Ringworld is a
Hugo,
Nebula, and
Locus award-winning
1970 science
fiction novel by
Larry Niven, set in
his
Known Space universe and considered
a classic of science fiction literature. It is followed by three
sequels, and ties into numerous other books set in Known Space.
Ringworld won the Hugo Award in 1970, as well as both the
Nebula and Locus Awards in 1971.
Plot summary
The novel
opens in 2855 with Louis Gridley Wu
stepping out of a transfer booth, a teleportation kiosk, in
Beirut
, thus entering yet another time zone. Louis,
after having escaped the festivities of his own 200th birthday, is
now bar-hopping the world, jumping west and always staying behind
the local midnight in order to extend his birthday as long as
possible.
Despite his age, Louis turns out to be in perfect physical
condition owing to a combination of advanced medical technology and
boosterspice, a drug that
extends human life. However, though
healthy, rich and intelligent, it is becoming clear Louis is
utterly bored. Having lived for two centuries, he has seen it all
many times over and people in general are getting on his nerves.
Between transfer booths he considers another sabbatical — a trip to
and beyond the reaches of Known Space, all alone in a single ship
for a year or more, until he begins to yearn for people's company
again — when all of a sudden the transfer booth materializes him in
a sunlit hotel room, rather than the nocturnal Seville he had set
its control for.
Facing him is an alien with three legs, no arms and two heads. The
alien introduces himself as
Nessus and Louis recognizes him
for a
Pierson's Puppeteer, a
species that had the most advanced technology in Known Space but
vanished from the region before Louis was born. Nessus has been
ordered to hire three mercenaries to do the things he himself dare
not. Louis is on top of his list of candidates.
With Nessus being secretive about the mission, Louis is reluctant
to join, but when the Puppeteer eventually shows Louis a blurry
picture of a distant star with a ring around it, the bored Louis
immediately signs up: this ring turns out to be the
Ringworld, an artificial circular strip of world with
spin for surface gravity, orbiting
the star. The Puppeteers, fleeing from the galaxy, have spotted
this artifact in their path; being cowards, the sheer power of
whatever has created such a structure frightens them profoundly.
Hence, Nessus' mission is to assemble a team, visit the Ringworld
and see whether it poses a threat to his species. Payment to the
expedition's members will be the
Long Shot, the extremely fast ship
depicted in the story "
At the
Core", that
Beowulf Shaeffer
rode to the galactic core and back, centuries earlier.
Eventually the team is assembled. The third member,
Speaker-to-Animals (Speaker) is a
Kzin, a ferocious
felinoid predator species
which has, in the recent past, fought a
series of brutal wars with humanity, losing
consistently because of a tendency to attack before being quite
ready. The Kzin, a translator, is a low-ranking official at the
Kzinti embassy to Earth. He reckons obtaining the
Long
Shot for the Kzinti Empire is enough of an achievement to give
him a name ("Speaker-to-Animals" being a literal description rather
than a name), and therefore signs on too, as the expedition's
security chief.
Finally,
Teela Brown is a young human
female whose role in the mission is not immediately clear. But
Puppeteers do not do anything without a very good reason, and her
significance is revealed as the plot unfolds. She is the result of
a secret Puppeteer experiment in selective breeding for luck among
humans, which generally helps her and her descendants. The
Puppeteers reckon her luck will increase the probability of a
successful mission, however it soon turns out that Teela's personal
luck and the luck of the expedition seldom go hand in hand.
As they approach their target in their ship,
Lying
Bastard, the Ringworld turns out to be an awesome sight: a
huge, circular strip of land, teeming with life and with entire
oceans bigger than Earth. Between the Ringworld and its star, a
series of squares (dubbed
shadow squares by the
expedition) are suspended in another ring, orbiting the sun faster
than the Ringworld itself, thus providing the artificial world
below with a day/night cycle. However, when their ship is hit by a
powerful, automated meteor defense system and then strikes one of
the near-invisible
shadow-square wires, the severely
damaged vessel crash-lands on the Ringworld . They now have to set
out to find a way to get back into space, as well as fulfilling
their original mission. They cross vast distances, witness
strangely evolved
ecosystems originating
from many different planets, including Earth, and interact with
some of the Ringworld's varied primitive
civilizations. They attempt to discover what
caused the Ringworld's inhabitants to lose their technology, and
puzzle over who created the Ringworld and why.
