Kaliane Bradley's The Ministry of Time was (largely) a hit with the New Scientist Book Club One of the wonderful things about science fiction is the broadness of its church, and this was really brought home to me by our two most recent reads. The New Scientist Book Club moved from the hard science fiction spacefaring of Larry Niven's classic Ringworld in May to the near-future-set time travel of Kaliane Bradley's The Ministry of Time for our June read. The former takes its science seriously, diving into the maths and physics of its set-up with gusto; the latter – not so much. Culture editor Alison Flood rounds up the New Scientist Book Club's thoughts on our latest read, the science fiction classic Ringworld by Larry Niven The story of an unnamed civil servant who is given the job of supporting an "expat" from history – Commander Graham Gore, a (real) Victorian polar explorer from 1847 – The Ministry of Time is many things in one: a thriller, a romance, a piece of climate fiction (apparently), a science fiction novel about time. I couldn't put it down and loved all of it – apart, perhaps, from the ending.

The Book Club gives their verdict on Larry Niven's Ringworld It was quite an experience, moving from the technicolour magical realism of Michel Nieva's wild dystopia, Dengue Boy, to Larry Niven's slice of classic science fiction, Ringworld, first published in 1970 and very much redolent of the sci-fi writing of that era. I was a teenager when I last read Ringworld, and a hugely uncritical sort of teenager at that, so I was keen to return to a novel I remembered fondly and see how it stood up to the test of time – and my somewhat more critical eye. The first thing to say is that many of the things I loved about Ringworld were very much still there. This is, for me, a novel that inspires awe – with the vastness of its imagination, the size of its megastructures, the distance it travels in space. I was reminded of that awe early on, when our protagonist Louis Wu (more on him later) recalls standing at the edge of Mount Lookitthat on a distant planet.

Larry Niven is one of the biggest names in the history of science fiction, and it was a privilege to interview him via Zoom at his home in Los Angeles recently. His 1970 novel Ringworld is the latest pick for the New Scientist Book Club, but he has also written a whole space-fleet-load of novels and short stories over the years, including my favourite sci-fi of all time, A World Out of Time. At 87 years of age, he is very much still writing. I spoke to him about Ringworld, his start in sci-fi, his favourite work over the years, his current projects and whether he thinks humankind will ever leave this solar system. This is an edited version of our conversation.