Larry Niven

Laurence van Cott Niven (born April 30, 1938) is a US science fiction author. Perhaps his best-known work is Ringworld (1970), which received Hugo, Locus, Ditmar, and Nebula awards. His work is in hard science fiction, utilizing big science concepts and theoretical physics in his stories. His writing also often includes elements of detective fiction and adventure stories.

Miscellaneous notes

A thinly disguised Niven appears as the character "Lawrence Van Cott" in the Greg Bear novel The Forge of God. A part of the computer game Wing Commander II takes place in the "Niven Sector" (it is believed that the Kilrathi, the feline alien enemy in the Wing Commander series, were based on Niven's Kzinti). There are those who think that Niven numbers may have been named in his honor, but despite his popularity and mathematical background, they are actually named for Ivan M. Niven.

Related Topics:
Greg Bear - The Forge of God - Wing Commander II - Kilrathi - Kzinti - Niven numbers - Ivan M. Niven

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Niven's idea of a beanstalk sucking dry a planet (see Rainbow Mars) seems to be copied in the animated movie .

Related Topics:
Beanstalk - Rainbow Mars

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Larry Niven introduced the idea of a flash crowd in his story Flash Crowd, 1973, which evolved in 2003 to the flash mob in which people meet together to protest in a creative way at a specific time and place to disappear as quickly as they appeared some minutes later. The term Flash Crowd is also used to describe a web site showing little or no response due to excessive amounts of traffic. A Flash Crowd on a web site is synonymous with Slashdotting.

Related Topics:
Flash crowd - Flash mob - Slashdotting

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