History Main / Ringworld

* HotLibrarian: Harkabeeparolyn, if you're into rishathra.

* LukeIAmYourFather: [[spoiler:Wembleth]]

* CargoCult: The strategy that the characters call the "God Gambit", where they pretend to be gods among Ringworld natives.

* AssPull: The Hindmost reveals to Louis Wu in ''The Ringworld Throne'' that he has a quantum computer and the {{nanotech}}-based autodoc invented by Louis' biological father Carlos aboard his ship, without having mentioned them at all in the previous book.
** In ''Ringworld's Children'', Louis discovers that Teela became a protector on one of the Maps of Pak in the Other Ocean, then traveled to the Map of Mars on the other side of the Ringworld and pretended to turn into a protector ''again'' for Bram's benefit. Apparently, the only reason for this is to justify why [[spoiler:Wembleth]] lived near the Other Ocean.
** ''Ringworld's Children'' also introduces the concept of monsters in hyperspace that take time to catch and eat spaceships, in order to explain how [[spoiler:the entire Ringworld, 1 AU around its sun, can go into hyperspace without being immediately destroyed]].

* CanonSue: In ''Ringworld's Children'', Louis [[spoiler:is transformed into a protector, but after using his new abilities to resolve the plot, [[IGotBetter he gets better]] thanks to Carlos Wu's autodoc. If becoming a protector is now a reversible condition, it diminishes the CursedWithAwesome aspect that protectors have always had.]] Also see WeCouldHaveAvoidedAllThis.

* NeverLiveItDown: Because Red Herders are culturally monogamous, much of the conflict in the "Fearless Vampire Slayers" storyline in ''The Ringworld Throne'' comes from Tegger and Warvia fearing that they'd get a reputation for promiscuity after all the rishathra they had while under the influence of vampire scent.

http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/ringworld-cvr250_5062.jpg

* BadassNormal: Compared to the rest of the cast, Louis has no real abilities apart from 200 years of interesting life experience. Nonetheless, he is either the leader or most influential character throughout the series.

* BadassNormal: Compared to the rest of the cast, Louis has no real abilities apart from 200 years of eclectic life experience. Nonetheless, he is the either the leader or at least the most influential character throughout.

Imagine, if you will, a giant ring a million miles wide with a radius of one Earth orbit (giving it a circumfrence of some 600 million miles). The Ring is far enough out that the heat is comfortable enough for humans to live on. The ring spins to mimic gravity and has walls over a thousand miles high on each side designed to keep in the air. Such a ring would have an inhabitable surface area equal to almost three million planets the size of the Earth.

* WeCouldHaveAvoidedAllThis: If Louis had known during ''The Ringworld Engineers'' that [[spoiler:the Hindmost's computer can stabilize the Ringworld without killing 1.5 trillion people, and that Carlos Wu's autodoc could cure someone of being a protector, he wouldn't have needed to kill Teela.]]

* RingWorldPlanet

* BornLucky: Teela Brown, later deconstructed to hell and back.

* NeverLiveItDown: Red Herders are culturally monogamous, but much of the conflict in the "Fearless Vampire Slayers" storyline in ''The Ringworld Throne'' comes from Tegger and Warvia fearing that they'd get a reputation for promiscuity after all the rishathra they had while under the influence of vampire scent.

* PutOnABus: In ''Ringworld's Children'', the Hindmost only briefly mentions that Harkabeeparolyn and Kawaresksenjajok were returned to their hometown floating city, and they otherwise don't appear in the book at all. In a surprising case of [=~They Just Didn't Care~=], Niven gets Harkabeeparolyn's name wrong and calls her Fortaralisplyar, who was a different character from the same floating city in ''The Ringworld Engineers''.

* ForeignQueasine: The City Builders are disgusted by Luis Wu's love of cheese.

* HotLibrarian: Harkabeeparolyn.

** Recently he re-published a number of his Beowulf Shaeffer short stories with a new story linking them together. This story was jam-packed with retcons intended to fix previous problems.

* TrailersAlwaysSpoil: The current edition of ''The Ringworld Engineers'' has a cover painting by Donato Giancola depicting a Protector, which spoils a major plot point of the book.

'''Chiron:''' [[ShapedLikeItself It is a star with a ring around it.]]

* WeCouldHaveAvoidedAllThis: If Louis had known during ''The Ringworld Engineers'' that [[spoiler:the Hindmost had Carlos Wu's autodoc and that it could cure someone of being a protector, he might not have needed to kill Teela.]]

* CargoCult: The strategy that the characters call the "God Gambit", where they pretend to be gods among RIngworld natives.

* CaptainOblivious

* ForeignQueasine: The Ringworld Engineers are disgusted by Luis Wu's love of cheese.

* AuthorAppeal: Rishathra. [[NotThatTheresAnythingWrongWithThat Not that we're judging or anything]], all we're saying some of the books in the series have quite a lot of it. Niven reportedly wearing a shirt to conventions that says "I have sex outside my species" doesn't help.[[hottip:*:He wrote that if wearing a badge with the same slogan, you really have to remember to take it off outside SF conventions, or people draw funny conclusions.]] Of course, his in-story reasoning makes sense, and he restricts it to sentient hominid species...

** Nessus isn't just considered insane. He ''is''. He is bipolar, swinging back and forth between "normal" puppeteer cowardice, and periods of berserker-like bravery.

* FloatingContinent: from buildings to cities

* SchizoTech: Ringworld, being a habitat made to be a giant garden for children of Pak Protectors is very low in metal elements, so technology hits a limit as their is no useful minerals for any group to use, but there is enough of the Pak materials around for some civilizations to arise from time to time.
* SciFiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScale: [[AvertedTrope Averted. Seriously averted.]] The scale of things is mentioned lots of times, usually in a "Holy crap, I can't believe how large this thing is" situation.

** Recently he re-published a number of his Beowulf Shaeffer short stories with a new story linking them together. This story was jam-packed with retcons intended to fix previous problems.
* StarfishAliens: Nessus is a Pierson's Puppeteer, a creature that has its brain in is torso, three legs, and two heads. Nessus is noted to have his heads look at one another as he's thinking at one point. (One character suspects that when a Puppeteer laughs, he looks himself eye to eye.) Puppeteers also reproduce in a method like certain wasps where the egg is implanted into another species who carries it to term and is eaten during birth. The Ring also has some transplanted Jinxian Bandersnatchi, sentient slugs the size of a freight train.

** The General Products Hull is another example of Unobtainium. It's transparent to visible light and ''only'' visible light, and absolutely impervious to any kind of harm except outright disintegration by antimatter.