Monday, May 12, 2014

Ringworld

Here are the four books in this series I have found so far:
       Ringworld 1971 (Hugo award winner)


Ringworld, is a book by Larry Niven written about 1970. It is an interesting and classic science fiction book and I realized I wouldn't mind reading it again. I've been trying to get back into reading Science fiction classics from all eras once again. I thought it might be good for me since my wife is reading a lot of escapist stuff lately and it helping her keep it glued together for our daughter's high school graduation and my wife's knee replacement surgery within about 1 month now. So, I went to Amazon to buy Ringworld.

However, I'm not used to buying things for my kindle that much yet. So, I went into Amazon and tried to buy Ringworld. However, what seemed to be available was: "Ringworld part one" but then I couldn't download it because I couldn't remember the password for my wifi. Since my daughter who lives in Portland was the one who set it up last time I tried to reach her but she was busy. So, I put in the passwords I thought it could be and the Kindle said, "Forget". Now, you might know that forget means "forget worrying about your password you are in". However, I thought it meant "Forget you. You didn't get in." So I was really really upset that I couldn't download my book into my kindle through my wifi. And I was also upset I couldn't get my daughter to return my call because she was busy working. Finally, two days later I called her while walking my dogs and she says, "My boyfriend and I meant to call you guys for mother's day but we had both been working so hard we talked about calling you and then fell asleep. Then we got to the password for our wifi and she told me what she thought it was and I told her I put that in but it wasn't it because it said, "Forget". However, she said "Forget" means I was in. So, I wasted two days worrying about having the right password when I had the right one all along. Then I said, "It still isn't downloading." And she said, "What does it say, "I said it says it is a preorder". She says, "What day does the preorder come due?" I said, "some time in July I think." She said, "It isn't going to download until then." So, I wound up buying "Ringworld's Children" so I would have something to read right now on my kindle.

Ringworld - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringworld
Wikipedia
Ringworld is a 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 ...
‎Ringworld series - ‎Pierson's Puppeteers - ‎The Ringworld Engineers - ‎Known Space

Ringworld

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article is about the science fiction novel. For the fantasy series, see Discworld.
Ringworld
Ringworld(1stEd).jpg
Cover of first edition (paperback)
Author Larry Niven
Illustrator Dean Ellis
Country United States
Language English
Series Ringworld storyline from Known Space
Genre science fiction novel
Publisher Ballantine Books
Publication date
 October 1970
Media type Print (hardcover, paperback), audiobook
ISBN 0-345-02046-4
OCLC 28071649
Followed by The Ringworld Engineers, 1980
Ringworld is a 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 four prequels, and ties into numerous other books set in Known Space. Ringworld won the Nebula Award in 1970,[1] as well as both the Hugo Award and Locus Award in 1971.[2]

