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Larry Niven (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.

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Larry Niven was born in Los Angeles, California. He graduated with a B.A. in mathematics (with a minor in psychology) from Washburn University, Topeka, Kansas, in 1962. He has since lived in Los Angeles suburbs, including Chatsworth and Tarzana as a full-time writer. He is independently wealthy, having inherited a substantial amount from his grandfather, Edward L. Doheny (otherwise known as a player in the Teapot Dome scandal of the 1920s).

Niven is the author of numerous science fiction short stories and novels, beginning with his 1964 story "The Coldest Place" (which in the story was said to be the dark side of Mercury, which at the time the story was written was thought to be tidally locked with the Sun but which was found to rotate in a 2:3 resonance just months before the story was published). He won the Hugo Award for Best Short Story in 1967 for ("The Slaver Weapon" with the Kzinti species). One of his short stories, "Inconstant Moon", was adapted for an episode of the television series . He has written for the DC comics character, Green Lantern, including in his stories hard science fiction concepts such as universal entropy and the red shift effect, that are common to his novels but unusual in comic books.

Many of Niven's stories take place in his Known Space universe, in which humanity shares the several solar systems nearest to Sol with over a dozen alien species, including species known as the Kzinti, and Pierson's Puppeteers, which are frequently central characters. The Ringworld series is set in the Known Space universe.

Niven has also written a logical fantasy series set in The Warlock's Era, detailed in The Magic Goes Away. There is a Magic: The Gathering card named , which contains Larry Niven's name backwards. When activated it destroys all creature, enchantment, and artifact cards in play, including itself. This is a reference to the from this series, which when activated drains all magic from a region by using it up with an open-ended enchantment.

In recent years, most of his writing has been in collaboration with Jerry Pournelle and

A thinly disguised Niven appears as the character "Lawrence Van Cott" in the Greg Bear novel takes place in the "Niven Sector" (it is believed that the Kilrathi, the feline alien enemy in the 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. Niven's idea of a beanstalk sucking dry a planet (see Rainbow Mars) seems to be copied in the animated movie Kaena: The Prophecy and also in the game Halo 2 by game company Bungie. The game Magic: The Gathering includes a card named Nevinyrral's Disk, and several other cards reference a tome called Nevinyrral - which is Larry Niven spelt backwards. As well, the game Netrunner has an artificial intelligence named Nevinyrral.

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.

Larry Niven's novels frequently make use of the stasis field concept, which he also popularized.

An interesting note about Larry Niven's work is that he often employs the use of terms that, by the choice of words, are evidently metaphorical, but are in fact meant to be taken literally. A few examples of this are:

In the Ringworld series, there was an event in the Ringworld's past known as the Fall of the Cities, in which floating cities literally fell out of the sky.The novel entitled The Integral Trees is in fact referring to trees with tufts at each end, shaped like the mathematical integral sign.Berserker Base: A Collaberative Novel (1984) (with Poul Anderson, Edward Bryant, Stephen Donaldson, Fred Saberhagen, Connie Willis and Roger Zelazny)