Nessus, the Puppeteer, is cowardly and risk-adverse and manipulative.
Think tame Klingons from Star Trek: The Next Generation. The Kzin is a barely repressed fierce warrior. He talks to himself quite often, so we can hear all the exposition being spoken aloud in automonologues. Louis Wu is there to theorise and figure things out. The explorers, meanwhile, are fairly simple characters. There are curious sunflowers, but other than that, it's a surprisingly, disappointingly mundane world. But it's got all the same sort of things that Earth has. It's an artificial world, without geology and with slightly different climate effects due to having no coriolis force. The book goes into lots of detail in imagining how a ringworld would be different from a spherical planet, but that's about as far as the thought experiment goes. Well, the main innovation of Ringworld is that it is. full of fascination, originality, aliens and wonder. As such, I would expect it to be a complex, staggering world. Ringworld is really a novel about imagining a world. Now they have to find a way to either leave or contact someone to request help. So, naturally, our explorers are interested in who created it, and why, and whether its creators pose a threat.īut things don't quite go to plan, and their spaceship crash lands. A thousand miles thick and hundreds of thousands of miles wide, the ring has millions of miles in circumference - it's millions of times bigger than Earth or any known planet, with a surface area big enough to sustain every known life form many times over. This is an ancient artifact, an artificial world that encircles a sun, with five artificial internal moons to create nights on the inner surface of the ring. The final member of the team is human - Teela Brown.Īfter a brief stint visiting the puppeteer exodus fleet, they make their way to their destination - the Ringworld. His purpose is to be the muscle of the expedition. Called Speaker in the common tongue, he's basically an advanced kind of tiger. Humans have been interacting with different aliens for a while, but this particular species, a Puppeteer, was thought to have mysteriously left the galaxy in a mass exodus, many years ago.Ī second alien is recruited into their team: a Kzin. He's celebrating his birthday when Nessus, a two-headed, three-legged alien, approaches him and hires him to join an exploration mission.
It reads like the sort of book I'd expect from Golden Age 1930s-1940s pulp science fiction. It doesn't read like post-New-Wave science fiction. Published in 1970, it's also a remarkably old-fashioned book. I haven't read Nikki's review yet, but I'm sure tomorrow will offer opportunities for lively discussions, especially if any of the book clubbers are feminists. Ringworld is the Cardiff Speculative Fiction Book Club selection for our May meeting, which is taking place tomorrow.
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