Ringworld

Summary

Larry Niven sends a mixed crew of humans and aliens to investigate the Ringworld, an enormous artificial band encircling a distant star with a habitable surface millions of times larger than Earth. The expedition led by Louis Wu must survive a crash and trek across the vast structure while puzzling over who built it and why. Celebrated for its rigorous scientific imagination, the novel is a defining example of the big dumb object tradition in hard science fiction.