 Larry Niven established his credentials as a master of the hard-science-fiction story with his Nebula Award–winning novel Ringworld, about a ribbon-like planetary body with a million-mile radius and six-hundred-million-mile circumference that rings a remote star and poses unique technical problems in navigation and escape for its human inhabitants.
The novel and its sequels, Ringworld Engineers and Ringworld Throne, are part of Niven’s vast Tales of Known Space saga, an acclaimed future history of humankind’s populating of interstellar space that has accommodated exploration of a wide variety of themes including alien cultures, immortality, time travel, terraforming, genetic engineering, and teleportation.
The novels World of Ptavvs, A Gift from Earth, Protector, The Patchwork Girl, The Integral Trees, and The Smoke Ring, as well as the story collections Neutron Star, The Shape of Space, Crashlander, and Flatlander, elaborate an epic billion-and-a-half-year history that integrates innovative technologies with colorful developments of alien races and human and extraterrestrial interactions.
The allure of Niven’s invention can be measured by the seven volumes in the Man-Kzin Wars anthology series, which have attracted his colleagues in hard science fiction to contribute stories, bolstering the plausibility of the series through a shared-world sensibility.
Niven has also written the novel A World Out of Time, a far-future projection in which human evolution leads to immortality, and the series of science fiction mystery stories collected in The Long ARM of Gil Hamilton.
Much of his work at novel length has been written in collaboration. The Mote in God’s Eye, coauthored with Jerry Pournelle, is a memorable first-contact story about the accidental discovery of an alien race determined to seed our solar system with their proliferating population.
Niven and Pournelle have also written a sequel, The Gripping Hand; the disaster novel Lucifer’s Hammer; and Inferno, which transports a science fiction writer to a Dante-esque Hell. With Steven Barnes, Niven has written Dream Park, The Barsoom Project, and The Voodoo Game, all set in a future amusement park where imagined realities are manifested through virtual reality.
Niven has also written a series of fantasies concerned with primitive magic that includes The Magic Goes Away and Time of the Warlock. [edit]
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