Ringworld (Ringworld series, part 1)   Basic facts title: Ringworld ISBN:  0 345 33392 6 author: Larry Niven language: English (original language) science fiction publisher: Ballantine Books / Del Rey 342 pages published: 1992, first published in 1970 my rating: includes: no additional material   The story On his two hundredth birthday Louis Wu meets Nessus, a Pierson's Puppeteer who is gathering a team for a secret mission. Together they also recruit Speaker, a Kzin ambassador to Earth, and a young girl named Teelah Brown. Once they set off on their mission the first stop is the Puppeteer's home world, where they learn about the target of their mission. They are to visit and reconnoiter the Ringworld, a huge artificial structure encircling a star. On arrival at the Ringworld their ship is shot down by the automatic meteor defence and makes a crash landing. Louis, Nessus, Speaker and Teelah start travelling towards the Ringworld edge, half a million miles away, to look for help. Although on their journey they find remains of the highly evolved civilization that has once inhabited the Ringworld, the current inhabitants have fallen back to a much earlier evolutionary stage and it looks like there will not be any help for them to escape from the Ringworld. On their journey Louis, Speaker and Teelah learn that the Puppeteers have been conducting experiments to bend human and Kzin evolution in a for them profitable direction, and that Teelah is a result of an experiment to breed luck into humans. It becomes clearer and clearer that this experiment has been so successful that in fact their entire mission is controlled by Teelah's luck. Finally Louis Wu finds the means to launch the remains of their space ship from the Ringworld and they can start the trip home, but not until after Teelah has decided to stay on the Ringworld and her place has been taken by Halrloprillalar, a Ringworld native.   My opinion The concept of a ring shaped world encircling a sun is intriguing, and Larry Niven is a master in working out the details of such a world. Together with Niven's catching style of writing this makes the book hard to resist. Woven through the main story about the journey to and across the Ringworld are a number of other stories: the explosion of the galactic core, the Puppeteer's exodus from the Galaxy, and their experiments with directing human and Kzin evolution. This variation of subjects certainly adds to the attraction of the book. All in all this a very pleasant and easy to read book. Once you have read it you will probably find it hard to stay away from the other parts in the Ringworld series.   Additional notes 'Ringworld' is the first part in a series, and it is followed by 'The Ringworld Engineers' and 'The Ringworld Throne'.

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