The same book famously featured a devastating inaccuracy: the eponymous Ringworld is not ( in ) a stable orbit and would crash into the sun without active stabilization.

His best-known work is Ringworld ( 1970 ), which received Hugo, Locus, Ditmar, and Nebula awards.

The Ringworld series is set in the Known Space universe.

Niven's most famous contribution to the SF genre is his concept of the Ringworld, a band of approximately the same diameter as Earth's orbit rotating around a star.

It is one of the most visible influences of the Ringworld concept on popular culture.

The fictional universe is also the home of species from outside Known Space, including the hominid inhabitants of a megastructure called Ringworld.

The Ringworld orbits a sun outside Known Space, but it is a well-established artifact within the Known Space " universe ".

In Ringworld it is revealed that this was in part due to clandestine meddling by the Pierson's Puppeteers.

No description is given, but the Ringworld RPG suggests they resemble horned birds and that their homeworld has low gravity.

When the Protectors reappear in The Ringworld Engineers and its sequels, it is strongly indicated that they constructed the Ringworld.

Likewise, every hominid species found on the Ringworld is descended from Pak breeders, and all are susceptible to the virus of Tree-of-life.

* Silvereyes is, at the time of Ringworld, the furthest Human world from Earth ( 21. 3 light-years, 60 days at Quantum-I hyperdrive speeds ), orbiting Beta Hydri.

* The Ringworld is an artificial world structure with three million times the surface area of Earth, built in the shape of a giant ring orbiting its sun, a million miles wide and with a diameter of 186 million miles.

In Niven's novel Ringworld's Children the Ringworld itself is converted into a gigantic Quantum II hyperdrive and launched into hyperspace while within its star's gravity well.

Ringworld's Children reveals that there is life in hyperspace around gravity wells and that hyperspace predators eat spaceships which appear in hyperspace close to large masses, thus explaining why a structure as large as the Ringworld can safely engage the hyperdrive in a star's gravity well.

In Ringworld's Children, it is suggested boosterspice may actually be adapted from Tree-of-Life, without the symbiotic virus that enabled hominids to metamorphose from Pak Breeder stage to Pak Protector stage ( mutated Pak breeders were the ancestors of both Homo sapiens and the hominids of the Ringworld ).

On the Ringworld, there is an analogous ( and apparently more potent ) compound developed from Tree-of-Life, but they are mutually incompatible ; in The Ringworld Engineers, Louis Wu learns that the character Halrloprillalar died when in ARM custody after leaving the Ringworld, as a result of having taken boosterspice after having used the Ringworld equivalent.

They were invented by the Pierson's Puppeteers, and their existence is not generally known to other races until the events of The Ringworld Engineers.

Ringworld is a 1970 science fiction novel by Larry Niven, set in his Known Space universe and considered a classic of science fiction literature.

Some Martians still exist on the " Map of Mars " on the Ringworld.

In various other books, for example Ringworld, Niven suggests that easy transportation might be disruptive to traditional behavior and open the way for new forms of parties, spontaneous congregations, or shopping trips around the world.

* Outsiders: very advanced, fragile aliens shaped like cats o ' nine tails that, according to Ringworld, probably evolved on a cold, low gravity world resembling Nereid.

Most Ringworld societies have forgotten they live on an artificial structure, and now attribute the phenomena of their world to divine power.

The game is intended to be set on the Ringworld itself, an enormous single world discovered at the far reaches of Known Space, a ring around a sun at approximately the orbit of the Earth.

The world is described in a series of novels by Niven, Ringworld, The Ringworld Engineers, and, after the game's publication, The Ringworld Throne and Ringworld's Children.

Instead, the game and rules focused on parties of characters exploring the Ringworld itself, and, despite its vast size ( with a surface area larger than that of all of Known Space's inhabited planets put together ), many who bought the game felt limited by this one world setting.

At the beginning of Ringworld, Louis celebrated his 200th birthday by working his way from party to party around the world using transfer booths to stay ahead of the dateline.

The Ringworld is home to some 30 trillion sentient inhabitants from up to 2000 hominid species.

Given that spinning a Dyson Sphere would result in the atmosphere pooling around the equator, the Ringworld removes all the extraneous parts of the structure, leaving a spinning band landscaped on the sun-facing side, with the atmosphere and inhabitants kept in place through centrifugal force and 1000 mile high perimeter walls ( rim walls ).

For example a group at MIT concluded that the planet Mesklin in Hal Clement's 1953 novel Mission of Gravity would have had a sharp edge at the equator, and a Florida high-school class calculated that in Larry Niven's 1970 novel Ringworld the topsoil would have slid into the seas in a few thousand years.

This becomes a problem with disks that are a significant distance apart on the Ringworld surface, as they will have different velocities: same speed, different direction.

Some of these Martians are thought to have survived on the Ringworld, however.

Other science fiction authors have devised their own variants of Niven's Ringworld, notably Iain M. Banks ' Culture Orbitals, best described as miniature Ringworlds, and the ring-shaped Halo structure of the video game Halo.

Similarities to Ringworld have been noted in the game, and Niven was asked ( but declined ) to write the first novel based on the series.

There have been many other wheel-shaped space habitats in science fiction, such as the Ringworld or the Earth-orbiting Space Station V invented by Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick and depicted in Kubrick's 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.

In Ringworld, Nessus, a Puppeteer, explains how his race's cowardice is partly a result of a science experiment ( the details of which are not given ) that proves the Puppeteers have nothing equivalent to an immortal soul, and therefore death is, for their species, absolute and eternal.

The character Teela Brown, who journeys to the Ringworld, is an outcome of this Lucky Human Project, though not quite the outcome the Puppeteers would have liked.

A number of previously revealed " facts " turn out to have been lies told by characters in the books, which is another common feature of Niven's Ringworld and other Known Space stories, especially those involving Protectors and Puppeteers.

He was the one that caused the most damage to the Ringworld village of Zignamuclikclik and were he not a part of the Docile Kzinti project, he probably would have leveled the village to the ground.

In the course of the novel, Louis and Chmeee set forth on an exploration of the Ringworld in order to learn where the creators of the Ringworld may have built a control or repair system.

In their travels they meet a number of the hominid species that have evolved on the Ringworld.