Ringworld (Sf Masterworks)

Pierson's puppeteers, strange, three-legged, two-headed aliens, have discovered an immense structure in a hitherto unexplored part of the universe. Frightened of meeting the builders of such a structure, the puppeteers set about assembling a team consisting of two humans, a puppeteer and a kzin, an alien not unlike an eight-foot-tall, red-furred cat, to explore it. The artefact is a vast circular ribbon of matter, some 180 million miles across, with a sun at its centre - the Ringworld. But the expedition goes disastrously wrong when the ship crashlands and its motley crew faces a trek across thousands of miles of the Ringworld's surface.Winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards for best novelFour 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 experience, 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 known 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? The ' (1970–2004), by science fiction author Larry Niven, is a part of his Known Space set of stories. Its backdrop is the Ringworld, a giant artifact 600 million miles in circumference around a sun. The series is composed of four standalone science fiction novels, the original award-winning book and its three subsequent sequels: 1970: Ringworld 1980: The Ringworld Engineers 1996: The Ringworld Throne 2004: Ringworld's Children The core series was developed with three side series of prequels set in the same Ringworld universe, and written in collaboration: 1988–2009: Man-Kzin Wars (by various edited by Niven) 2007–2010: Fleet of Worlds (by Niven and Edward M. Lerner) 2010-2011: Juggler of Worlds (by Niven and Edward M. Lerner) The artefact is a circular ribbon of matter six hundred million miles long and ninety million miles in radius. Pierson's puppeteers, the aliens who discovered it, are understandably wary of encountering the builders of such an immense structure and have assembled a team of two humans, a mad puppeteer and a kzin, a huge cat-like alien, to explore it. But a crash landing on the vast edifice forces the crew on a desperate and dangerous trek across the Ringworld. In the nighttime heart of Beirut, in one of a row of general-address transfer booths, Louis Wu flicked into reality. Return to the classical hard-science fiction of the kind popular in the Golden Age