Ringworld.
“Not until we can deliver our secret to our respective worlds and acquire an intact ship": First Edition of Larry Niven's Ringworld; Lengthily Signed by Him
Ringworld.
NIVEN, Larry.
$16,000.00
Item Number: 139744
London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1972.
First British and first hardcover edition of this classic work, which went on to win the 1970 Nebula and 1971 Hugo award for best novel. Octavo, original cloth. Lengthily signed by the author on the title page, “Not until we can deliver our secret to our respective worlds and acquire an intact ship. Larry Niven.” Very good in a very good dust jacket. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box made by the Harcourt Bindery. A unique example.
Larry Niven "set his mark on the United States science fiction field, winning four short-fiction Hugos, and both Hugo and Nebula in 1971 for Ringworld (1970), a capstone title in his seminal Tales of Known Space sequence… In the novels and stories of this sequence, and in some of his other work, he was seen for some time as hard sf's last best hope; and there can be no doubt that hard-sf writers dominant in the 1980s… owe much to the scope of Larry Niven's inventiveness, the sense he conveys of technological ingenuity as being ultimately beneficial, and his cognitive exuberance. The Tales of Known Space… is a wide-ranging, complex, unusually well integrated future history which, within an essentially optimistic and technophilic frame, provides an explanatory structure for the expansion of humanity into space, one notable from the first for the complexity of the Universe into which it introduces the burgeoning human race" (Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, 873).