I heard many tales - Robert Gleason, my editor on several books, he said that they condensed all their distributors down to six, and then they fired all the old guys to condense their manpower. We used to get our our magazines and paperback books in drugstores. Yeah, as bookstores and chainstores came about, right? A lot of the magazines have collapsed, and were collapsing even in the 1960s and 1970s. I had all the magazines, including the failures. I graduated to science fiction with Robert Heinlein, and Jack Anderson, and Poul Anderson and Jack Vance. I did start with fairy tales, I didn't get that much knowledge from them. It was the notion that they were describing a reality. And then I got to Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity, which is canonical. Arthur Clarke was also one of the best writers around, and he got my attention. And it wasn't terrific but it set the stage for large ambitious stories. There was a novel called the Cosmic Engineers. What were some of the stories that attracted you, aside from the future being full of rocket ships? They’d just going through an ordeal! They needed to rest. There was a lot of sitting around dozing, because the astronaut were sitting around dozing. I remember the thought, “wait a minute - have we thought this through completely?” What was that party like? And I was in a car still on the way when they decided to leave orbit. She was throwing a party for the landing on the moon. I was in in the middle of the street driving to a party at Bjo Trimble’s house, the famous science fiction fan. I don't know what to tell you that you haven't heard from everyone else. I think in Flash Gordon, they felt the same.

I figured our future was all rocket ships. In fact, I didn't pick up any economic knowledge until I started collaborating with Jerry Pournelle. I was only seven when the war ended, so I didn't have any strong economic knowledge. How did that environment of economic and technological growth shape your worldview when it came to science and technology? I know you were born in the late 1930s, and grew up during the post-war era. I wanted to go back to the beginning, and was wondering if you’d tell me about the world you grew up in. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. The novel first hit bookstores in October 1970: a full half-century ago, and with that milestone in mind, I spoke with Niven about the novel earlier this year, and chatted with him about the book and what it’s like after half a century. It does have its issues, reading it fifty years later, but when I dipped into it briefly recently, I was struck at how quickly it moved, and how much fun it was. One of my favorite books of all time is Larry Niven’s Ringworld: for me, it epitomizes the entirety of 1960s/1970s science fiction: interstellar megastructures, galactic civilizations, and a bit of a quest-style adventure.

Ring world larry niven