Larry Nivens Known Space
- Thread starter Lt. Tyler
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Shouldn't matter. I don't believe there was much about pac protectors in either Ring World or the Ring World Engineers.
My advice though read everything Larry Niven wrote related to his Known Space universe as it's good stuff.
Pretty sure there was a fair amount in the latter. But I read Engineers before Protector and ended up going "Ohh, so that's where that idea came from." So I think you can follow the stories in either order. The link between them is more about general concepts and worldbuilding than specific characters or incidents, and whatever details from Protector are relevant are re-established in Engineers.
And you could say the same about any other earlier Niven stories that Ringworld used elements from, like "The Warriors" (the kzinti), "The Soft Weapon" (more kzinti and Nessus), and "There is a Tide" (Louis Wu).
I tend to feel that it's best to start with publication order, so you can follow the progression of the concepts as they develop. Then if you want, you can re-read the series in chronological order and get a different experience.
There is a suggested chronological reading order on the Larry Niven wiki. It spans 8,000 BCE to 3,101 CE:
Reading Order | Larry Niven Wiki | Fandom
The stories I have read, I read in random order as I started reading them before I discovered they were part of the same fictional universe.
Reading Order | Larry Niven Wiki | Fandom
The stories I have read, I read in random order as I started reading them before I discovered they were part of the same fictional universe.
Like Christopher, I first read Protector after Ringworld Engineers. It works fine that way.
I still need to read Ed Lerner's Fleet of Worlds series, though that series is not held in high regard by Niven fans. AIUI, Niven didn't have a lot of involvement in the books, much like Gentry Lee's sequels to Rendezvous with Rama didn't have much involvement by Arthur C. Clarke.
I still need to read Ed Lerner's Fleet of Worlds series, though that series is not held in high regard by Niven fans. AIUI, Niven didn't have a lot of involvement in the books, much like Gentry Lee's sequels to Rendezvous with Rama didn't have much involvement by Arthur C. Clarke.
I think it's probably quite common for people to read the Ringworld books first and then move out to the lesser-known Niven stuff.
I think it was when I got Tales of Known Space and read the chronology in the back that I became motivated to seek out all the other books and assemble a complete set. Although I remember that when I did complete the set and read the whole Known Space continuity (as it then existed) in chronological order, I discovered it didn't fit together as neatly as I'd hoped. As with any long-running continuity, it has some inconsistencies and rethinkings along the way.
I read the first few of those and found them okay. Lerner's style is a decent fit with Niven's -- at least, I didn't find it incongruous -- and they were certainly more palatable and more faithful to the tone of the universe than the dismal Lee Rama sequels were. I thought they gave some interesting insights into the puppeteers' civilization.
They'd be a handful if you wanted to approach Known Space chronologically, though, since at least the first couple of volumes are interspersed with events from earlier KS books and stories, telling a larger story that ties them together -- a bit like what Star Trek: Vanguard did with respect to TOS, or what I did with Trek's time travel episodes in my DTI novels.
Definitely. I was blitzed through Known Space in the early 90s (pre-The Ringworld Throne) -- I read Ringworld in July (followed by Pournelle and Stirling's Man-Kzin novel The Children's Hour), and the other (then) seven books in the fall semester. The Long ARM of Gil Hamilton and Tales of Known Space were the last two of the pre-Throne books for me as they were the hardest to get.
Thinking on Known Space now, I think Protector should really be read before Throne.
IIRC, Niven, when starting out, envisioned the "known space" Bey Schaeffer era as separate from the near-future ARM era, then elements from one creeped into the writing of a story ("A Relic of Empire," ISTR) in the other, either unintentionally or because his editor on the story (Fred Pohl, I think) suggested it.
The Niveverse is interesting as it took a while for the author to put everything together cohesively. As is, it's a lot of disparate eras anyway. At the Journey, Niven is a very new author -- I've been reading the stories he writes "as they come out" as bedtime stories to my family; we just did Eye of the Octopus.
Protector started out as a novella set in the 22nd century, and then after Ringworld is published, it gets expanded to have a portion in the pre-Kzinti wars "Golden Era" that ends with The Warriors (a very early story).
Though Niven later ties Ringworld and the Protectors together (in a series of increasingly lousy sequel novels), as of 1971, there is no connection, and the two books take place no less than four centuries apart. I read Ringworld first, as a kid, but the order does not matter at all.
Protector started out as a novella set in the 22nd century, and then after Ringworld is published, it gets expanded to have a portion in the pre-Kzinti wars "Golden Era" that ends with The Warriors (a very early story).
Though Niven later ties Ringworld and the Protectors together (in a series of increasingly lousy sequel novels), as of 1971, there is no connection, and the two books take place no less than four centuries apart. I read Ringworld first, as a kid, but the order does not matter at all.
Not that long. There were only two years between the first Known Space story in 1964 and "A Relic of the Empire," which was the first story that crossed over elements from previous stories and knitted them into a shared universe. By contrast, it took Asimov more than three decades to start tying his Robot, Galactic Empire, and Foundation series into a shared reality.
It feels longer to me since I'm currently in that two year period.
Niven's output really is quite prodigious in these early years!Similar threads
