Showing results by author "Larry Niven" in All Categories

It’s been 20 years since the quixotic and worldsweary Louis Wu discovered the Ringworld. Now he and SpeakertoAnimals are going back, captives of the Hindmost, a deposed puppeteer leader. With Louis’ help, the Hindmost intends to regain his status by bringing back such extraordinary treasures from the Ringworld that his fellow puppeteers will have to be impressed. But when they arrive, Louis discovers that the Ringworld is no longer stable - and will destroy itself within months. To survive, he must locate the control center of the legendary engineers who built the planet.

A group of pretend adventurers suit up for a campaign called "The South Seas Treasure Game". As in the early role-playing games, there are dungeon masters, warriors, magicians, and thieves. The difference? At Dream Park, a futuristic fantasy theme park full of holographic attractions and the latest in VR technology, they play in an artificial enclosure that has been enhanced with special effects, holograms, actors, and a clever story line. The players get as close as possible to truly living their adventure.

The gigantic comet had slammed into Earth, forging earthquakes a thousand times too powerful to measure on the Richter scale, tidal waves thousands of feet high. Cities were turned into oceans; oceans turned into steam. It was the beginning of a new Ice Age and the end of civilization. But for the terrified men and women chance had saved, it was also the dawn of a new struggle for survival--a struggle more dangerous and challenging than any they had ever known....

After more than two hundred years as a corpsicle, Jaybee Corbell awoke in someone else’s body and under threat of instant annihilation if he made a wrong move while they were training him for a one-way mission to the stars. But Corbell bided his time and made his own move. Once he was outbound, where the society that ruled Earth could not reach him, he headed his starship toward the galactic core.

Covert agent Sigmund Ausfaller is Earth's secret weapon, humanity's best defense against all conspiracies, real and imaginary, and all foes both human and alien. Who better than a brilliant paranoid to expose the devious plots of others?

But Sigmund may finally have met his match in Nessus, representative of the secretive Puppeteers, the elder race who wield vastly superior technologies.

For decades, the spacefaring species of known space have battled over the largest artifact - and grandest prize - in the galaxy: the all-but-limitless resources and technology of the Ringworld. Now, without warning, the Ringworld has vanished, leaving behind three rival war fleets. If the fallen civilization of the Ringworld can no longer be despoiled of its secrets, the puppeteers will be forced to surrender theirs - everyone knows that they are cowards. But the crises converging upon the trillion puppeteers of the Fleet of Worlds go far beyond even the onrushing armadas.

Fleet of Worlds takes a closer look at Human-Puppeteer (Citizen) relations and the events leading up to Niven's first Ringworld novel. Kirsten Quinn-Kovacks is among the best and brightest of her people. She gratefully serves the gentle race that rescued her ancestors from a dying starship, gave them a world, and nurtures them still. If only the Citizens knew where Kirsten's people came from.

Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, award-winning authors of such best sellers as Footfall and The Legacy of Heorot, return us to the Mote, and to the universe of Kevin Renner and Horace Bury, of Rod Blaine and Sally Fowler. There, 25 years have passed since humanity quarantined the mysterious aliens known as Moties within the confines of their own solar system. They have spent a quarter century analyzing and agonizing over the deadly threat posed by the only aliens mankind has ever encountered - a race divided into distinct biological forms, each serving a different function: Master, Mediator, Engineer, Warrior.

Allan Carpentier escaped from hell once but remained haunted by what he saw and endured. He has now returned, on a mission to liberate those souls unfairly tortured and confined. Partnering with the famous poet and suicide, Sylvia Plath, Carpentier is a modern-day Christ who intends to harrow hell and free the damned. But now that he's returned to this Dantesque inferno, can he ever again leave?

The Mote In God's Eye is their acknowledged masterpiece, an epic novel of mankind's first encounter with alien life that transcends the genre. No lesser an authority than Robert A. Heinlein called it "possibly the finest science fiction novel I have ever read".

