The Gripping Hand / The Moat Around Murcheson’s Eye (With: Jerry Pournelle)
1993
Publication Order of The State Books
A World Out of Time
1976
The Integral Trees
1984
The Smoke Ring
1987
Publication Order of Inferno Books
Inferno (With: Jerry Pournelle)
1976
Escape from Hell (With: Jerry Pournelle)
2009
Publication Order of Magic Goes Away Books
The Magic Goes Away
1978
The Magic May Return
1981
More Magic
1984
The Time of the Warlock
1984
The Seascape Tattoo (With: Steven Barnes)
2016
Publication Order of Golden Road Books
The Burning City (With: Jerry Pournelle)
2000
Burning Tower (With: Jerry Pournelle)
2005
Publication Order of Dream Park Books
Dream Park (With: Steven Barnes)
1981
The Barsoom Project (With: Steven Barnes)
1989
The California Voodoo Game / The Voodoo Game (With: Steven Barnes)
1992
The Moon Maze Game (With: Steven Barnes)
2011
Publication Order of Heorot Books
The Legacy of Heorot (With: Jerry Pournelle, Steven Barnes)
1987
Beowulf’s Children / The Dragons of Heorot (With: Jerry Pournelle, Steven Barnes)
1995
The Secret of Black Ship Island (With: Jerry Pournelle, Steven Barnes)
2012
Starborn & Godsons (With: Jerry Pournelle, Steven Barnes)
2020
Publication Order of Bowl of Heaven Books
Bowl of Heaven (With: Gregory Benford)
2012
Shipstar (With: Gregory Benford)
2014
Glorious (With: Gregory Benford)
2020
Publication Order of Standalone Novels
The Flying Sorcerers (With: David Gerrold)
1971
Lucifer’s Hammer (With: Jerry Pournelle)
1977
Oath of Fealty (With: Jerry Pournelle)
1981
The Descent of Anansi (With: Steven Barnes)
1982
Footfall (With: Jerry Pournelle)
1985
Achilles’ Choice (With: Steven Barnes)
1991
Fallen Angels (With: Jerry Pournelle, Michael Flynn)
1991
Destiny’s Road
1997
Rainbow Mars
1999
Saturn’s Race (With: Steven Barnes)
2000
Building Harlequin’s Moon (With: Brenda Cooper)
2005
The Goliath Stone (With: Matthew Joseph Harrington)
2013
Ice Vegas (With: Steven Barnes)
2026
Publication Order of Short Story Collections
The Shape of Space
1969
All the Myriad Ways
1971
The Flight of the Horse
1973
Inconstant Moon
1973
A Hole in Space
1974
Convergent Series
1979
Niven’s Laws
1984
Limits
1985
N-Space
1990
Playgrounds of the Mind
1991
Bridging the Galaxies
1993
Scatterbrain
2003
The Draco Tavern
2006
Stars and Gods
2010
The Best of Larry Niven
2010
Red Tide (With: Brad R. Torgersen, Matthew J. Harrington)
2014
Publication Order of Graphic Novels
Green Lantern: Ganthet’s Tale (With: John Byrne)
1992
About Larry Niven
Larry Niven is an American science fiction writer, born in Los Angeles in 1938, who is best known for “Ringworld” (1970), winner of the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards. Most of his solo work is hard science fiction set in his Known Space universe, and he has written many novels in collaboration, including “The Mote in God’s Eye” and “Lucifer’s Hammer” with Jerry Pournelle.
Born Laurence van Cott Niven, he is a great-grandson of the oil tycoon Edward L. Doheny. He briefly attended the California Institute of Technology, graduated in mathematics from Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas, in 1962, and spent a further year on graduate work in mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles. His first published story, “The Coldest Place”, appeared in 1964, and the novel “World of Ptavvs” followed in 1966.
In Known Space, humanity shares the star systems nearest the Sun with more than a dozen alien species, among them the aggressive feline Kzinti and the intelligent but cowardly Pierson’s Puppeteers. The setting takes in the four Ringworld novels, published between 1970 and 2004, and the five Fleet of Worlds novels written with Edward M. Lerner, the last of which, “Fate of Worlds” (2012), also concludes the Ringworld story. In 1988 Niven opened the Man-Kzin Wars period to other writers as a shared universe, and that anthology series reached its fifteenth volume in 2019.
Much of his writing since the 1970s has been collaborative. He and Pournelle wrote nine novels together, including “Inferno” and “Footfall”. With Steven Barnes he wrote the Dream Park novels, the two were joined by Pournelle for the Heorot books, and the Bowl of Heaven trilogy was written with Gregory Benford. His fantasy series “The Magic Goes Away” treats magic as a non-renewable resource called mana, an idea that inspired the mana system of the card game Magic: The Gathering.
Niven won Hugo Awards for the short works “Neutron Star”, “Inconstant Moon”, “The Hole Man” and “The Borderland of Sol”, and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America gave him the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award in 2015. He wrote scripts for the television series “Land of the Lost” and “Star Trek: The Animated Series”, and “Inconstant Moon” was adapted as an episode of “The Outer Limits”. His most recent novel is “Ice Vegas”, written with Steven Barnes and published by Blackstone in July 2026.
