While the discovery of the technology and the science is lacking in Ringworld, it is a book about discovery. In the novel, the main character makes an interesting realization: that he is a character in a story, and that he is not the protagonist. This is not made quite so explicit in the book. In the novel, Teela Brown is one of the explorers. She is the result of several generations of winners of a genetic lottery - on earth breeding is tightly controlled but one can win the right to breed. She is found to be bred for luck, and as such she is extremely lucky. Louis Wu, the main character, at first dismisses this notion but eventually he comes to realize the reality of Teela's luck, and feels himself a puppet to its machinations. In fiction, readers are accustomed to the protagonist being privy to all kinds of good fortune, coincidence, or straight-up deus ex machinas. We recognize this as part of the writing, and if we recognize it too well, we may see it as bad writing. However, the protagonist is unaware that he or she is able to benefit unnaturally in this way, nor are the other characters generally aware of something afoot. In Ringworld, the discovery comes as the main character becomes keenly aware of Teela Brown's uncanny guiding hand of fate. He contextualizes this in terms of something that he thinks he can somewhat understand - luck. But luck is just another word for fortune, itself a term for a favourable fate. Fate carries with it the implication of predestination, and of a narrative structure to reality. If Teela Brown is truly lucky, then her life is a story.
Characters recognizing the hand of fate, or even realizing they are in a story, is not so novel. Ringworld differentiates itself in the way this knowledge is discovered. Louis Wu starts as a luck sceptic, but as he observes evidence he gradually comes around until the end of the book where Speaker contextualizes the entire narrative in terms of Teela Brown's luck.
In a cast of a three-legged, double-necked coward, a giant cat-like beast hungry for conflict, and a two hundred year old man so bored with life he must surround himself with aliens and visit the furthest reaches of known space to keep his pulse up, it is Teela Brown, a twenty year old woman from earth who has never been on an adventure who comes across as the real alien. Teela should be our window into this strange world, her wide-eyed naïveté the closest match for the reader's perspective at Niven's fantastical future world. In most stories, Teela would be the protagonist, and indeed she is here too, but, the story is not told from her perspective, but from Louis'. Rather than identify with Teela, the reader is made to consider the strangeness of her position, the alien quality of her incredible luck. Teela is given other qualities that set her apart, such as walking clumsily, and not knowing what to do in a crisis, the result of her luck having always worked for her rather than simply kicking into gear once she starts her quest.
Later on we meet up with Teela and her rescuer, Seeker, a hero archetype who travels around with a black sword on his way to the base of the arch (of the Ringworld, not realizing that it is a ring and not an arch). He refers to technology as magic (a nod to Arthur C. Clarke perhaps1) and sees Teela as a damsel in distress. The crew who have to this point been the focus of the story, two aliens and Louis Wu, then seem to slot into this fantasy narrative as sort of elder characters or creatures with strong power over magic. Seeker thinks he is on a quest, and that he is the hero of this. He understands the world in terms of magic and the fantastical. But we, like Louis, Speaker, and Nessus, know that this is not the case and that his quest is futile (there is no base to the Ringworld, it just goes all the way around), and that his understanding of things is wrong. He thinks he is in a fantasy, but we know that he is really in a science-fiction story. He thinks he is the hero, but in fact it is Teela Brown for whom the fates bend. Through this contrast the reader can come to the realization that Louis Wu is not the protagonist, but rather Teela Brown is. Louis later almost spells this out by pointing out that only on the Ringworld could Teela learn about pain, could she grow as a human being. Teela is the only character with a narrative arc, all other characters serve her plot. But there is something else - as readers we think we are reading about the Ringworld, a vast alien megastructure, but that is not the real story, only window dressing, much as Seeker's fantasy tale is a flawed interpretation of events.
The story also presents several aspects of attempting to play God. Nessus' race, the Puppeteers, lure the Outsiders to human space so that they will give them a quantum I hyperdrive, which enables them to defeat the Kzin in the man-Kzin wars. This decisive advantage then causes the Kzin to be naturally selected to be more docile, since aggressive Kzin would just die off. The Puppeteers breed the Kzin to be a more agreeable species. Then the Puppeteers manipulate the breeding rules of earth to make way for the genetic lottery, allowing them to breed humans for luck. The Puppeteers manipulate in the affairs of other races for their own ends in an attempt to play God. Nessus and Speaker practice playing God to the natives of Ringworld, and Louis tries this early on as well, although it goes badly for him. Yet Teela's luck shows the feeble, toy-like nature of their attempts. Try to play God they might, but they are subject to far more powerful forces. Even the Ringworld engineers attempt to play God, by rebuilding their solar system into a world more suitable for living, but this world eventually collapses into barbarism, and unlike a conventional world, civilization cannot rebuild itself without transmutation. At each turn we are made to realize that God plays at a much grander scale than we can see or comprehend. Indeed the God of Ringworld is Larry Niven himself, who is the motive force behind Teela Brown's luck, but the characters in the story cannot comprehend this, it just escapes their grasp.
Nessus also tries at playing God more directly by using the tasp, a device that directly stimulates the pleasure centre of the brain for humans and Kzin, by threatening Speaker with it and using it on Prill, the Ringworld engineer, making her dependent on it.
Near the end, Louis explains to Speaker why Teela had to come to Ringworld - to grow as a human. Speaker does not understand and says it must be uniquely human. Louis justifies the events in terms of a narrative arc, but Speaker's reply instead suggests that the need to fit a series of events into a narrative is a uniquely human trait. Later on, Speaker explains that Teela came to Ringworld to escape the galactic core explosion some twenty thousand years in the future. To Speaker, it is survival, not growth, that drives Teela's plot.
Footnotes
1 An oft-repeated quote of Clarke's is "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."↩
References
Niven, Larry. (1970) Ringworld. Toronto, Canada: Del Rey Books.
