Larry Niven

From the mind of #1 New York Times bestselling author Larry Niven, come twenty-six tales and vignettes from this interplanetary gathering place, collected for the first time in one volume. When a tremendous spacecraft took orbit around the Earth's moon and began sending smaller landers down toward the North Pole, the newly arrived visitors quickly set up a permanent spaceport at Mount Forel in Siberia. Their presence attracted many, and a few...

With an asteroid on a collision course with Earth, Doctor Toby Glyer and his partner William Connors must find a way to make contact with their wayward children -- the Briareus nanites -- and save the planet.

"Avalon was thriving. The cold sleep colonists from Earth had settled on a verdant, livable world. The fast and cunning predators humans named "grendels" were under control, and the mainland outposts well established. Avalon's new mainland hydroelectric power station was nearly complete, and when on-line would compensate for the nuclear power systems lost in the Grendel Wars. Humans would have power, and with power came the ability to make all the...

A gigantic comet slams into Earth, forging earthquakes, turning cities into oceans, and oceans into streams. For the terrified men and women chance has saved, it is the dawn of a new struggle for survival.

Welcome to a world like no other. The Ringworld: 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 the universe. Explorer Louis Wu, an Earth-born human who was part of the first expedition to Ringworld, becomes enmeshed in interplanetary and interspecies...

The arrival of Phssthpok the Pak in human space in the 2130s sets the stage for the discovery of how the human race came into existence.

After fleeing the chain of supernovas that devastated the universe, the Puppeteers have struggled badly. Their human slaves have rebelled, the Pak are pressing onward, and a new crisis looms. Will the Fleet survive?

Two hundred years before the discovery of the Ringworld, covert agent Sigmund Ausfaller represents Earth's secret weapon, humanity's best defense against all conspiracies--real and imagined. Who better than a brilliant paranoid to expose the devious plots of others? Yet he may finally have met his match in Nessus, representative of the secretive Puppeteers, the elder race who wield vastly superior technologies. Nessus schemes in the shadows with Earth's...