Ringworld Books In Order

Publication Order of Ringworld Books

Publication Order of Ringworld Prequel / Fleet of the Worlds Books

Publication Order of Known Space Books

Publication Order of Ringworld Graphic Novels

As with many of Larry Niven’s science fiction stories, the Ringworld books begin in the known world, taking place on earth but at a date sell well in the future. Although earth as we know it has drastically changed in this future setting, we can still recognize certain familiar core elements that make up the place we readers are from.

The series centers around an alien race called the Puppeteers, and their discovery of a planet which is known as Ringworld in a previously unknown area of the universe. The surface of this planet, unlike our round earth, is flat and long like a ribbon, and forms a circle, or ring. At the center of the ring rests this unusual world’s sun.

This world turns out to actually be an artificial structure, created not by a force of nature, but by this quasi planet’s strange inhabitants. The world is around one million miles wide and 600 million miles in circumference.

With no other planets or heavenly bodies in the vicinity, Niven suggest that Ringworld may have consumed and destroyed and all other stars or planets that may have once existed near the orbit of Ringworld.

The Ringworld series consists of four books: Ringworld, The Ringworld Engineers, The Ringworld Throne, and Ringworld’s children. The first book was published in 1970, and the last did not appear until 2004.

About Larry Niven

Larry Niven is a highly popular science fiction writer, born in 1938 in Los Angeles California. He began writing in the 1960’s, and his short stories and novels have won such prestigious literary awars as the Locus, Hugo, and Nebula.

Most of Niven’s stories are hard science fiction, the most classic of all science fiction which is based on scientific research, theories, and physics. This type of science fiction is said to be based on the concept that these events could possibly actually happen, based on scientific support.
While he is probably most famous for his science fiction works like the Ringworld series, Niven’s prolific writing career also includes many divergences, including screen writing for television series like The Land of The Lost and Star Trek: The Animated Series. He also wrote some of the Green Lantern stories for D. C. Comics, and authored a series of fantasy novels, The Magic Goes Away.

He is also known for a catch phrase philosophy which fans of his work fall Niven’s Law: “There is no cause so right that one cannot find a fool following it.” His concept of the artificial structure called Ringworld has been called a “ niven’s ring,” a term which is now often used to describe any such similar structure that other writers choose to create.

About Louis Gridley Wu

Louis Gridely Wu is the main character in the Ringworld series. He is known as one of the Flatlanders, and at over six feet tall he literally stands out in a crowd. The story opens when he is celebrating his 200th birthday in the year 2850.

He has lived a long and sometimes eventful life in which he was first removed from his birth parents and given to others to be raised because of laws surrounding the Fertility Board of the United Nations of Earth which denied his birth father a parenting license.

But Louis doesn’t talk much about his past. Because his childhood was troubled , he prefers to keep these details to himself. Although he has some good friends, he also requires plenty of time alone. For this reason he sometimes takes off in his spaceship to unknown parts of the universe in order to escape from the human race until he can tolerate their company again. He calls this kind of little adventure “the sabbatical.”

A man of many talents and abilities, Louis once ran for political office, though did not succeed in winning the election. He also once worked in a wartime hospital, and experienced a struggle of being addicted to painkillers.

Years later he is enjoying his 200th birthday, time travelling around to various parties in his honor using a sort of teleporting system, when he is invited to go on an adventure with some aliens, a human, and a talking catlike beast. On their expedition into the unknown, they crash land on Ringworld, and so begins the story of this strange and mysterious world where nothing is familiar, and no one knows how to get off.

Ringworld On TV

Although there have been many plans conceived to create movies and television series based on the Ringworld books, none have actually come into fruition, which has been a grave disappointment to avid fans of the book series.

The first plan was for a supposed movie that had been signed for in 2001, but this movie has still never been made. Another attempt at getting Ringworld onto the TV screen was a miniseries supposedly planned by the Sci-Fi chanel in 2004. This concept also never fully developed.

More recently, in 2013, The Sci-FI Chanel made another announcement about the creation of a Ringworld mini series, reported to be a collaboration that will be produced by MGM Television and Universal Cable Productions. Although this possibility sounds more promising than any of the other attempts thus far made, after so much previous disappointment, fans will be forgiven for holding their breath until the first episode of this series airs on TV.

Who will enjoy Ringworld?

Readers of science fiction are often eclectic in their choice of books in this genre. Those who read Star Trek and Star Wars books are often just as likely to turn to the more hard science fiction classics, such as The Time Machine.

The Ringworld books are likely to appeal to fans of modern and classical science fiction, from readers of H. G. Wells, Orson Scott Card, and Arthur C. Clarke to fans of more modern stories like Joan Aiken’s The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, Lynn Abbey’s Forgotten Realms, and Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Even if you’ve never tried a science fiction series before, if you enjoy adventure stories or fantasy fiction, you will probably enjoy Larry Niven’s Ringworld series. With strong world building techniques and character development, as well as a captivating plot, these adventurous stories are sure to appeal to many readers of all ages.