Ringworld: Encyclopedia II - Ringworld - Concepts

Ringworld - Concepts

Niven includes a number of alien species and entertaining concepts from his other Known Space stories including:

• the Puppeteer's General Products hulls, which are impervious to nearly anything except light and gravity and cannot be destroyed by anything except antimatter.
• the Slaver stasis field, which causes time in an area to stand still; since time is nearly stopped, no harm can come to objects in stasis.
• the idea that luck is a genetic trait that can be favored by selective breeding.
• the tasp, a device that induces a state of extreme pleasure in the brain at the push of a button; it is used as a non-harmful method of debilitating its target.

The novel is also a send-up of fundamentalist religion; the inhabitants of the Ringworld have lost their technological prowess and now attribute the phenomena of their world to divine power. The four explorers thus encounter priests, crowd scenes, fanaticism, and so on.

However, it is the very idea of a Ringworld that seems to have most attracted readers' admiration. Niven fills the reader with a sense of awe and wonderment by describing different aspects of the unimaginably large scale of the Ringworld and how it would look to an observer on its surface.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Concepts", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki