An author of "hard" Science Fiction books. His Hugo Award classic Ring World (1970) is a masterpiece.
Niven's glory days were the late sixties and early seventies when he originated two truly brilliant universes, one SF, Known Space, and the other fantasy, The Magic Goes Away. Unfortunately he seems to have lost his abilities to write tight prose and gripping drama in later years. He's still worth reading, but he's no longer an author we'd regard as one of the immortals.
Ringworld is great, but don't bother with the sequels. They get progressively worse. -- Greg Vaughn
(Seconded, and this from a long time Niven fan. -- Marty Schrader)
But The Ringworld Engineers and The Ringworld Throne are not totally awful (I think).
I thought The Ringworld Throne was totally awful. After finishing the book, I still didn't understand what had happened -- Greg Vaughn
He also wrote Oath Of Fealty and many others.
With Jerry Pournelle.
Rainbow Mars was actually funny and out of his normal character, kind of fantasy like. The series I really did like was the smoke ring ones [The Integral Trees] -- amc
Rainbow Mars is good in that it reprints the early Svetz stories, which some may have trouble finding otherwise. The (new) title story is regrettable and thoroughly formulaic.
Sounds like The Flying Sorcerers, with David Gerrold. Rainbow Mars is just Niven.
The Smoke Ring stories are pretty cool, and the physics are actually correct. I love the multiple-AU-diameter breathable atmosphere. I checked with an astrophysicist at a Fermilab gig I was on a while back. The same kind of gas torus (not breathable) is in a story that I am trying to put together about a long term battle over a treasure found within such a torus.
However, my favorite short story of all time is "A Teardrop Falls," which combines Larry Niven's writing with my All Time Favorite Bad Guy®, Fred Saberhagen's Berserkers. In fact, the main character of this short story is used to tie together the stories in the collection in which it is originally published, entitled Berserker Base.
I thought Ring World, The Ringworld Engineers, and The Ringworld Throne got better as they went along. I keep The Ringworld Throne within easy reach and I have read it possibly as many as ten times. I also liked The Integral Trees and The Smoke Ring. I tried to read Lucifers Hammer once, but I got bored around page 106 or so. I also liked Fallen Angels.
Larry Niven seems to have only three bad habits in The Ringworld Throne. First, he likes intercutting between story lines. This bugged me because I found one story line more interesting than the other, and when I got in the "boring" story line, I slammed through it so fast to get back to the "good" stuff that I missed important information. Second, The Ringworld Throne has a sort of mini-climax in the middle of the work. The Mote In Gods Eye, written with Jerry Pournelle, has another notable instance of this problem. I prefer stuff that builds up to a unified Final Conflict. Third, sometimes his style places too much emphasis on narrative and dialogue, and not enough on description; you have to remember how he describes things when he does, because he seldom describes them again. If he described things more, his work would probably be 50% longer.
-- Edward Kiser
I think his short stories are pretty weak. E.g., a space-faring species that don't know about tides? It's silly. His (early) novels, on the other hand, are excellent. In this Niven is a kind of anti-Isaac Asimov. Asimov's novels are weak but his shorts can be very good indeed. -- Dave Harris
They didn't not know about tides, Dave. They just didn't realize the stasis box was being guarded by something of that steep a gravity gradient. I didn't figure it out myself when reading the story. -- Marty Schrader
It may be that Dave was thinking about the Puppeteers, who also apparently didn't know about tides.
Yeah, that was "Neutron Star" itself--which, by the way, was voted one of the "Super Hugos" from the 1992 Magi Con.
I remember reading "Neutron Star" as a first year physics student. It gave me an intense experience of I-know-who-donnit. I don't know if Larry Niven did this intentionally but it would definitely be a valid writing technique. The glimpse of Known Space and the story telling were facinating as well. Never mind small (perceived) glitches. BTW: I heard that "Neutron Star" was published before any neutron star was actually observed. On the other hand it was supposedly 'inspired by an Isaac Asimov essay about curious gravity effects around neutron stars' Anybody know for sure? -- Jan Larsen
Asimov relates somewhere or other (I've no idea where; the man was SO prolific; someday it would be nice to have all his works on CD - except I doubt anybody could ever know that it was ALL his works!) that his essay was inspired by an article in an astronomy journal, and that Niven freely admitted to him that "Neutron Star" was inspired by Asimov's essay. He describes the frustration that, "... had I only been thinking story-wise, instead of article-wise, *I* might have written the story." He seemed to accept that it was fair for Niven to use the idea, though it was unclear. -- Daniel Knapp
Neutron stars were theoretical at the time - although hypothesized to exist in 1933, one wasn't actually discovered until 1968, two years after Neutron Star was published. (en.wikipedia.org 
) -- Joseph Riesen
I personally think he's brilliant. Not the best Sci-Fi writer out there by any means, but his set pieces are always magnificient in scope and idea. His short stories about Gil "The Arm" are probablly the best I've ever read from him in terms of actual writing. I think the Moties are probablly my favorite Universe of his. Also, if you'd like to read something really out of his style try Destiny's Road (It gives you a mighty hankerin' for Stir Fry though). -- Dan Nugent
Oh, puhleeeze! Destiny's Road gave me fits each of the three times I actually tried to read the durn thing. I still ended up skipping over large parts in the middle that didn't seem to contain any content. Even when I read the last few chapters very carefully I couldn't figure out half of what was happening. I ended up using my copy (paperback, thank goodness) as a doorstop. I like Niven a lot, but Destiny's Road was a steaming pile as far as I could tell. -- Marty Schrader
I had no trouble following the book, but I still found it very boring. It had very few real science-fiction ideas, and the ones it did have were really incidental to the story. Most of the aspects of living on a colony world were repeated from the Smoke Ring books (and for that matter, the Grendel books). A worthless, disappointing book. -- Daniel Knapp
Personally, I found Destiny's Road to be mediocre, but worth finishing. As Niven's work has progressed, he's moved away from hard science fiction focused on cool gadgets and grandiose ideas (i.e. Ring World) and gone in for character development and more personal plots (Destiny's Road, The Burning City, The Integral Trees, etc.) I'd suggest it was related to Jerry Pournelle's influence, but thanks to their work we also got The Mote in God's Eye... so I can't complain. =) Also, personally I enjoyed Lucifer's Hammer as a great character-driven what-if story without too much heavy tech (though it's hard to read a semi-SF book set in the Apollo era!) As Dan Nugent mentioned above, it's definitely out of his style. Me, I'll stick with the good ol' Known Space timeline, though I've read pretty much all of its books and short stories. -- Joseph Riesen
I think the best way to describe Larry Niven would be one of the masters of hard-science 'what if' SF. The emphasis isn't so much on character development (and, as mentioned above, when Niven downplays science and tries to make interesting characters, it seems to fall flat). As you can get a glimpse of when reading All The Myriad Ways (i.e. his notes from his MIT lecture on teleportation), he likes to come up with a zany idea and run with it, make sure it's intellectually consistent. Rinse, lather, repeat [Lather Rinse Repeat], and a whole unique universe evolves out of it, social implications included. It makes his speculative fiction very compelling, in my mind. For instance, if minor errors in physics annoy you (such as I found in Stephen R. Donaldson's 'Gap' novels), you can rest assured everything's well thought-out in Niven's work. -- Joseph Riesen
I personally enjoyed Destiny's Road, but enjoy his other works as well. If it says Niven on the front I read it. I particularly enjoy his collaborations with Jerry Pournelle. I think Mote in God's Eye to be an extrordinarily fresh piece of SF lit. For pure story enjoyment though I go back repeatedly and read the "Smoke Ring series" and would absolutely be thrilled with an additional tale. One of my other favorites purely for the entertainment is Footfall, (sometimes you just gotta have an alien invasion). Overall if find his work consuming everytime I pick it up. -- Jason Watson
Nobody here seems to talk about "Protector" or "World of Ptavvs". I think both of them are wonderful hard SF novels. -- Chetan Vaity
Protector is by far my favourite of Niven's work. It's a wonderful story, and a perfect microcosm of Niven's work - he throws together a little science and a little fantasy to make a wonderful concept/setting with some truly alien, mindbending new ideas... and then he tells stories where the protagonist is always this intelligent, slightly-hedonistic everyman that makes it easy for the reader to empathise.
The problem I find with Niven's work is (a) when he tries to move away from his expertise, and (b) when he works with Pournelle or Barnes. Niven + Pournelle produces bold-faced ideological trolling (Pournelle's characters are often strawmen for various leftist concepts he dispises). Niven + Barnes is just piles of fan-service (holodeck-LARPS are televised, sci-fi conventioneers save the world, etc.). That being said, many of the Niven + Pournelle books are quite enjoyable when Pournelle manages to rope in his didactism (e.g., The Gripping Hand, Footfall).
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