In Review: Ringworld
Over the last few years I have been delving into older sci-fi and fantasy.Ringworld by Larry Niven is often mentioned as a science fiction classic. It has a reputation as a hard science fiction novel that helped define the genre and inspired other works. The main focus of the novel is the titular Ringworld. It is a variation on the Dyson sphere concept. And if I have lost you at Dyson sphere, then this may not be the novel for you. If Niven did not come up with the concept of a ring world, then he certainly made it famous. A great deal of effort went into explaining the mechanics and ecology of the Ringworld. Apparently, there were some errors in the math that readers pointed out to him so he addressed them in later books. I for one was not going to read with a calculator in hand, but appreciate that Niven was willing to take what was pointed out and address it. The plot is fairly straight forward. Our protagonist, Louis Wu, has just turned 200 years old and is approached b...