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

polygon.com:

George Lucas has always been something of a packrat when it comes to the bigger world of science fiction. Critics have charged him with borrowing from some of science fiction’s best-known stories, like Isaac Asimov’s Foundation and Frank Herbert’s Dune. With episode 5 of The Book of Boba Fett, we can now cite another huge influence: Larry Niven’s Ringworld.

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

In this latest episode, the show’s titular character took a breather while we caught up with the adventures of Din Djarin from The Mandalorian. When we last saw him, he relinquished his diminutive ward, Grogu. His latest bounty takes him to somewhere interesting: a ring-shaped space station, where his latest quarry works as a butcher. If you’ve ever played the Halo games or read Niven’s classic novel, you’d immediately recognize the massive structure.

Star Wars has never shied away from massive structures, like the Death Star inA New Hope and Return of the Jedi, the Ring of Kafrene in Rogue One, or Cloud City in The Empire Strikes Back. The Expanded Universe introduced a handful of its own megastructures, too, like Corellia’s Centerpoint Station, the Amaxine Space Station from 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 ever seen anything like it in this particular world, and that’s a little surprising that it’s taken this long for a proper ringworld to pop up.

The structure first appeared in science fiction canon half a century ago in Larry Niven’s 1970 novel Ringworld. When I interviewed Niven a couple of years ago about the novel, he explained that he had gotten the idea from a real scientific