Pulp magazine and pinup auction preview

Those are pretty sweet. And the Ringworld drawing would be a steal at that price. But I couldn’t buy it because having to look at it every day would drive me mental and I’ll tell you why.

The ringworld in that drawing is a ringworld for ANTS! It’s the same mistake on all the other Ringworld book covers I’ve seen (and at least one cover for Iain M Banks’s Consider Phlebas). What you’d actually see from near the surface, and Niven does describe this in the books, is the flat surface of the world receding like a highway into the haze, and a very thin arc of light going across the sky (the top of the arc would probably be too fine to see). For it to look like a ring while you were standing on it, it’d have to be, I dunno, no bigger than Rhode Island.

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