He's one of David Nivens's boys, right?

He's a fairly well-established sci-fi author... wrote a few apocalyptic books about huge asteroid strikes on Earth and what not (called Lucifer's Hammer)... another interesting one about how Earth is invaded by super-intelligent wooly mammoths... (think that one's called Footfall)

It'll keep you from nodding off on plane flights, anyway...

tmi3rd

um, yeah, and he also wrote Ringworld...

"Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex".
"Man-Kzin Wars".
I love this guys stuff.

Umm - yeah. Also, "The Mote in God's Eye" and "The Gripping Hand," which has a connection with my blog name. :)

Among a heck of a lot of other great SF. (Some of which was mentioned by previous commentors.)

Regarding the comic itself -- Funny but accurate representations of Chmeee/Speaker, Louis Wu, and Teela. Nice touch with the Pierson's Puppeteer on the viewscreen as well.

Kids these days...

Halo rocks your faces off.

The first Ringworld was okay. The sequels sucked.

Did he ever try hooking up with bbeck?

@Kathy K - Two of my favorites.

I'll have to show Larry a copy of this. I thik he'll get a kick out of it.

More like 35 years ago, in 1970. It was already considered a classic when I read it as an 11 year old in 1975.

The folks at Bungie say that their direct inspiration for the style of structure in the game Halo was from Iain Banks. Banks in turn has drawn on many sources including Niven to populate his universe with all manner of megastructures whose inhabitants chose as much on aesthetic whim as practical need.

After Halo took off the PR folks at Microsoft sent Larry an Xbox along with a bunch of games. They were very interested in seeing if he had any interest in writing something related to Halo but nothing came of it. Military SF isn't his strength, which is why the Man-Kzin Wars are written by other writers unders Niven editorial control.

While Niven is a great SF writer in his own right, it bears commenting that many of his best novels, including many already mentioned in these comments, were co-written with Jerry Pournelle. Jerry also rights a daily commentary on the net which is kind of like a blog, but not quite. And the military aspects of Niven's collaborations were written by Pournelle who has his own line of novels which are primarily military in nature, though set in the future.

All-in-all, two great writers who don't get the time of day from hollywood or the current generation of kids who would rather watch George Lucas' latest flatulance than read real fiction.

My favorite SF book ever, and a top ten in all genres, is "All the Myriad Ways", a collection of short stories and essays which contains the aformentioned "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex" as well as the theory and practice of teleportation, the theory and practice of time travel, and the gripping "What About Chocolate Covered Manhole Covers?". The opening story tells us quite scientifically why witches and warlocks don't have quite the voting bloc they used to.

Pfft. You can keep your Ringworld. Dyson spheres are the schiznit.

And don't give me that nonsense about centrifugal simulation of gravity, either. If we can encase a star in a solid globe, we can induce gravity artificially.

If we can rearrange atoms in huge quantity, it follows that we can reverse a basic physical constant?

Larry Niven is the best! I enjoyed Ringworld. Those lethal sunflowers ruled.