Ringworld begins with Louis Wu stepping out of a transfer booth (a teleportation device); a seemingly everyday occurrence not much different than using a telephone booth (for those of you who remember those halcyon pre-cell phone days). Niven then paints a picture of the Earth of the mid twenty-ninth century that is at peace, and so interconnected that there is one primary language (Interworld), and cities are indistinct from one another. Humans use technology that is miraculous to us today. In the first four chapters we learn of cosmetic dyes, slidewalks, longevity treatments, holo prints, sleep sets, sonic deadeners, sober pills, tridee, robot bars, sleeping plates (gravity control that produces a localized zero gee environment), reactionless thrusters for spaceship propulsion, stunners, stasis fields (that stop time) and more.
Just as we get comfortable with humanity’s seemly miraculous level of technology, we begin to learn that the Puppeteers are even more advanced. We learn of a tasp; a human device miniaturized by the Puppeteers and fashioned into a Puppeteer implant. Tasps induce a current from a distance, directly into the pleasure center of either a human or Kziniti brain. We learn that the Puppeteers have developed a spacecraft, the Long Shot, which uses a quantum II hyperdrive. The quantum II hyperdrive allows a spaceship to travel about thirty-five hundred times as fast as a human quantum I hyperdrive equipped craft (which itself would take three days to travel one light year). The Long Shot’s hull is made of an impervious material and is huge, more than a thousand feet in diameter. A psi device called a mass pointer is used for navigation in hyperspace (although humans use these on their hyperdrive ships, too). It’s a transparent crystalline sphere that a pilot uses to detect large masses and avoid them. Spaceships in hyperspace that get too close to a large mass disappear.
Next we learn that the Puppeteers don’t just move worlds, they move them at close to the speed of light. And, the Puppeteers move their planets five at a time in a formation called a Klemperer Rosette. The Puppeteers bought this technology from another alien race, the Outsiders; an alien race with a metabolism based on liquid helium II. The Outsiders range across the galaxy in city-sized spaceships.
After transferring from the Long Shot, the explorers (Louis, Nessus, Speaker and Teela) rendezvous with a spaceship from the Puppeteer Fleet of Worlds. They transfer to the Puppeteer spaceship and accelerate from interplanetary speeds to eighty percent of the speed of light in about an hour. This is an acceleration of about seven thousand gees, which implies either an inertia-less drive or a high level of gravity control (or both). In comparison, a human yacht might run thirty gees and use a more modest form of gravity control to offset the acceleration. The explorers turn the spaceship’s hull invisible and travel the remaining distance to the Puppeteer homeworld as if they were floating in space.
Next, we learn that the Puppeteers have other advanced technologies, and have had them for a long, long time. These include stepping discs that don’t need booths to work (as human-built transfer booths do), holographic projectors and light-bending fields. Puppeteer cities have no buildings less than a mile high compared to human cities where few buildings are more than a mile high. We also learn that the population of the Puppeteer home world is around a trillion individuals, more than fifty times the population of Earth. The explorers travel through the Puppeteer city by running between the open stepping discs as if they were wearing “seven league boots.”
Again, we begin to get acclimated to the level of Puppeteer technology, only to see engineering that far surpasses even the Puppeteer’s accomplishments. We begin to explore the Ringworld and see engineering on a truly massive scale. The Ringworld is an artifact, something that was built, which has a surface area three million times the surface area of the Earth. It is a huge ring around its sun. Rotating so fast (giving its inhabitants a one gee environment) that the material strength needed to hold it together is something on the order of the strength of the nuclear force holding an atomic nucleus together. It is a different material than the Puppeteers use for their invulnerable spaceship hulls; something unknown that stops forty percent of neutrinos. As we learn more, we find walls a thousand miles high to keep the air in. Next, we come to the shadow squares that give a day-night cycle to the Ringworld, and some type of super strong wire to hold the shadow squares together in orbit. We also see lasers that, as we learn in subsequent books, are powered from immense artificially created solar flares.
Faster and faster through the first nine chapters we are continuously exposed to more and more advanced technology. In the latter part of the book we do learn about a few more super advanced technologies, such as the Puppeteer starseed lure and the Ringworld cziltang brone (an osmosis beam generator used to travel through the rim walls), but for the most part the sense of wonder has been firmly established in the first third of the book. It’s a heady ride.
Ringworld illustration by Cortney Skinner, originally appearing in Galileo
Doug McElwain has been a science fiction fan for over forty years. As a fan, he has corresponded with Larry Niven and Ed Lerner about the implications inherent in the Fleet of Worlds, Ringworld, and Known Space stories.
