I recently finished rereading Larry Niven’s
Ringworld, from which I’d been away for about a decade, and which
therefore held some surprises for my forgetful brain. A member of the Giant
Mysterious Space Artifact school of literature, a sub-sub-genre it shares with
the Rama and Riverworld stories, it centers around the journey to and
exploration of a great big ring-shaped construct that encircles a sun. The
civilazations on the ring have fallen into ruin, and the members of the journey
are faced with the challenge of getting off the ring once they crash-land
without the help of much technology other than what they salvage from their
ship. As with the first installment in the other GMSA stories, there’s still
much left unexplained, giving the author an opportunity to milk his idea for a
couple more sequels. A fun read with some interesting
ideas.