Ringworld

Larry Niven’s Ringworld is considered a cult classic of science fiction. On the one hand, it is - after Dune and The Left Hand of Darkness - one of the first novels to have won both the Hugo and the Nebula Award. On the other hand, despite being published more than 50 years ago (1970), it still inspires modern media, for example Bungie’s Halo - one of the highest-grossing media franchises of all time.

I’ll only give a rough overview of the plot here to avoid major spoilers. What I’m primarily interested in below are the impressions I took from the book and how it comes across to me today.

The journey to the Ringworld

Louis Wu, the book’s protagonist, travels in the year 2850 with a small expedition team to a gigantic object that an alien species discovered beyond explored space. Long-distance images suggest it might be an enormous artificial world: a ring built around a star with a diameter comparable to Earth’s orbit.

The book spends ample time on the journey and its preparation, and then finally on the events on the Ringworld itself.

Hard sci-fi…

Larry Niven introduces many intriguing concepts in Ringworld and gives their derivation and explanation plenty of room.

In most cases it’s far from any real physical laws - it hews closer to Star Trek’s brand of hard sci-fi than to The Expanse, if you take those two as the endpoints of the pop hard-sci-fi spectrum. The Ringworld itself and the many associated elements like Space Thread, the Foundation Material, and the Shadow Squares are the most prominent example, of course. The protagonists observe and discuss their physical properties, providing answers to the obvious questions readers will have.

But the celebration of technical detail is almost always part of the worldbuilding, too. Pierson’s Puppeteers - a species portrayed as anxious and hyper-cautious, whose drive to shield themselves from every possible danger has made them the technological vanguard of known space - present what, from a human perspective, are obvious regressions in ship design as a major innovation, because they offer even more safety for passengers.

Every discovery about the Ringworld, its mechanisms and properties, also sketches a picture of the Ringworld Engineers.

So every nerdy technology deep dive also carries a slice of species characterization and worldbuilding.

…in a space-fantasy wrapper

What’s striking is the contrast with the parts of the book that aren’t technical. The species feel like they stepped out of a fantasy novel: The Puppeteers are three-legged ungulates with two snakelike heads. The Kzinti are anthropomorphic cats.

Seeker, a humanoid character, is drawn by Niven as if lifted straight from Conan the Barbarian - sword included.

Metaphysical aspects also take up a surprisingly large amount of space. For instance, the question of whether luck can be a genetic trait is a key plot element.

All of that feels much closer to Star Wars’s fairy-tale quality.

A surprising mix of genre elements

At times it even feels like the book doesn’t want to take itself seriously, for example when parking bans play a pivotal role or a building becomes a means of transportation. Even though you never get the impression that Larry Niven is aiming for humor, some ideas and situations could have slotted straight into a Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett novel.

It’s an extremely unusual combination of genre elements. Not just because you don’t see it often. It’s also unusual that it works.

The fact that Larry Niven takes the time to explain how his universe works and presents it through the sober, technocratic lens of an engineer gives it enough credibility.

The images painted by his words end up feeling like deceptively real photographs of something unbelievable. An AI fake, made for entertainment, that we know for sure isn’t real - yet real enough that you can slip into the illusion without much effort.

What breaks the style more, however, is the brutality of a few of the fight scenes. The imagery is unnecessarily gory and, to me, doesn’t really fit.

It’s striking that the characters are repeatedly portrayed as particularly ruthless and cold-blooded. But that clashes with the protagonist’s inner life and introspection.

The 70s view of women as the main break in immersion

However, what most breaks immersion from today’s perspective, is the portrayal of the female characters.

Ringworld is a stark illustration of how the media of the 1970s portrayed women. The book’s few female characters range from sexual playthings to naive airheads. In the plot they all show up as objects, whether as an official ship prostitute or, quite literally, as a good-luck charm.

The Kzinti, one of the dominant species, are considered ‘male-dominant’. Female Kzinti are in fact described as barely verbal breeding apparatus.

Weak character building adds to the problem

Unfortunately, the characters are fairly flat across the board. It feels like the focus went more into developing the species than the individual people and their motives. It’s especially noticeable with the women, since the already meager character development further weakens and objectifies them.

Larry Niven has multiple groundbreaking and creative ideas in Ringworld that sketch a future vision of a (post-)utopia. At the same time, he presents a view of society that feels backward even by 1970s standards.

1970 is the year Margaret Thatcher, later known as ’the Iron Lady’, takes her first ministerial post.

India has a woman as head of government in Indira Gandhi.

Thousands of women in the US women’s movement take to the streets for equal rights.

A year earlier, Ursula K. Le Guin publishes ‘The Left Hand of Darkness’, which is still considered a milestone of feminist literature.

The fact that Larry Niven wins the Hugo and Nebula with Ringworld just a year later is a striking illustration of why.

Sure, the image of women as the weaker sex, far from any notion of equality, is still ubiquitous at the time. But there were more than enough clear signs of how far the second wave had come by 1970 and where the future was headed. Confronting a completely outdated view of gender - and the implicit expectation that from 1970 to 2850 not much will change on gender equality - hits me over the head the entire time I’m reading.

For all the praise due the creative achievement in Ringworld, its view of women is the clear fly in the ointment, repeatedly breaking immersion.

What sticks in the end

That is all the more tragic because Larry Niven comes across as all the more incisive elsewhere: In the conversations and the plot he repeatedly drops philosophical ideas or questions, and at times surprising insights or theories.

The Tasp

One weapon in the book is the tasp, which can stimulate anyone’s pleasure center. It can neutralize attackers by trapping them in a moment of immense joy and ecstasy. Its most powerful effect, though, comes from the crash afterward - the complete emptying of dopamine reserves and the deep ensuing depression - which throws the target into profound dependency on the tasp’s owner.

It’s an impressive metaphor for drugs like cocaine, especially with regard to the psychological aspects of addiction.

Religiosity and its abuse in the face of superior technology

People who are technologically far ahead of others in the book repeatedly present themselves as gods. Surrounded by phenomena and technologies they can’t explain, the technologically inferior civilizations in the book take refuge in religion. They escape uncertainty and find an explanation, but in the process fall ever deeper into fundamentalism.

The expansion of the Kzinti

Driven by an unbridled will to expand and conquer, the Kzinti strive for a drive that will carry them to the farthest corners of the universe. At the same time, that would mean their own annihilation, since it’s impossible that they’d win every one of the infinitely many conflicts to be fought - and so they’d only end up finding the one that will defeat them.

Luck as protection from harm

A central plot element is also the question of what the protective effect of luck really is, and what consequences unbounded luck would have for oneself and others.

Conclusion

Ringworld sticks with me mainly for its mode of storytelling - its stylistic heterogeneity. I like the Ringworld concept itself and the lore - the Puppeteers, their technology, and how they truly live up to their name.

It’s the kind of material I could easily imagine on film - if only because the images in my head already feel so vivid. A thoroughly updated view of women and clearer character work would have served the book well - at least from today’s perspective.