Les réalismes de l’anneau-monde

Abstract

Ringworld (1970), the most famous novel of the American writer, Larry Niven, is the first novel to have been explicitly sold and presented as a novel of “hard science fiction” (although the sub-type existed well before its publication). By proposing both an analysis of the text and its reception by critics and readers, this article reflects the fact that science fiction, far from being a creation of the imagination with no foundation, does in fact obey imperatives of realism and even of scientific credibility. In this instance, by writing a novel of the sort, Larry Niven has not only taken a stance in the field of American science fiction; he has also participated indirectly in a scientific dialogue—by means of the text—with the mathematician and physicist, Freeman J. Dyson, while at the same time suggesting a variant of the concept of “artificial biosphere” which the latter had developed in an earlier academic article.

Keywords

• hard science fiction
• realism
• credibility
• literature
• reception
• reality test