Laird niven bio
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A Biography
Laurence van Cott Niven was born on April 30, 1938, in Los Angeles, California, and spent his childhood in Beverly Hills, "excluding two years (ages six to eight) in Washington, D.C., serving his country."
In 1956 he entered the California Institute of Technology, only to flunk out a year-and-a-half later after discovering a bookstore jammed with used science-fiction magazines. Larry finally graduated with a B. A. in mathematics (and a minor in psychology) from Washburn University, Kansas, in 1962, and completed one year of graduate work in mathematics at UCLA before dropping out to write. He made his first sale, "The Coldest Place," in 1964 for $25.
Niven's love of science drove him to write stories on the cutting edge of scientific discovery throughout his career. Neutron stars were a newly-described phenomenon when Niven first wrote about them in 1966, and the modern-day theories of "dark matter" inspired him to write "The Missing Mass" in 2000. ("Neutron Star" netted him his first of five Hugo awards, and "The Missing Mass" earned an award from Locus, continuin
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Larry Niven
American science fiction writer (born 1938)
Laurence van Cott Niven (; born April 30, 1938) is an American science fiction writer.[2] His 1970 novel Ringworld won the Hugo, Locus, Ditmar, and Nebula awards. With Jerry Pournelle he wrote The Mote in God's Eye (1974) and Lucifer's Hammer (1977). The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America gave him the 2015 Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award.[3]
His work is primarily hard science fiction, using big science concepts and theoretical physics. It also often includes elements of detective fiction and adventure stories. His fantasy includes the series The Magic Goes Away, works of rational fantasy dealing with magic as a non-renewable resource.
Biography
Niven was born in Los Angeles.[2] He is a great-grandson of Edward L. Doheny, an oil tycoon who drilled the first successful well in the Los Angeles City Oil Field in 1892, and also was subsequently implicated in the Teapot Dome scandal.[4] Niven briefly attended the California Institute of Technol
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Entry updated 6 February 2023. Tagged: Author.
Working name of US author Laurence van Cott Niven (1938- ). He was born in California, where he set many of his stories, and gained a BA in mathematics from Washburn University, Kansas. From his first publication, "The Coldest Place" for If in December 1964, he set his mark on the US sf field as a Hard SF writer of remarkable vigour and inventiveness, soon winning four short-fiction Hugos: for "Neutron Star" (October 1966 If), "Inconstant Moon" (in All the Myriad Ways, coll 1971), "The Hole Man" (January 1974 Analog) and "The Borderland of Sol" (January 1975 Analog). He won both Hugo and Nebula in 1971 for Ringworld (1970), the capstone title in his seminal Tales of Known Space sequence, which he began with "The Coldest Place" and has added to ever since, though more recent work – including three weak sequels to Ringworld and the Worlds prequel subseries with Edward M Lerner – is very much less intense. In the novels and stories of this sequence, and in some of his other work, he was
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