#60. RINGWORLD By Larry Niven

Published : 1970
Pages : 288
Overall Mark : 8/10

The artefact is a circular ribbon of matter six hundred million miles long and ninety mile in radius. Pierson's puppeteers, the aliens who discovered it, are understandably wary of encountering the builders of such an immense structure and have assembled a team of two humans, a mad puppeteerand a kzin, a huge cat-like alien, to explore it. But a crash landing on the vast edifice forces the crew on a desperate and dangerous trek across the Ringworld...

LARRY NIVEN (1938-)
Born in California in 1938, Larry Niven published his first SF story in 1964 and made an immediate impact. He has won four Hugos for his short fiction and both the Hugo and the Nebula for Ringworld, the most important novel in his seminal future history, Tales Of Known Space. He has also collaborated with Jerry Pournelleon, among other notable novels, Oath Of Fealty.

VERDICT
Yet another SF novel that successfully takes the idea of religion and pokes fun at it in an SF environment. Niven does this in an effective way by having humans visit Ringworld and discover a primitive society that thinks they are Gods. A well observed look at how some religions view their idols, and how a simple act can result in being accused of blasphemy.