Larry Niven's "Ringworld" Trivia Quiz

Answer: The ability to have children

The Pierson's puppeteer species -- tri-pedal organisms with a pair of heads on long stalks -- vanished from known space centuries before this book takes place. Now, however, they're drawn back -- or rather, one of them is. "Your whole ethical system is based on cowardice," one character observes about them, but sometimes a risk must be taken to benefit the entire species -- and, the Hindmost (the puppeteer leader) judges, the investigation of the Ringworld is just such a task. No sane puppeteer would be willing to do it, and even Nessus -- a lunatic by puppeteer standards, and a coward by human ones -- quails at the dangers involved. Only the utmost prize -- being permitted to have children -- drives him forward.

Answer: 200

With the aid of a miracle drug called boosterspice, humanity has finally been able to achieve the long lifespans it has so long dreamed of -- but the reality often falls far short of the dream. Louis Wu grows bored of the sameness of life on an earth interconnected by instantaneous transfer booths, and bored of the sameness of conversations with those who have been his friends for decades.

The book opens on his 200th birthday, after he has left his birthday party and headed west, extending his day one hour at a time, dreaming all the while of taking a sabbatical and getting away from people.

Answer: Kzin

Kzinti (the plural of Kzin) are fearsome, sentient predators who were busy taking the universe by storm when they encountered the human race. Although psychoengineering had made humanity almost entirely pacifist, the first human ship attacked by the Kzinti managed to turn its propulsion system into a deadly weapon, marking the first victory of the Man-Kzin Wars. Beginning in the Larry Niven short story "The Warriors" (1966) and continuing over several anthologies by different authors, these wars resulted in a cowed and defeated Kzin race, deferent to the hegemony of man. "We know what happens when we fight," says one kzinti diplomat. "Today our numbers are less than an eighth of what they were when kzin first met man. Our colony worlds are your colony worlds, our slave species are freed ... when we must apologize or fight, it is my function to apologize."

Speaker-To-Animals is a proud member of a defeated species, anxious for personal honor (and the corresponding right to take a name for himself, rather than calling himself by his occupation). Intelligent and resourceful, he is nonetheless a dangerous member of the team, anxious for any opportunity to take command -- and, just possibly, to seize sole ownership of the prize.

Answer: For five generations running, only global Birthright Lottery wins allowed her ancestors to be born.

The right to have children is strictly controlled on the Earth of Louis Wu and Teela Brown; it has to be, with some eighteen billion people inhabiting the planet! The colony worlds don't really relieve the population pressure; only the Fertility Board can. Each person has the right to parent one child; for subsequent children, that right must be earned -- by cash, by proven survival traits, by single combat, or by the Lottery.

"For the past two centuries," Nessus explains, "between ten and thirteen percent of each human generation has been born by right of a winning lottery ticket. What determines who will survive and breed? On Earth, luck. And Teela Brown is the daughter of six generations of winning gamblers..."

Answer: An innovative ship that takes only 1 minute and 15 seconds to travel an entire light year

"If my mission is successful," Nessus tells Louis, "I plan to turn the ship over to my crew, with blueprints with which to build more. The ship, then, is your ... fee, salary, what have you." This prize is more than just useful, however: it's vital to the survival of their species. Ten thousand years previously, a star in the dense core of the Milky Way galaxy had gone nova, setting off a chain reaction -- "the Core explosion." In another twenty thousand years, the radiation from this cataclysmic event will reach known space and destroy every biological organism in its path. Ever try to evacuate tens of trillions of sentient beings to another galaxy? Louis and Speaker know that their species need the fastest, best ships they can get.

Answer: En route out of the galaxy

"You will find the information more surprising than useful," warns Nessus, but Louis -- knowing that humanity had spent hundreds of years fruitlessly seeking this homeworld -- persists. Our intrepid crew visits the homeworld on their way to the Ringworld -- but the homeworld is not attached to a star.

In their flight from the Core explosion, the puppeteers are moving their entire homeworld, in addition to four agricultural planets to supply them with food. Arranged at the five points of a regular pentagon, in a stable gravitational pattern called a Kemplerer rosette, these planets are on their way out of the galaxy. Artificial suns circle each farming world; the homeworld "glow[s] by its own light, in patches the shapes of continents and the colors of sunlight." Louis Wu vows, not for the first time, to live forever, so that he can see all the wonders of the universe.

Answer: Using a device called a tasp, he stimulates the pleasure centers of Speaker's brain.

A Slaver disintegrator would destroy everyone inside the ship, and any effort by two humans to subdue a full-grown kzin in hand-to-hand combat is similarly doomed to failure. Nessus has a far subtler weapon: the tasp, which feels so good that a being can easily become addicted to it, which is a terrifying thought for one as sophisticated and dignified as Speaker-To-Animals.

"The puppeteer is quite right," Speaker admits, having been disarmed while distracted by the tasp. "I would not risk the tasp again. Too many jolts ... would leave me his willing slave. I, a kzin, slaved to an herbivore!"

Answer: They are shot down by the Ringworld's automated defenses.

Its path mistaken for that of a dangerous meteor, the ship is attacked with x-ray lasers. These vaporize the wing of the ship, which contained landing gear, communications equipment, thrusters, and sensors; only the General Products hull, impervious to all electromagnetic radiation, protects the crew, their hyperdrive, and their life support system. Forced to fall in the direction their ship was originally aimed, the crew must prepare for an impact on the Ringworld itself.

A stasis field protects them physically from the force of the crash, but now they are stranded on the surface of a strange world, built by an unknown species of unimaginable power.

Answer: Humanoids at a low technological level

Evidence of the Ringworld civilization is everywhere -- in the crumbling cities, in the spaceport at the edge of the ring, and not least in the engineering marvel of the Ringworld itself. Our crew even encounters a survivor of the original Ringworld civilization, Halrloprillalar, although she herself can give only a fractured narrative of the disaster. A microorganism ate the superconductors that powered the cities, and the rest was silence.

The descendants of the survivors live at an Iron Age level, forming isolated cultural and linguistic groups and worshipping reminders of the original Ringworld Engineers, a bald and vanished group. There will be more on them in later Ringworld books!

Answer: Teela

Separated for some weeks from her companions, distraught and stuck with a broken flycycle, Teela Brown finds comfort with a half-Engineer Ringworld native, Seeker. "[He] was so blatantly type-cast that [Louis] burst out laughing ... He was a hero. You could tell. You didn't need to see him fighting dragons. You need only see the muscles, the height, the black metal sword ..." Seeker is on a quest to walk to the base of the Arch -- not realizing that the Arch is merely the other half of the Ringworld, and that it has no base at all. Teela falls in love with him, and follows him, at least for now; this is where her luck wants her to be.

Louis, meanwhile, works out a brilliant way to get the ship off the Ringworld and back home -- but for that, you'll have to read this excellent book for yourself!