The world named Mount Lookitthat was never meant for humans - it was shrouded in lethal mists. Life existed only on one plateau, unreachable except from space. But the disastrous decision to colonize the planet could not be reversed. So the settlers survived somehow - under a ruthless dictatorship. Mount Lookitthat was rebellion-proof. Then fate dealt the colonists a wild card named Matthew Keller, who had a talent that neither he nor anybody else knew about. At last the colonists had a glimmer of hope!

Best-selling science fiction superstars Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle combine their talents with those of Steven Barnes in an extraordinary adventure of humankind’s first outpost in the farthest reaches of space. Light years from Earth, colonists land on a planet they name Avalon. It seems like a paradise—until native creatures savagely attack. It will take every bit of intelligence, courage, and military-style discipline to survive.

The Ringworld is a landmark engineering achievement, a flat band 3-million-times the surface area of Earth, encircling a distant star. Home to trillions of inhabitants, not all of which are human, and host to amazing technological wonders, the Ringworld is unique in all of the universe.

They first appear as a series of dots on astronomical plates, heading from Saturn directly toward Earth. Since the ringed planet carries no life, scientists deduce the mysterious ship to be a visitor from another star. The world's frantic efforts to signal the aliens go unanswered. The first contact is hostile: the invaders blast a Soviet space station, seize the survivors, and then destroy every dam and installation on Earth with a hail of asteriods.

Welcome to Ringworld, an intermediate step between Dyson Spheres and planets. The gravitational force created by a rotation on its axis of 770 miles per second means no need for a roof. Walls 1,000 miles high at each rim will let in the sun and prevent much air from escaping. Larry Niven's novel, Ringworld, is the winner of the 1970 Hugo Award for Best Novel, the 1970 Nebula Award for Best Novel, and the 1972 Ditmars, an Australian award for Best International Science Fiction.

Come back to the Ringworld - the most astonishing feat of engineering ever encountered. A place of untold technological wonders, home to myriad humanoid races, and world of some of the most beloved science fiction stories ever written.

The human Louis Wu; the puppeteer known as the Hindmost; Acolyte, son of the Kzin called Chmeee: legendary beings brought together once again in the defense of the Ringworld. Something is going on with the protectors.

Nothing quite prepared telepath Larry Greenberg for mind-to-mind contact with an alien. In the interest of science, Larry tapped the mind of Kzanol - and that was his first mistake. Kzanol was a thrint from a distant galaxy. He had been trapped on Earth in a time-stasis field for two billion years. Now he was on the loose, and Larry knew everything he was thinking. Thrints lived to plunder and enslave lesser planets - and what the planet Kzanol had in mind was Earth!

Leaving Earth, the crew of the spaceship Discipline were prepared for a routine assignment. Dispatched by the all-powerful State on a mission of interstellar exploration and colonization, Discipline was aided - and secretly spied upon - by Sharls Davis Kendy, an emotionless computer intelligence programmed to monitor the loyalty and obedience of the crew. What they weren’t prepared for, however, was the Smoke Ring - an immense, gaseous envelope that had formed around a neutron star directly in their path. The Smoke Ring was home to a variety of plant and animal life-forms evolved to thrive in conditions of continual free fall.

The newly liberated humans of the Fleet of Worlds and Sigmund Ausfaller, who had been transported by the Puppeteers from Earth to the Fleet, must contend not only with the sly Puppeteers but also the threat of the Pak, a very smart and utterly ruthless species who are fleeing the exploding galactic core in an armada of ships at near light speed. The Pak are headed towards the Fleet of Worlds, having destroyed entire planets in their wake.

This funny and insightful science fiction classic introduces Shoogar, the greatest wizard ever known in his village. His spells can strike terror in the hearts of even his most powerful enemies. But the enemy he faces now is like none he has ever seen before. The stranger has come from nowhere and is ignorant of even the most basic principles of magic. But the stranger has an incredibly powerful magic of his own. There is no room in Shoogar's world for an intruder whose powers match his own, let alone one whose powers might exceed his.