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Four travelers come to the Ringworld: Louis Wu – human and old; bored with having lived too fully for far too many years. Seeking a challenge, and all too capable of handling it. Nessus – a trembling coward, a puppeteer with a built-in survival pattern of nonviolence. Except that this particular puppeteer is insane. Teela Brown – human; a wide-eyed youngster with no allegiances, no experiences, no abilities. And all the luck in the world. Speaker-to-Animals – kzin; large, orange-furred, and carnivorous. And one of the most savage life-forms found in the galaxy. Why did these disparate individuals come together? How could they possibly function together? And where, in the name of anything sane, were they headed?

My latest read was the Hugo and Nebula award-winning novel by Larry Niven, “Ringworld.”

Two humans and two aliens are brought together to investigate an amazing artifact: the Ringworld is a ring (duh!) built around a sun. At six hundred million miles long and a million miles wide, it has roughly 3 million times the area of Earth. It’s spinning around the sun at 770 miles per second, so it has gravity. The air is held in by thousand foot high walls on either side. A series of shadow squares also orbiting the sun give it night and day (but when the sun is out, it’s always high noon). Niven does a great job of visualizing the Ringworld and what it would be like to stand on the surface (I loved the Arch of heaven).

As usual in these posts, I’ll refrain from major plot summaries or spoilers and just make some general comments. It took me a while (just like Louis Wu) to wrap my mind around the scale of Ringworld. It’s HUGE. But Niven makes it seem plausible. The characters were fun (Speaker-to-Animals reminded me of the Kilrathi Hobbes from the old Wing Commander games) and the plot really moves … it was a hard book to put down. Unfortunately, it seemed to wrap up too quickly, almost as if Niven was in a rush to finish and just stopped. The ending left me wanting, so I guess I’ll have to read “The Ringworld Engineers” next (although I’ll probably stop after that because I’ve heard the last two books in the series are not that great).

One thing to consider: is it possible to be so lucky that you’re unlucky to the others around you? Think about that. If you read the book, you’ll understand what I’m talking about.