This is a Pierson’s Puppeteer, which is an alien from Larry Niven’s Ringworld, which I have been listening to while drawing recently. I’d heard a lot about the book before reading it and was very excited to start it, but it has become almost difficult to sit through.

Ringworld kind of reminds me of Arthur C Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama and Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris- all three of these books deal with people trying to understand massive, mysterious artifacts in outer space. But where Rama and Solaris convey a clear sense of the enormity of the discovery and its strangeness, Ringworld dampens any sense of wonder by its bland writing style and frequent and embarrassing attempts at humor. There’s some pervasive sexism in the treatment of the main (only) female character, which seems particularly out of place in an invented setting distant in so many other ways from the 1970 America in which is was written. I really don’t like this book very much but I will probably finish it because it’s an audiobook and it is easy to listen to while drawing.

But anyway I wanted to draw this alien because I thought it looked cool.