History Main / Ringworld

* OffToSeeTheWizard: After finishing the first book, Larry Niven realized that its plot mirrored that of TheWizardOfOz.

** Also the Shadow Square Wire. A heap of it looks like smoke from a distance. Trying to pick it up can cut off your fingers. One character runs into a trap made from it and gets his head cut off (fortunately he has a spare).

* 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. Of course, Teela would have known how many the Hindmost would kill and still couldn't allow it.]]

* ThirtyGambitPileup: The third and fourth books become this when dozens of protectors start plotting against each other.

* 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 ''male'' character from the same floating city in ''The Ringworld Engineers''.

* NewtonEinsteinSurak: Louis' opinion of [[AudioErotica Nessus' voice]] -- "Had Louis visualized a woman to go with that voice, she would have been Cleopatra, Helen of Troy, Marilyn Monroe and Lorelei Huntz rolled into one."

** Also the Shadow Square Wire. A heap of it looks like smoke from a distance. Trying to pick it up can cut off your fingers. One character runs into a trap made from it and gets his head cut off (fortunately he has a space).

* NewtonEinsteinSurak: Louis' opinion of [[AudioErotica Nessus' voice]]: "Had Louis visualized a woman to go with that voice, she would have been Cleopatra, Helen of Troy, Marilyn Monroe and Lorelei Huntz rolled into one."

** NotDrawnToScale: However, many of the artists in various countries who paint cover art for the ''Ringworld'' novels have a hard time grasping the proportions of it.

Imagine, if you will, a giant ring a million miles wide with a radius of one Earth orbit (giving it a circumference 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.

It is big. It is huge. Much of the work dealing with the Ringworld is about the difficulties in making such a large world, who could have built it, and the problems in running it how various societies developed on it over time.

* BigDumbObject: The Ringworld itself is an ancient and mysterious super tech that dwarfs anything else in the galaxy. It is, of course, practically abandoned.
** Actually, its population numbers in the trillions, its just "not a lot" for such a large area.

* InferredHolocaust: The climax of ''Ringworld'' features kind of a doozy. So they get Liar off the Ring by [[spoiler: dragging it with shadow square wire. Thing is, they only have one end of the wire. The other is coiled up in a heavily inhabited city. Ever seen a high-tension cable break free? It can take off limbs. Now imagine ''hundreds of miles'' of ''razor sharp'' wire doing something similar...]] Apparently the author noticed this "small" problem (or a fan pointed it out) between the first book and the second, where our hero goes [[WhatTheHellHero What The Hell, Me]].

* NeglectfulPrecursors: The Pak built the Ringworld and seeded it with Pak breeders, Homo Habilis. Pity the Pak suck at building societies not based on war.

** This has a hidden subtlety. As herd animals, the Puppeteer don't charge enemies the way territorial hominids do, they run the heck away. So the hindmost member of a puppeteer herd is actually the rear guard, the ''most'' exposed and combative of the bunch. It's unclear if the title of Hindmost is actually meant to be read this way, or is a CulturalTranslation into human terms.

** Louis doesn't seem to know that Beowulf Shaeffer was the original pilot of the ''Long Shot'' who discovered the explosion of the galactic core, but stories written after ''Ringworld'' revealed that Shaeffer was his adopted father.
** The fact that most Ringworlders pronounce Louis' name as "Luweewu" in ''The Ringworld Engineers'' implies that Louis uses the French pronunciation of his name, but ''Ringworld's Children'' says he pronounces it ''Loo''-is.

* 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 there are no useful minerals, but there are enough of the [[LostTechnology Pak's materials]] around for some civilizations to arise from time to time.

* StarfishAliens: Nessus is a Pierson's Puppeteer, a creature that has its brain in its 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.

* TransplantedHumans: More like transplanted Homo habilis. Pak Protectors are a form of Homo Habilis who built the Ringworld as a safe place to survive the core explosion for enough breeders. The initial Pak breeders mutated over 3 million years on the ring and evolved into different ecological niches which the Pak did not plant (generally those niches normally filled by creatures that killed and ate Pak breeders). With the exception of some transplanted aliens on the continent-sized "garden maps" in the middle of oceans [[strike:tens]] hundreds of thousands of miles wide, there wasn't so much as an insect that will harm humanoids present. Until Hominds evolved to fill the role.
* {{Unobtainium}}: The strength of the base material needed to stop a ring world ripping itself apart is impossible under the known laws of physics, seeing as it would need to exceed the strength of carbon to carbon atomic bond.
** Hell, it would need to have an interatomic bonding force on par with the forces that hold ''nuclei'' together.
** It also has room temperature superconductors, which become an important plot point.
*** Which are also superconductors of ''heat'', quite unlike real world superconductors.

* OurBetterIsDifferent: The Puppeteers value survival to the point of cowardice, so their leader is called "The Hindmost".

* ThirtyXanatosPileup: The third and fourth books become this when dozens of protectors start plotting against each other.

* HotLibrarian[=/=]PrettyWhiteHairedGirl: Harkabeeparolyn, if you're into rishathra.

* {{Retcon}}: At the time Niven wrote ''Ringworld'', he hadn't decided to integrate his stories of the Belters and near-future space exploration, including ''Protector'', into the same universe with the far-future stories of Beowulf Shaeffer and Louis Wu. This is why Nessus says "There is evidence enough that your species evolved on Earth," even though later novels show he would have known who the Pak were. It wasn't until after Niven established the [[StandardSciFiSetting future history]] of Known Space that he realized Pak Protectors were the most likely builders of the Ringworld.