Rereading the best science fiction writers of all time: Larry Niven, author of Ringworld

Ringworld
Larry Niven (Gollancz)

Ringworld by Larry Niven was published in 1970 to huge acclaim, winning both Hugo and Nebula awards; it’s been in print ever since.

It came out when humans had just landed on the moon and it looked like we might be on our way to the stars. The title alone evokes a particular golden age of science fiction, when (mostly male) writers wrestled with big physics and big ideas, imagining far-off futures where humans had galactic-scale adventures.

Authors like Niven wanted to imagine what might be out there in the universe, and they took pride in trying to get the science right. With Ringworld featuring in the New Scientist book club this month, it seemed like a good time to revisit the novel, having last read it as a teenager.

How did this 55-year-old work stand the test of time? After all, many books from this era have dated badly. Sometimes it is because science has now rendered their plotlines silly; sometimes it is because the sexual politics (or other cultural aspects) have begun to stink over the decades.

Well, to start with, this book is stuffed full of ideas! You can see why it was a smash hit and ended up being part of a sprawling network of follow-up stories, prequels and spin-offs.

Given how much internal lore is thrown at us, I found the novel surprisingly zippy and exposition-light. Our 200-year-old hero Louis Gridley Wu, a human and seasoned adventurer, is approached by Nessus, an alien known as a puppeteer, and asked to come on a mysterious mission in exchange for access to new technology.

Ringworld evokes a golden age of sci-fi when writers (mostly men) wrestled with big physics and big ideas

Wu and Nessus are to be joined on their adventure by a feline, warlike “kzinti” alien called Speaker-to-Animals (the animals in question being other species), and a young human woman named Teela Brown, whose qualities become evident only later in the story. This gang travels to the eponymous Ringworld and, after being fired on by an ancient security system, crash-lands on it.

The Ringworld is the star of this show. It is an ancient artefact of almost unimaginable scale: a ribbon world, looped around a star, 1.6 million kilometres wide and with an inner surface area the size of 3 million Earths. With a diameter of 305 million kilometres, it is fashioned from a substance with amazing tensile strength. On the terraformed inner surface of the Ringworld, a civilisation has fallen, but life goes on.

Wu and the gang must travel a vast distance across the inside of the ring to look for a way to leave it; along the way, as you might expect, they have plenty of adventures.

As for the mores of this 1970 novel, there are things a modern editor would probably want to cut, and they might well want the female characters to be given more depth.

The science, meanwhile, was thoroughly picked apart by readers at the time, so much so that Niven’s follow-up, Ringworld Engineers, published a decade later, was basically a riposte to all those who had nitpicked the mechanics of Ringworld.

This isn’t my favourite Niven; that is A World Out of Time. However, revisiting Ringworld has made me hungry to plunge back into his universe. I plan to reread some of his other classics, like The Mote in God’s Eye, as well as Ringworld‘s follow-ups, because there are so many interesting questions that go unanswered in the first book.

Emily also recommends…

The Draco Tavern
Larry Niven (Tor Publishing)

Strictly speaking, this section should be entitled “Larry Niven also recommends”. I exchanged emails with him recently in order to plan an interview, and I asked him which one of his books he would particularly recommend to me. He immediately replied with The Draco Tavern. I haven’t had time to read it yet, but I am very happy to pass on this recommendation from the man himself.

Emily H. Wilson is a former editor of New Scientist and the author of the Sumerians trilogy, set in ancient Mesopotamia. The final novel in the series, Ninshubar, is out in August. You can find her at emilyhwilson.com, or follow her on X @emilyhwilson and Instagram @emilyhwilson1