Niven, Larry

(US, 1938– )

Niven was born in Los Angeles and educated at Washburn University, Kansas. He began his career as a prolific author of technologically inventive science fiction in 1962. Begin with Ring World (1970), the central work in his celebrated Tales of Known Space series, in which aliens and humans unite in exploration of a gigantic artificial world built around a distant star. The book continues from World of Ptavus (1966), featuring the escape from an imprisoning ‘stasis field’ of a hostile survivor of an extinct civilization. A Gift from Earth (1968) recounts a revolt over economic conditions on a planet colonized by humans. The descendants of a terrestrial space-crew inhabit a gaseous envelope around a neutron star in The Smoke Ring (1987), which describes their attempt to discover their origins from the computer program on their ancestors’ spacecraft.

Frederick Pohl, Isaac Asimov, Kim Stanley Robinson  DH