So, books that changed my life. Given my reading rate, my voracious love of the printed word, and that I have been able to read at a college level literally before I could remember, one would think that this would be a tough choice – but the answer is surprisingly simple. This was, at six, the first hard science fiction novel that I read. This was the second “grownup book” that I read at all, given an understanding librarian had already let me read Edgar Rice Burroughs' A Fighting Man of Mars. Gentle Readers, I give you the winner of the 1970 Hugo Award, the 1971 Nebula and Locus Award, the classic “big thing” hard science fiction novel Ringworld by Larry Niven.
Ringworld, for those of you who haven't read it, is the story of Louis Wu's exploration of the Ringworld, a megastructure that's a stepping stone to a Dyson sphere. The book follows Lois Wu's recruitment at his two hundredth birthday party by Nessus, a Pierson's Puppeteer, the recruitment of two other explorers, Speaker-to-Animals and Teela Brown, their journey to the Puppeteer homeworld, and their exploration of and subsequent escape from the Ringworld.
The best way to imagine the Ringworld is to take fifty feet of ribbon, attach it in a circle balanced on edge, and put a candle in the middle. Now increase the scale – the candle is a star, the ribbon is a structure a million miles wide and with a radius of one AU. You'll want to have thousand-mile high walls on the edges to keep the air in. Spin for gravity, and it will be a long, long time before you have to worry about population pressure. Astute engineering types will note that the material you'd need to make the structure out of would need a tensile strength somewhere between “ridiculous” and “impossible”, and that the structure is not in orbit around its star.
So, how did this change my life? I can still remember walking down the stairs from my classroom in elementary school, when the explorers in their ship, the Lying Bastard, first get a view of the Ringworld and I could see it. It sounds so simple when I type it like that, but damn near forty years later I can still remember how it felt. I know I didn't go on to be a theoretical physicist or rocket engineer or something, but Ringworld started a deep, abiding interest in learning, in reading, and in the sciences that has served me all my life. Many of the positive things from my childhood, even the gaming, can all be traced back to six-year-old me opening that book. In fact, to refer back to the title, I tend to tell people that I was raised by Larry Niven, Isaac Asimov, and Robert A. Heinlein. In a real sense, I would not be here, would not be who I am and as progressive as I am, without having read Ringworld.
And then Niven goes all right-wing nut job on me. Tanj damn it.