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Ringworld <span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>
Ringworld is a novel and the first book in a 4 book series set within Larry Niven's Known Space universe. The novel won a Hugo and a nebula Award and is considered a scifi classic. The novel had three sequels and also spawned a role playing game in the 1980s and two adventure games in the 90s. Ringworld features a human named Louis Wu, a Kzinti named Speaker-to-Animals, Pierson's Puppeteer named Nessus and another human who was bred for luck named Teela Brown.
Spoiler Warning: Plot details and/or information about the ending follow. If you wish to enjoy the work first, stop reading here and return at another time.
SummaryThe novel and series is set in the 29th Century, the year 2855 and opens with Louis' 200th birthday, which he celebrates by using the network of teleportation booths set up to travel around the Earth to prolong the day. The last hop he makes malfunctions and he ends up in a non-descript hotel room facing a Pierson's Puppeteer, a race that abruptly left the area some 200 years prior causing a massive stock market crash. The Puppeteer offers Louis the chance to explore an artefact orbiting a far-off star and hints at the object by giving Louis a photo of a star with a ribbon of pale blue around it. Louis follows the Puppeteer (Nessus) as he assembles the crew, and dramatically meets the Kzinti Speaker-to-Animals when he inadvertantly challenges the 8-foot tall warcat to a duel. They also acquire Teela Brown a human who has been bred for luck by the Puppeteers manipulating Earth's breeding lotteries. The group journies first to the Puppeteer Fleet-of-Worlds a massive megastructure of 5 planets set into a Kemplerer Rosette and travelling through interstellar space at 0.8 lightspeed. This is how the Puppeteers are leaving the galaxy as they determined that the galactic core has exploded and a supernova shockwave will incinerate and destroy all life within 20,000 years. The Puppeteers are very conservative. The group then journies to the Ringworld itself. A ribbon of material 1 million miles wide that totally encircles the star and can best be described as a suspension bridge with no end-points The remainder of the novel deals with the explorer's ship crashing and their attempts to get off the ring and back to civilised space. SequelsRingworld spawned 3 sequels over a 30 year period, starting with The Ringworld Engineers and continuing with The Ringworld Throne and finishing with Ringworld's Children Many concepts were introduced over the period of the novels and the books themselves helped to mould Known Space. Ringworld engineering
The Ringworld is a ring built to encircle a sun. At 3 million times the surface area of Earth the Ring has room to breathe for any expanding empire. The inner surface of the ring is comprised of a layer of soil around 30ft(10m thick) covering a layer of bedrock that is itself around 50ft(18m) deep. This covers the ring building material, called Scrith which has a tensile strength approachnig that of the strong nuclear force and stops 40% of neutrons. The ring was built to shield it's inhabitants from the core explosion, as the rotational axis is aligned with the core so the radiation surge will hit the outer edge, not the inner surface. ISBNsClick to find sources to buy this book.
2008, SCI FI. All rights reserved.
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