Book of Boba Fett’s halo isn’t a halo reference—it’s bigger than that

George Lucas has always been something of a packrat when it comes to the larger world of science fiction. Critics have accused him of borrowing from some of the most well-known science fiction stories like Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, endowment and Frank Herberts dune. With episode 5 of Boba Fett’s bookwe can now name another big influence: Larry Nivens ringworld.

[Ed. note: This story contains spoilers for The Book of Boba Fett.]

In this latest installment, the series’ title character has taken a breather while we catch up on the adventures of Din Djarin The Mandalorian. The last time we saw him, he gave up his tiny ward, Grogu. His latest bounty leads him to an interesting place: a ring-shaped space station where his newest prey works as a butcher. If you’ve ever played the Halo games or read Niven’s classic novel, you’ll immediately recognize the massive structure.

Star Wars has never shied away from massive structures like the Death Star A new hope and Return of the Jedithat Ring of Kafrene in Villain Oneor cloud city in The Empire Strikes Back. The expanded universe also introduced a handful of its own megastructures, such as Corellia’s center stationwho have favourited the Amaxine space station The High Republic series and seen The rise of Kylo Ren comic series and a Dyson Sphere in the Iokath system. But this is the first time we’ve seen anything like this in this particular world, and it’s a bit surprising that it’s taken this long for a proper ringworld to show up.

The structure first appeared in the science fiction canon half a century ago in Larry Niven’s 1970 novel ringworld. When I interviewed Niven about the novel a few years ago, he explained that he got the idea from a true scientific concept: a Dyson Sphere, in which a civilization covers its host star with a shell to capture all of its energy output. “If you spin the Dyson sphere you can get gravity along the equator,” Niven explained, “but nowhere else, so I just worked with the equator.” Niven’s ringworld was born, and while he was attending a writing workshop, he figured out the story that eventually became the book.

The novel was popular with science fiction fans: upon its publication in 1970, it won the triple crown of science fiction awards: the Hugo, Locus, and Nebula awards, and eventually included it in its established Known Space” on ” Universum and followed it up with three more novels, The Ringworld engineers (1979), The Throne of the Ringworld (1996) and The Children of the Ringworld (2004), along with a handful of prequels and spinoffs.

Niven’s ring world is fixed: It is an object that traces the orbit of a planet, like a thin ribbon around a lightbulb. When you spin it, the inside of the ring has enough gravity to stay in an atmosphere. This interior? At 1.6 million kilometers wide and 940 million kilometers in circumference, it offers plenty of habitat: 580 trillion square miles, or the surface of three million Earths. When you stand on the surface, you can’t really tell that you’re standing on a real ring – it appears as if a giant arch stretches out above you.

After introducing the concept to audiences, other writers borrowed it: Iain M. Banks used the concept as orbitals in his sprawling culture series (and mentions a couple of decently sized ringworlds in passing), while John Varley used living versions in his Gaia -Trilogy. Scientists have also theorized the concept in smaller versions, like a Stanford torus station (where the ring is enclosed with a roof to hold an atmosphere) or a Banks orbital, which is an orbital about a thousand kilometers in radius . In 2013 ElysiumNeill Blomkamp used a Stanford torus designed by famed conceptual artist Syd Mead, in which Earth’s wealthy elite escaped the poverty and filth of Earth to live a life of luxury.

Image: 343 Industries/Xbox Game Studios

But the most famous use does not come from literature, but from video games in the form of gloriole franchise (and most recently in Halo: Infinite) where much of the action takes place. These versions are nowhere near as massive as those envisioned by Niven: they are only 10,000 kilometers in diameter, although there are larger rings (30,000 kilometers) in the world. Though much smaller than the structures that inspired them, they still form majestic, vast worlds.

The ring world of ringworld would dwarf what we’ve now seen in Star Wars, which sees something like the Death Star at eye level: a massive space station that uses its spin to impart gravity to its inhabitants. As Din Djarin moves through the structure, it becomes clear that it is essentially a city stretching from end to end, a convenient interstellar hub for trade and transportation in the galaxy’s Outer Rim.

The beauty of this particular structure is that it looks like Lucasfilm decided to borrow some elements from Niven: not just the circular structure, but also an inner, segmented ring that provides day and night cycles to parts of the world.

The entire structure is a nice nod to one of science fiction’s most iconic works. It probably won’t be the last we see one on screen: an adaptation of gloriole is coming to Paramount Plus later this year, and although we haven’t seen an actual adaptation of ringworld still, there was none lack of effort to steer one. From 2020, Amazon was working on a series based on the novelWith game of Thrones‘ Alan Taylor was set to direct from a script written by Akiva Goldsman.