Apparently fans had been quick to determine the structure’s inherent instability, and so Niven felt duty-bound to write the second book to address and solve the problem.Īnd thank goodness he did! The Ringworld Engineers is the book the Ringworld deserves. In his introduction, Niven says that he hadn’t the slightest intention of writing a sequel to Ringworld, but ten years’ worth of letters from readers finally convinced him otherwise.

The remainder of the book follows Louis, Chmee and their captor as they travel across the Ringworld in search of the mechanisms to stabilize its orbit before disaster can strike, and to discover the identity of its builders, the eponymous Ringworld Engineers. Left to its own devices, the ring’s inner edge will eventually scrape against the star, killing its trillion or so inhabitants. The giant, hoop-like structure is off-center, orbiting its sun like a hula-hoop wobbling around the waist of a dancer. Together, they are held prisoner until their arrival in the Ringworld system, at which point they discover something has gone terribly awry. Louis’ fellow abductee is Chmee, a diplomat from the fearsome and tiger-like Kzinti race. He has flaws, and his struggles on the Ringworld mirror his internal struggles to overcome his addiction and readjust to life without the wire. In part, he is one of the old fashioned, self-reliant and capable heroes of science fiction, able to solve any problem with hard work and careful thought. Louis is an interesting mix of the old and new. Now, he finds himself kidnapped by a mad alien Puppeteer and compelled to return. Twenty years have passed since his first expedition to the Ringworld.

The viewpoint character in the book is Louis Wu, a two hundred year-old Earthman and ‘wirehead’, addicted to the electrical stimulation of his brain’s pleasure centres. Getting my head around the physics rekindled my fascination with science and learning, and the main character’s insatiable curiosity and habit of asking pertinent questions prompted me to take another look at things I had hitherto taken for granted, and to really start questioning the workings of everything I saw around me, from tin openers to internal combustion engines. And all the action took place on a hoop encircling a sun, with a surface area a trillion times that of the Earth!Īs an eleven year-old, this book literally changed the way I thought about the world. The pages were full of beautiful vampires, flying cities, carnivorous sunflowers, ancient libraries, and dangerous aliens. I was ten or eleven years old, and the story that followed blew my mind. A brief introductory note told me everything I needed to know about the first book, and enabled me to dive right in.

Powell: Thinking about The Ringworld Engineers takes me back to the moment I first pulled the hardback from the shelf of my local village library on a hot and dusty afternoon in the early 1980s.

Ring world larry niven