Pun Salad

A blast from the past, rereading a Larry Niven book I bought back in 1970. (No kidding: the price was a hefty 95 cents.) And it's not just nostalgia: Ringworld won the Nebula Award, the Hugo Award, and Locus Award for best SF novel back then.

In fact, I have the very first edition, one with a glaring first-chapter error: the book's protagonist, Louis Wu, is celebrating his 200th birthday, and in order to extend it, he is teleporting from timezone to timezone. But my edition has him teleporting west-to-east, and that wouldn't work at all. According to the book's Wikipedia page, Niven says this edition is "worth money". I bet not enough to retire on, though.

It is a hoot, though. At the time of the story, the cowardly Puppeteer alien race has exited known space, fleeing the explosion of the galactic core (discovered in a previously-written short story). But one, Nessus, appears back on Earth to recruit Wu in an expedition to a recently-discovered artifact: a solid ring of matter encircling a small star. It uses unbelievably advanced technology, and the Puppeteers see the makers as a possible threat.

Joining Wu and Nessus are a Kzin, Speaker-To-Animals, and a young human woman, Teela Brown. After a brief stop on the Puppeteer homeworld, the explorers set off in an advanced starship for Ringworld. Naturally, things don't go as planned. They run afoul of Ringworld's defense mechanisms, and only survive the crash landing on the inner surface due to extreme technological mumbo-jumbo.

But that's just the beginning, because things haven't procceeded as planned by the Ringworld's designers. The team encounter a world full of perils and mystery, and also have to deal with internal conflict between the members. The Ringworld's inner surface area is about 3 million times Earth's surface area, so there's a lot of room to play. Niven has written three additional Ringworld books, and I've put them on my TBR pile.