Niven's Law : There is no cause so right that one cannot find a fool following it.

Laurence van Cott Niven was born on April 30, 1938 in Los Angeles and is an American science fiction writer. His best-known work is Ringworld (published in 1970), which along with critical acclaim received Hugo, Locus, Ditmar, and Nebula awards. This novel and many others fits into his Tales of Known Space universe which is breath-taking in its scope and detail.

Predominantly known for his ‘hard’ science fiction, he has also written humour and fantasy, and he has a knack of combining science concepts and theoretical physics with elements of detective fiction and adventure (for example the Long Arm of Gil Hamilton) in such an adept manner that you often forget you’re reading a very clever and scientifically interesting story.

He has written both short and long works, and Inconstant Moon is well known in SciFi circles as a ‘must-read’. It’s also one of my personal favourites along with Nightfall (Asimov) and The Nine Billion Names of God (Clarke).

His fantasy includes the series The Magic Goes Away, which is touted as “a rational fantasy dealing with magic as a non-renewable resource” and even here Niven brings an almost scientific structure to the use of magic / mana.

Everything starts as somebody's daydream.

Niven is the author of numerous science fiction short stories and novels, beginning with his first published story in 1964 - "The Coldest Place". At the time of writing, Mercury was thought to be tidally locked with the Sun but it was found to rotate in a 2:3 resonance just after Niven received payment for the story, but before it was published. This is a prime example of the closeness of science and science fiction in hard SciFi, and many early science fiction works have been proven to be scientifically incorrect since publication.

After winning the Nebula award in 1970, and Hugo and Locus awards in 1971 for Ringworld, Niven also won a Hugo Award for Best Short Story for "Neutron Star" in 1967. He also won Hugos in 1972, for "Inconstant Moon" (which was later made into a short film shown on the BBC at which point I spilt my coffee in surprise when I recognised it, much to the annoyance of my wife), in 1975 for "The Hole Man" and again in 1976, for "The Borderland of Sol".

To add to his writing credits, Niven has also written three television series scripts: the original Land of the Lost series; Star Trek: The Animated Series, for which he adapted his early story "The Soft Weapon"; and The Outer Limits, for which he adapted his story "Inconstant Moon" into an episode of the same name (see previous spilt coffee).

He has also written for the DC Comics character Green Lantern, his style noticeable with the addition of hard science fiction concepts such as universal entropy and the redshift effect. His use of hard SF concepts such as the ringworld and habitable gas torus (The Integral Trees) is very much part of his style but the ‘hard’ is not so hard that it renders the story unreadable which is a real talent..

We need to take command of the solar system to gain that wealth, and to escape the sea of paper our government is becoming, and for some decent chance of stopping a Dinosaur Killer asteroid.

Although considered a master of Hard SF, my personal favourite of Niven’s works is Lucifer’s hammer which has a far more dystopian feel to it. It’s a tome of a book, but the asteroid hits about a third into the book and the resultant mess of humanity that follows is glorious. He follows a similar style in Footfall too, although in this one an alien species invades leaving much of humanity to fend for itself.

The Tales of Known Space universe encapsulates many of his stories and depicts a scenario where humanity shares the several habitable solar systems nearest to the Sun with over a dozen other alien species. These include the aggressive feline Kzinti (The Man-Kzin war stories) and the very intelligent but cowardly Pierson's Puppeteers. The Ringworld series is also part of the Tales of Known Space which fans have created a dedicated timeline for over many years. Niven has also shared the setting with other writers including Jerry Pournelle and Dean Ing, both of whom are grand authors in their own right.

Building one space station for everyone was, and is, insane: we should have built a dozen.

Niven's most famous contribution to the SF genre however is still considered his novel Ringworld, in which he envisions a band of material, roughly a million miles wide, of approximately the same diameter as Earth's orbit, rotating around a star. The idea originally came from Niven's attempts to imagine a more efficient version of a Dyson Sphere, which could produce the effect of surface gravity through rotation.

This idea proved influential, serving as an alternative to a full Dyson Sphere that required fewer assumptions (such as artificial gravity) and allowed a day/night cycle to be introduced (through the use of a smaller ring of "shadow squares", rotating between the ring and its sun). This was further developed by Iain M. Banks in his Culture series, which features megastructures called Orbitals which orbit a star rather than encircling it entirely. Alastair Reynolds also uses the concept in his 2008 novel House of Suns. The idea has been expanded on by others in more recent years to suggest that the first sign of alien life may be a Ringworld type structure which uses the sun not just as a light source but as a source of energy that can power a galaxy travelling structure with its own sun in tow.

One of Niven's best known humorous works (and probably funniest in my humble opinion) is "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex", in which he uses real-world physics to underline the difficulties of Superman and a human woman (Lois Lane or Lana Lang) mating. Supersonic sperm is not to be trifled with it seems.

Aside from his writing, Niven tends to be relatively private, but appeared in the 1980 science documentary film Target...Earth?

After attending the California Institute of Technology and graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in mathematics (with a minor in psychology) from Washburn University, Topeka, Kansas, in 1962, he did a year of graduate work in mathematics at the University of California at Los Angeles.

On September 6, 1969, he married Marilyn Joyce "Fuzzy Pink" Wisowaty, a science fiction and Regency literature fan. He is an agnostic.

For those of you who’ve never read any Niven, I personally would suggest starting with his short story Inconstant Moon simply because of its cleverness, brevity and genius. If that doesn’t reel you in to reading more of his work then nothing will. The man is a wonderful writer.

SF isn't a genre; SF is the matrix in which genres are embedded, and because the SF field is never going in any one direction at any one time, there is hardly a way to cut it off. 

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Quotes from the man himself in Italics

Well, it's #wattpadwednesday again and this time I thought I'd try something that might actually be useful rather than just draining Brian onto a page. I'm going to submit this thing to the ScienceFiction profile (see dedication) to try and help out with the Greats of Science Fiction profiles they've got going on over there. Anyone can submit, so go for it if you want to add one.