Concepts
In addition to the two aliens, Niven includes a number of concepts
from his other Known Space stories:
- The Slaver stasis field,
which causes time in the enclosed volume to stand still; since time
has for all intents and purposes ceased for an object in stasis, no harm can come to anything in its
field.
- The tasp, a device that induces a state of
extreme pleasure in the pleasure
center of the brain at the push of a
button; it is used as a method of debilitating its target and is
extremely addictive. If the subject cannot, for whatever reason,
get access to the device, intense depression can result, often to
the point of madness or suicide.
- Boosterspice, a drug
that extends human life to near immortality.
- Impact armor, a flexible form of clothing that hardens
instantly into a rigid form stronger than steel when rapidly
deformed, similar to certain types of
bulletproof vests.
- Hyperdrives allow for
faster-than-light travel, but at a rate slow enough (1 light year
per 3 days, ~125c) to keep the galaxy vast
and unknown; the new Quantum II Hyperdrive, developed by the
Puppeteers but not yet released to humans, can cross a light year
in just 1.25 minutes (~425,000c).
- Near instant point-to-point teleportation is possible with
transfer booths (on Earth) and
stepping disks (on the Puppeteer
homeworld); on Earth, people's sense of place and global position
has been lost due to instantaneous travel; cities and cultures have
blended together.
- A theme well-covered in the novel is that of cultures suffering
technological breakdowns who then proceed to revert to
belief-systems along religious lines. Most
Ringworld societies have forgotten they live on an artificial
structure, and now attribute the phenomena of their world to divine
power.
Science error in first edition
The opening chapter of the original paperback edition of
Ringworld featured Louis Wu teleporting eastward around
the Earth in order to extend his birthday. (Moving in this
direction would, in fact, make local time later rather than
earlier, so that Louis would arrive in the early morning of the
next calendar day.) Niven was "endlessly teased" about this error,
which he corrected in subsequent printings to show Louis
teleporting westward.
In his dedication to the 1980 sequel
The Ringworld Engineers, Niven
wrote, "If you own a first paperback edition of
Ringworld,
it's the one with the mistakes in it. It's worth money."
Ringworld engineering
Ringworld parameters
| Radius |
9.5×107 miles
(~1.5×108 km) (~1 AU) |
| Circumference |
6×108 miles
(~9.7×108 km) |
| Width |
997,000 miles (1,600,000 km) |
| Height of rim walls |
1,000 miles (1,600 km) |
| Mass |
2×1027 kg (1.8×1024 short tons) (1,250,000 kg/m², e.g. 250 m
thick, 5,000 kg/m³) |
| Surface area |
6×1014 sq mi (1.6×1015 km²); 3 million
times the surface area of Earth. |
| Surface gravity |
0.992 gee (~9.69 m/s²) |
| Spin velocity |
770 miles/second (~1,200,000 m/s) |
| Sun's spectral class |
G3 verging on G2; "barely smaller and cooler than Sol". |
| Day length |
30 hours |
| Rotational time |
7.5 Ringworld days (225 hours, 9.375 Earth days) |
| On Ringworld, time longer than a day is measured in
falans, with 1 falan being 10 turns or 75
Ringworld days (93.75 Earth days), so 4 falans are slightly longer
than 1 Earth year. |
The "Ringworld" is an artificial ring about one million miles wide
and approximately the diameter of Earth's orbit (which makes it
about 600 million miles in
circumference), encircling a Sol-type star. It
rotates, providing an
artificial
gravity that is 99.2% as strong as Earth's gravity through the
action of
centrifugal
force. Ringworld has a habitable flat inner surface equivalent
in area to approximately three million Earth-sized planets. The
majority of the surface is land interspersed with shallow,
freshwater seas. On opposite sides of the ring are two large deep
saltwater oceans, placed in counterbalance to one another. One of
the large oceans, known as the "Great Ocean", contains one-to-one
maps of all of the inhabited worlds of known space. The "Other
Ocean" has many maps of a single world: the Pak Homeworld. Walls
1,000 miles tall along the edges retain the atmosphere. The
Ringworld could be regarded as a thin, rotating slice of a
Dyson sphere, with which it shares a number of
characteristics. Niven himself thinks of the Ringworld as "an
intermediate step between Dyson spheres and planets."
