Review of Ringworld, by Larry Niven

Imagine a world that is in the shape of a ring rather than a sphere. Its radius is about ninety-three million miles (the size of Earth's orbit) and it is one million miles wide. At the center of the ring is a sun to provide enough heat to sustain life on the ring. For gravity, the ring spins about its axis fast enough to provide centrifugal force as strong as Earth's gravity. Walls similar to a tire's sidewalls are one thousand miles high on the ring's rims to keep the atmosphere from spilling out.

Larry Niven's Ringworld explores such a world - a world that is so large that it covers 3 million times the surface area of Earth. Ringworld is the story of a very unusual team that is sent on a mission to learn as much as possible about the ringworld and the creatures that created it. The exploration team consists of four individuals:

Louis Wu - a human who is very old and experienced, but still strong and able to handle most challenges (with the help of a youth-preserving drug).
Speaker-to-Animals - an orange furry creature from the race called Kzin - a race of mean, vicious carnivores.
Nessus - a two-headed creature from the race called Puppeteers - a very cowardly and paranoid race, yet probably the most powerful race in Known Space.
Teela Brown - A young human who has very little experience at anything, but has been bred for luck.

Opinion
To begin with, I read the book knowing it had won both the Hugo and the Nebula awards for best science fiction novel in the mid 1970's, so I was expecting an excellent piece of science fiction. Upon finishing the book, I was disappointed --until I had a day or two to think over what I had just read. I am now a firm believer that the awards were well-deserved. It presents some very interesting speculative science - the center of which is the ringworld itself. This was the first book of Niven's I had read, so it was a good introduction to his "Known Space" and its civilizations like the Kzin and the Puppeteers. The only negative things I can think of to say about it is that I don't think this is a book for the masses. Those who can't handle the reality stretch of sci-fi won't be able to handle this book. Also, it left me with some unanswered questions. Perhaps they'll be answered in the sequel, The Ringworld Engineers...

My grade: A