Part of Series
The kzin, formerly invincible conquerors of all they encountered, had a hard time dealing with their ignominious defeat by the leaf-eating humans. Some secretly hatched schemes for a rematch, others concentrated on gathering power within the kzin hierarchy, and some shamefully cooperated with the contemptible humans, though often for hidden motives. In war and in uneasy peace, kzin and humans continue their adventures, as told by Paul Chafe, Hal Colebatch, and Michael Joseph Harrington, expanding on the concepts created by New York Times best-selling writer Larry Niven. A human secret agent and her hired kzin companion infiltrate a planet newly occupied by the kzin, and discover that humans were on the planet before the dawn of space travel, and claim to be part of the Roman Empire. Where did they come from - and can they survive the inevitable kzin attack? A man wakes up with over a month's gap in his memory. He remembers being hired by a mysterious woman for a job with the condition that his memory would be scrubbed afterward. Obviously, the scrub worked, but now the police suspect him of murdering the missing woman. And a kzin is threatening him with much worse than anything the police would do. The Protectors - powerful ancestors of the human race who live only to guard it and destroy all its enemies - have learned that the kzin have discovered a rich cache of anti-matter in deep space. One Protector brings a human out of stasis-sleep and enlists his involuntary help in her desperate mission to stop the kzin from gaining this source of unimaginable power.
Author
Laurence van Cott Niven's best known work is Ringworld (Ringworld, #1) (1970), which received the Hugo, Locus, Ditmar, and Nebula awards. His work is primarily hard science fiction, using big science concepts and theoretical physics. The creation of thoroughly worked-out alien species, which are very different from humans both physically and mentally, is recognized as one of Niven's main strengths. Niven also often includes elements of detective fiction and adventure stories. His fantasy includes The Magic Goes Away series, which utilizes an exhaustible resource, called Mana, to make the magic a non-renewable resource. Niven created an alien species, the Kzin, which were featured in a series of twelve collection books, the Man-Kzin Wars. He co-authored a number of novels with Jerry Pournelle. In fact, much of his writing since the 1970s has been in collaboration, particularly with Pournelle, Steven Barnes, Brenda Cooper, or Edward M. Lerner. He briefly attended the California Institute of Technology and graduated 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. He has since lived in Los Angeles suburbs, including Chatsworth and Tarzana, as a full-time writer. He married Marilyn Joyce "Fuzzy Pink" Wisowaty, herself a well-known science fiction and Regency literature fan, on September 6, 1969. Niven won the Hugo Award for Best Short Story for Neutron Star in 1967. In 1972, for Inconstant Moon, and in 1975 for The Hole Man. In 1976, he won the Hugo Award for Best Novelette for The Borderland of Sol. Niven has written scripts for various science fiction television shows, including the original Land of the Lost series and Star Trek: The Animated Series, for which he adapted his early Kzin story The Soft Weapon. He adapted his story Inconstant Moon for an episode of the television series The Outer Limits in 1996. He has also written for the DC Comics character Green Lantern including in his stories hard science fiction concepts such as universal entropy and the redshift effect, which are unusual in comic books. http://us.macmillan.com/author/larryn...