Source of material
The Ringworld is described as having a mass approximately equal to
the sum of all the planets in our solar system. The adventurers
surmised that its construction consumed literally all the planets
in that original system, down to the last asteroid and/or moon, as
the Ringworld star has no other bodies in orbit. In
Ringworld's
Children it is additionally explained that it took the
reaction mass of roughly 20 Jupiter
masses to spin up the ring; thus either the combined mass of the
planets of the original system was that much larger than our solar
system's, or there was other source material.
Scrith
Scrith, usually written italicized as
scrith, forms the
walls and floor of the Ringworld.
Scrith is a milky-gray translucent, nearly frictionless
material. The fairly thin layer of
scrith that forms the
floor of the Ringworld blocks the passage of 40% of the
neutrinos that encounter it, equivalent to almost a
light year of
lead.
It also absorbs nearly 100% of all other radiation and subatomic
particles and rapidly dissipates heat. The
tensile strength of
scrith is
similar to the
strong nuclear
force, with the Ringworld foundation only about 30m (100 ft)
deep. Also, it is transparent to large magnetic fields.
Due to its enormous strength,
scrith is impervious to most
weapons. A body (such as a comet or asteroid) striking with enough
kinetic energy may be able to deform
the Ringworld floor and punch a hole. The Ringworld engineers used
a device, called the
cziltang brone in their language, to
pass from the vacuum of their
spaceports
right through the
scrith to the habitable surface of the
Ringworld.
The physical composition of
scrith is unclear, but it
appears to share some of the properties of a
metal (albeit in a greatly exaggerated form): for
instance, the high tensile strength, the ability to
conduct heat and the ability to retain an
induced magnetic field.
Scrith is said by one inhabitant to have been artificially
produced through the
transmutation of matter, though this
is later thought to have been a lie.
Variations
"Ringworld", or more formally, "Niven ring", has become a generic
term for such a structure, which is an example of what science
fiction fans call a "
Big Dumb
Object", or more formally a
megastructure. Other science fiction authors
have devised their own variants of Niven's Ringworld, notably
Iain M. Banks'
Culture Orbital, best described as
miniature Ringworlds, and the ring-shaped
Halo structure of the video game
Halo.
Technical realities
Construction issues
The construction of a ringworld remains firmly in the area of
speculation. If such a structure were built it could indeed provide
a huge habitable inner surface, but the energy required to
construct it, set it rotating, and keep it stabilized is so
significant (several centuries' worth of the total energy output
from the Sun) that without as-yet unimagined energy sources
becoming available, it is hard to see how this construction could
ever be possible in a time frame acceptable to humans.
Tension on material
The tensile strength of the material required would be on the same
order as the
strong nuclear
force, according to Niven – since the artificial gravity is the
same as normal gravity, the structure is comparable with a bridge
with an extremely long span; nothing even remotely strong enough is
known to exist in nature. In Niven's
Ringworld novels, the
material – which he calls
scrith – is said to have been
artificially produced through the
transmutation of matter into the
required substance. (This merely gives a name to the
sufficiently advanced technology that
would have to be used.) In later novels the "transmutation" idea is
simply discarded and the construction method of
scrith
left open, although one engineer is able to use nanotechnology to
weave new scrith into meteor punctures.
Instability
A ringworld design requires active stabilization, because it is not
in
inertial orbit.
Though the ring itself is rotating at 1,200 km/s (to
approximate Earth gravity), the center of mass is stationary — in
fact, it is at an unstable equilibrium, roughly comparable to a
small sphere balanced on top of a pin.
Thus, large thrusters must be incorporated into the design to keep
it centered about its star. This point gave Niven some difficulty
after he published his first
Ringworld novel; he was
deluged with letters pointing out that "the Ringworld isn't stable"
and dedicated the first sequel to a resolution of this problem.
He notes
in the dedication of Ringworld
Engineers that at the 1971 World Science Fiction
Convention, MIT
students crowded the hotel hallways chanting "The
Ringworld is unstable!" In this first sequel, he also
tackled how to prevent all the soil from ending up in the oceans.
In the fourth book in the series,
Ringworld's Children, he
creates backplot explanations for several of the imperfections in
his original design of the Ringworld — and wholly glosses over
others, such as that Louis Wu is worried about his dietary intake
of
salt since only the Great Oceans are
described as being
saline.
