James Blish wrote that he thought it would win the Hugo Award, but it shouldnt.

The readers gave it a Hugo Award anyway.

The writers gave it a Nebula.

I didnt have a sequel planned. I was not expecting a flood of redesigns.

During one of my speeches, a man pointed out that the Ring-worlds mathematics are simple: its a suspension bridge with no endpoints.

An academic in England pointed out that the tensile strength of the Ringworld frame must be approximately the force that holds an atomic nucleus together. (Hence, scrith.)

A grade school class in Florida spent a semester on the Ringworld. Their conclusion: the worst problem is that, without tectonic activity, all the topsoil would flow into the oceans in a few thousand years. (Hence, flup and the spillpipes.)

At the 1970 World Science Fiction Convention there were MIT students in the halls chanting, "The Ringworld is unstable! The Ringworld is unstable!" (Did the best that I was able… hence, attitude jets.)

Somebody decided that the shadow squares shed too much twilight. Whats needed is five long shadow squares orbiting retrograde.

Ultimately there was too much opportunity for redesign. I had to write The Ringworld Engineers.

All of these readers had found something worth knowing. The Ringworld is a great, gaudy, intellectual toy, a playground with the gates left wide open.

Some readers just read a book and stop.

Others play with the characters, or the assumptions, or the environment. They make up their own homework. We readers have been doing that for unguessable thousands of years: demanding more data on Atlantis from Plato, inventing Purgatory to put between Hell and Heaven, redesigning Dantes Inferno, writing new Odysseys. An amazing subculture has sprung up around Star Trek.