said the puppeteer. “A ring of solid matter. An artifact.” RINGWORLD, 1970 From RINGWORLD Today it may not be obvious, but when I wrote RINGWORLD it was an act of courage. Designing the Ringworld wasn’t the hardest part, though I still found surprises as I traveled. The difficult part was to describe it without losing the reader! This was an environment outside all common experience, yet I planned to give the reader puzzles to be solved as he traveled. [If I don’t have a puzzle, I don’t have a story. It’s not just a quirk. I’m a compulsive teacher.] Then there was Teela Brown. Psi powers were common in fiction then, and I was fed up. With Teela I set out to show the ultimate psychic power: Author Control. As soon as it’s obvious what Teela’s power is, she’s moved offstage; but it’s still a lot to ask of a reader, that he continue to suspend his disbelief. I used high-school geometry. Mercator maps at one-to-one scale laid across the width [forty] and length [24,000].