Great oceans
A further point of instability comes from the inclusion of the two
‘Great oceans’; large bodies of water each many times the mass of
the earth.
The original story had the builders place the two large masses of
water on opposite sides of the structure in order to counterbalance
each other; however this counterbalancing effect would only have
been valid under the original novel’s contention that the ringworld
was ‘in orbit’ with the centrifugal force being balanced by the
pull of gravity of the sun.
Since we now know that that is not the case and that the whole
structure is supposedly held rigid by centrifugal force alone, the
effect of the mass of the two oceans would instead be to deform the
structure away from its stable circular shape
(imagine a loop
of string with 2 heavy weights at opposite positions; when spun the
two weights will fly apart under centrifugal force pulling the loop
into a straight line with the weights at either end).
We can assume from this that scrith has a much higher density than
water, making the weight of the oceans negligible (the discretion
to place them at opposite positions on the loop can be considered
an artistic one).
Imperfect shadow squares
To provide an approximation of the day–night cycle common to
planets, Niven's Ringworld was also provided with a separate ring
of "shadow squares" linked together (by "shadow square wires") in a
ring close to the star, rotating at slightly faster than the
Ringworld's spin, providing a lot of
twilight, as well as a day-night cycle. This is not
the perfect match for a planet however, as there is no sunrise or
sunset in Ringworld, and when not covered by a shadow square, the
sun is always at high noon. These absorb a huge amount of sunlight
energy, which is beamed to the Ringworld as its primary source of
power. They are also not in inertial orbit, and must be actively
stabilized as well. The shadow squares provide another of the
imperfections "clarified" in
Ringworld's Children, as five
shadow squares of greater length, orbiting
retrograde would provide a better
day-night cycle, with less twilight. As revealed in
Ringworld
Engineers, the "shadow squares" also provide a shielding to
the inner surface of the Ringworld when someone in the control room
uses a magnetic field embedded in the Ringworld to fire the meteor
defense system.
Movie
Larry Niven reported in 2001 that a movie deal had been signed and
was in the early planning stages. There have also been many
abortive attempts to adapt the novel to the screen. In 2004, the
Sci Fi Channel
reported that it was developing a
Ringworld
miniseries.
In other works
- Tsunami Games released two
adventure games based on
Ringworld, Ringworld: Revenge of the Patriarch in
1992 and Return to Ringworld in 1994. A third game,
Ringworld: Within ARM's Reach, was also planned, but never
completed.
- Terry Pratchett intended his
1981 novel Strata to be a
"pisstake/homage/satire" of Ringworld. Niven allegedly
took it in good faith and enjoyed the work.
- Some of Iain M. Banks's novels of The Culture involve smaller circular
structures called Orbitals,
their day-night cycle is inherent in their rotation, since they do
not encircle a star but orbit around it like a planet does.
- The plot of the first-person
shooter Halo for
the Microsoft Xbox,
Windows and Mac
OS also takes place on an artificial ring structure. Given its
dimensions (10,000 kilometers in diameter) it is more like Banks'
Culture Orbital (though much
smaller) than Niven's behemoth. Similarities to Ringworld
have been noted in the game, and Niven was asked (but declined) to
write the first novel based on the series.
- There is a Ringworld-like structure in the Tre'illica system in
the video game Escape Velocity
Nova; also, in the game, Earth has a
ring structure built around its equator.
- Walter Jon Williams'
Dread Empire's Fall
series has each planet in that empire with an orbital ring station
around its center, connected by towers to the planet (also called a
space elevator). The ring has a
stationary and a rotating part, generates huge amounts of power,
houses millions of people, docks ships to keeps them individually
from having to use energy to take off and land on the planets, and
uses the 2nd, outer, moving ring section to launch ships.
- In the game Space Empires
it is possible for players to create a Ringworld around a star
using Stellar Technology.
- "All in Fun" by Jerry Oltion, in Fantasy & Science
Fiction, January 2009, mentions a faithful big-budget
movie adaptation of Ringworld.
See also
References
- "Ringworld Movie Around the Corner" from
Space.com
- "Ringworld Movie News" from Known Space: The
Future Worlds of Larry Niven
- Sci Fi Channel goes supernova with new shows,
series and specials By Patrick Sauriol, April 06, 2004 Source:
The Sci Fi Channel
- The Annotated Pratchett File v9.0 - Strata
- — Condensed version of information found at Niven's own site:
link
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