|
-
Hivemind social net
-
News
- Features
- Blogs
- Events
Calendar
- Editorials
- Monthly
Zine
- Offworld
Report
- Our Daily
RSS Feed
- Google Toolbar scifi
- Movie/TV
Reviews
> Recent movies
> Movies by year
> Movies by title
- Book
Reviews
> Recent books
> Books by year
> Books by title
- Home
- Worlds
- Biography
- Bibliography
- Appearances
- Reviews
- Blog
- Community
- Press
- Links
Become
an Advertiser
- Web
Site Directory
- Search
the Net
- StephenHunt.net
- WoodenRocket.com
- Check
your E-mail
- Non Sci-Fi
News
|
Ringworld by Larry Niven (SF Masterworks 60)
01/07/2005 . Source: Geoff Willmetts 
pub: Gollancz. 288 page enlarged paperback. Price: £ 6.99 (UK). ISBN: 0-575-07702-6. Buy from Amazon US - Buy from Amazon UK
nb: US titles may only be available from Amazon US, and UK titles from Amazon UK. check out website: www.orionbooks.co.uk
Is there anyone out there who hasn't heard of Larry Niven's Known Space stories let alone missed his most probably definitive volume in that reality regarding the most famous big object, the Ringworld?
Well, I guess there might be some of you out there who haven't got around to reading the book. Gollancz has re-released this 1970 book for the upcoming audience.
Louis Wu, together with his lover Teeela Brown and accompanied by the aliens Pierson's Puppeteer Nessus and the Kzin Speaker-To-Animals go and investigate a six hundred million miles long, ninety million miles radius ring around a distant star. The only problem is that they crash-land and have to check through the myriad species who live here - the topography is based on several planets and has early versions of their own species - seeking out the controls or who built Ringworld to escape. An epic adventure of grand proportions.
If you're talking big dumb objects in SF, it mostly gets divided between Dyson spheres and Ringworld as being the most recognised. It's often been speculated that before you could have a Dyson sphere that you would have to have a ringworld around a star before you could start building out from.
You would also have to be spectacular engineers in many fields to ensure it stayed in a stable orbit, ensuring that night and day was possible - by using an inner ring that slowly rotated - and maintained a breathable atmosphere. If you had a ringworld, then you would surely have created one in much the same way as Larry Niven's alien race, the Pak, did here. In the latter books in this series, Niven admits that there were some flaws in calculations but has since been aided and abetted by scientists intrigued with the idea who've sorted them out.
Ladies and gentlemen, if you haven't read this book already then now's the time you added this novel to your collection and look at the scale of big.
GF Willmetts
|
|