Plot summary

The novel opens in A.D. 2850 on Earth. Louis Gridley Wu is celebrating his 200th birthday. Despite his age, Louis is in perfect physical condition (because of a regimen of boosterspice) but is bored. He has experienced life thoroughly, and is thinking of taking a trip to and beyond the reaches of Known Space, all alone in a spaceship for a year or more. He is confronted by Nessus, a Pierson's Puppeteer, and offered one of three open positions on an exploration voyage beyond Known Space. Speaker-to-Animals (Speaker), who is a Kzin, and Teela Brown, a young human woman, also join the voyage.
They first travel to the Puppeteer home world, where they learn that the expedition's goal is to explore a ringworld: 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 sunlike star. It rotates, providing artificial gravity that is 99.2% as strong as Earth's gravity through the action of centrifugal force. The ringworld has a habitable, flat inner surface equivalent in area to approximately three million Earth-sized planets. Night is provided by an inner ring of shadow squares which are connected to each other by thin, ultra-strong wire (shadow-square wire).
None of the crew's attempts at contacting the Ringworld succeed, and their ship is disabled by its automated meteoroid-defense system. The severely damaged vessel collides with a strand of shadow-square wire and crash-lands on the Ringworld near a huge mountain. The ship's defenses keep the crew compartment and many of the ship's systems intact, including the faster-than-light drive (hyperdrive), but the normal drive is destroyed, leaving them unable to launch back into space to use the hyperdrive. The team now has to set out to find a way to get back into space, as well as fulfilling their original mission – learning more about the Ringworld.
Using their flycycles (similar to antigravity motorcycles), they try to reach the rim of the ring, where they hope to find some technology that will help them. It will take them months to cross the vast distance. When Teela develops "Plateau trance" (a kind of highway hypnosis) from becoming too absorbed in watching the vast landscape ahead, they find themselves forced to land. On the ground, they encounter apparently human Ringworld natives. The natives, who are living primitively in the crumbling ruins of a once advanced city, think that the crew are the Engineers of the Ring, whom they revere as gods. The crew is attacked when they commit what the natives consider blasphemy (the misuse of certain technologies).
They continue their journey during which Nessus is forced to reveal some Puppeteer secrets: they have performed indirect breeding experiments on both humans (breeding for luck) and kzin (breeding for less aggressiveness). The resulting hostility forces Nessus to abandon the other three and follow them at a safe distance.
They encounter a city and, in a floating building, they find a map of the Ringworld and videos of its past civilization.
In a giant storm, caused by air escaping through a hole in the Ring floor due to meteoroid impact, Teela is blown away in an unknown direction. While Louis and Speaker search for her in a ruined city, their flycycles are caught by an automatic police station designed to catch traffic offenders. They are trapped in a prison in the basement of the police station. Nessus arrives, entering the station to help his team.
In the station they meet Halrloprillalar Hotrufan ("Prill"), a former crew member of a spaceship used for trade between the Ringworld and other inhabited worlds. Her ship was stranded on the Ringworld when the landing mechanism failed. She relates what she learned of the downfall of the Ringworld's civilization: A mold that breaks down superconductors was introduced by a visiting spaceship. Without its superconductive technology, civilization fell.
Teela reaches the police station, accompanied by her new lover, a native "hero" called Seeker who helped her survive.
Based on his studies of an ancient Ringworld map, Louis devises a plan to escape. The four explorers, with Seeker and Prill, use the floating police station as a vehicle to travel back to the explorers' crashed ship. Teela and Seeker choose to remain on Ringworld. The remaining explorers and Prill collect one end of the shadow-square wire that was dislodged when the ship crashed, dragging the wire behind them as they travel. Reaching the wreck, Louis threads the wire through the ship and uses it to tether the ship to the police station. Still in the station, he then continues to pull the wire onward, up to the summit of "Fist-of-God", the enormous mountain near their crash site. The massive mountain had not appeared on a map of the original Ringworld, leading Louis to conclude that it was in fact the result of a meteoroid impact with the underside of the ring, which pushed the "mountain" up from the ring floor and broke through. The top of the mountain, above the edge of the ring's atmosphere, is therefore a passage to the underside of the Ringworld and freedom. Louis drives the police station over the edge of the crater. The Ringworld spins very quickly, so once the police station and ship are free of the ring, their speed is enough to get them back to open space in a reasonable time. The crew can then use the ship's hyperdrive to get home. The book concludes with Louis and Speaker discussing returning to the Ringworld.

Reception

Algis Budrys found Ringworld to be "excellent and entertaining . . . woven together very skillfully and proceed[ing] at a pretty smooth pace." While praising the novel generally, he faulted Niven for relying on inconsistencies regarding evolution in his extrapolations to support his fictional premises.[3]

Concepts

In addition to the two aliens, Niven includes a number of concepts from his other Known Space stories:
  • The Puppeteers' General Products hulls, which are impervious to any known force except visible light and gravity, and cannot be destroyed by anything except antimatter.
  • 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 within the field.
  • The idea that luck is a genetic trait that can be favored by selective breeding.
  • The tasp, a device that remotely stimulates the pleasure center of the brain; it temporarily incapacitates 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. To use a tasp on someone from hiding, relieving them of their anger or depression, is called "making their day."
  • Boosterspice, a drug that restores or indefinitely preserves youth.
  • Scrith, the metal-like substance of which the Ringworld is built (and presumably the shadow squares and wires too), that has a tensile strength nearly equal in magnitude to the strong nuclear force.
  • 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.
  • The hyperspace shunt, an engine for faster-than-light travel, but slow enough (1 light-year per 3 days, ~122c) to keep the galaxy vast and unknown; the new "quantum II hyperspace shunt", developed by the Puppeteers but not yet released to humans, can cross a light-year in just 1.25 minutes (~421,000c).
  • Point-to-point teleportation at the speed of light 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 that they live on an artificial structure, and now attribute the phenomena and origin of their world to divine power.

