Larry Niven

Larry Niven (born 1938) is an American science fiction writer best known for Ringworld (1970), which won the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards, and for the Known Space future history in which it is set.

He was born Laurence van Cott Niven on 30 April 1938 in Los Angeles, a great-grandson of the oil magnate Edward L. Doheny. After a period at Caltech he took a BA in mathematics, with a minor in psychology, at Washburn University in Kansas in 1962, followed by a year of graduate mathematics at UCLA.

His first published story, "The Coldest Place", appeared in 1964. Many of his stories and novels belong to Known Space, a shared future peopled by alien species such as the Kzinti and Pierson's Puppeteers. Ringworld, published by Ballantine Books in October 1970, won the Nebula (1970), Hugo (1971) and Locus awards. With Jerry Pournelle he wrote The Mote in God's Eye (Simon & Schuster, 1974), shortlisted for the Hugo and Nebula, and Lucifer's Hammer (1977). He has won further Hugos for the stories "Neutron Star", "Inconstant Moon" and "The Hole Man" and the novelette "The Borderland of Sol", and received the SFWA Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award in 2015.

For collectors. Ringworld first appeared as a Ballantine paperback, and the first printing is identifiable by an error in the opening chapter: Louis Wu teleports eastward to extend his birthday, which Niven corrected to westward in later printings. In the dedication to The Ringworld Engineers he remarked that a first paperback edition is the one with the mistakes, and that it is worth money. The Mote in God's Eye was first published by Simon & Schuster in 1974.