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Arts & Entertainment

Out of This World: The Sky Is Not the Limit

Science fiction author Larry Niven takes us to worlds beyond.

In a beautiful gated community in northern Chatsworth resides multiple award winning author Larry Niven with his lovely wife Marilyn. Over the course of his life he has had a very successful career as a novelist and is best known for his works in science fiction.

Larry has always been first and foremost a fan of science fiction [he met his wife at the 1967 World Science Fiction Convention] and its myriad facets of storytelling.  At 24 or 25 years of age he felt he was stagnating, describing himself as being “at the bottom of a class of the intellectually elite in graduate school.”  He could not envision new innovations in his major of mathematics, and didn’t know where to go with it.

Niven completely changed direction by enrolling in the mail order Famous Writers School to learn to write.  Why writing? “It looked like I might succeed at that: I was getting daydreams in math class and they were beginning to look like full stories rather than occasional visions.”

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With the exception of his step-parents, Niven’s family was not particularly supportive of his change of career.  He says that they had hopes of his getting into the oil business [Larry is the great grandson of oil tycoon Edward L. Doheny].  So rather than encouraging him, they simply stood by and watched to see if he could make any money at “this writing thing.”

His first professional sale was a short story called The Coldest Place in June of 1964 to Frederik Pohl, the editor of If; the magazine was featuring a story by a new writer in every issue. “I stuck with Fred until he sent me a personal rejection letter. I rewrote it according to Fred’s suggestions, and promptly sold it to Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. He didn’t realize at the time what a huge faux pas he had committed:  “If an editor makes suggestions, it means that he wants to see the story again.” Niven continued sending a lot of stories to Fred Pohl, who was also working for Galaxy and Worlds of Tomorrow at the time.

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As Niven continued to write for the magazines, the stories became longer and longer. “The stories get longer because you see more implications given years of practice--with more details of characters, scenery, etc., [the work] turns into a novel.  That’s aside from novels being more lucrative.”

Nearly half of his fiction takes place in Known Space, such as Ringworld, said to be his most famous contribution. Although known primarily for “hard” science fiction, i.e. based on known and agreed upon physical principles, Niven also wrote in other genres: fantasy, detective fiction,  adventure and humorous stories, and for television: The animated Star Trek, Land of the Lost, and The Outer Limits.

Larry Niven and his fellow author and sometimes collaborator Jerry Pournelle have also had impact on U.S. national defense and terror policy.  They were advisors to President Ronald Reagan and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Niven is also a judge in L. Ron Hubbard’s “Writers of the Future” Contest. Currently he is working in collaboration with Gregory Benford on a new two volume novel, The Bowl of Heaven.

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