Errors

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 Wu would soon 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 Wu teleporting westward.[4]
In his dedication to 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."[5]
After the publication of Ringworld many fans identified numerous engineering problems in the Ringworld as described in the novel. One major problem was that the Ringworld, being a rigid structure, was not actually in orbit around the star it encircled and would eventually drift, ultimately colliding with its sun and disintegrating. This led MIT students attending the 1971 Worldcon to chant, "The Ringworld is unstable! The Ringworld is unstable!" The phrase made its way into a filk song, "Give Me That Pro, Larry Niven." Niven wrote the 1980 sequel The Ringworld Engineers in part to address these engineering issues. The ring was found to have a system of attitude jets atop the rim walls, but the Ringworld had become gravely endangered because most of the jets had been removed by the natives, to power their interstellar ships. (The natives had forgotten the original purpose of the jets.)

References to Ringworld

"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 Orbitals, best described as miniature Ringworlds, and the ring-shaped Halo structure of the video game Halo.

Film

There have also been many abortive attempts to adapt the novel to the screen.
In 2001, Larry Niven reported that a movie deal had been signed and was in the early planning stages.[6][7]
In 2004, the Sci-Fi Channel reported that it was developing a Ringworld miniseries.[8] The series never came to fruition.
In 2013, it was again announced by the SyFy Channel that a miniseries of the novel was in development. This proposed 4-hour miniseries is being written by Michael R. Perry and will be a co-production between MGM Television and Universal Cable Productions.[9]

In other works

See also

Portal icon Novels portal

References

  1. "1970 Award Winners & Nominees". Worlds Without End. Retrieved 2009-07-20.
  2. "1971 Award Winners & Nominees". Worlds Without End. Retrieved 2009-07-20.
  3. "Galaxy Bookshelf", Galaxy, March 1971, pp.112-13
  4. "Fantastic Reviews: Larry Niven Interview". August 2004. Archived from the original on 2009-10-26. Retrieved 2009-05-10.
  5. Niven, Larry (1980). The Ringworld Engineers. New York: Ballantine Books (Del Rey). p. vii. ISBN 0-345-33430-2.
  6. ""Ringworld Movie Around the Corner" from ''Space.com''". Space.com. 2000-11-06. Retrieved 2010-06-28.
  7. "Ringworld Movie News" from Known Space: The Future Worlds of Larry Niven
  8. Sci Fi Channel goes supernova with new shows, series and specials By Patrick Sauriol, April 06, 2004 Source: The Sci Fi Channel
  9. "'Ringworld' miniseries in the works at Syfy". ew.com. 2013-04-10. Retrieved 2013-04-11.
  10. "The Annotated Pratchett File v9.0 - Strata". Lspace.org. Retrieved 2010-06-28.
  11. Perry, Douglass C. (2007-03-17). "The Influence of Literature and Myth in Videogames". IGN. Retrieved 2007-12-10.
  12. "The Halo Author that Wasn't". Bungie Sightings. 2003-03-05. Retrieved 2007-10-04. — Condensed version of information found at Niven's own site: link

External links

This page was last modified on 16 February 2014 at 04:05.
end quote from:

Ringworld - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I like Kindle because I can make the print any size so I don't get a headache like I tend to when I read a book that isn't on a kindle since I started wearing glasses about 20 years ago now at about age 45. Somehow wearing glasses made me have a headache if I read 1/2 hour to an hour or more. However, I don't get this if I'm on a computer or Ipad for some reason or now a kindle when I slightly enlarge the print.

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