Larry Niven
- Pierson¿s puppeteers, strange, three-legged, two-headed aliens, have discovered an immense structure in a hitherto unexplored part of the universe. Frightened of meeting the builders of such a structure, the puppeteers set about assembling a team consisting of two humans, a puppeteer and a kzin, an alien not unlike an eight-foot-tall, red-furred cat, to explore it. The artefact is a vast circular ribbon of matter, some 180 million miles across, with a sun at its centre - the Ringworld. But the expedition goes disastrously wrong when the ship crashlands and its motley crew faces a trek across thousands of miles of the Ringworld¿s surface.
- A culture of evolved humans inhabits a doughnut-shaped gas tube that rotates around a neutron star.
- After being thrown out the window of his luxury apartment, science fiction writer Allen Carpentier wakes to find himself at the gates of hell. Feeling he's landed in a great opportunity for a book, he attempts to follow Dante's road map. Determined to meet Satan himself, Carpentier treks through the Nine Layers of Hell led by Benito Mussolini, and encounters countless mental and physical tortures. As he struggles to escape, he's taken through new, puzzling, and outlandish versions of sin--recast for the present day.
- The accidental killing of a group of emissaries to Earth threatens man's survival
- When Louis Wu returns to Ringworld as a captive of the Hindmost, he discovers the world is no longer stable, and he must locate the control center of the legendary engineers who first built the planet.
- The gigantic comet had slammed into Earth, forging earthquakes a thousand times too powerful to measure on the Richter scale, tidal waves thousands of feet high. Cities were turned into oceans; oceans turned into steam. It was the beginning of a new Ice Age and the end of civilization. But for the terrified men and women chance had saved, it was also the dawn of a new struggle for survival--a struggle more dangerous and challenging than any they had ever known.... "Massively entertaining." CLEVELAND PLAIN-DEALER
- Hostile extraterrestrials, known as the Fithp, invade the Earth, destroying space stations, dams, and military installations
- The accidental killing of a group of emissaries to Earth threatens man's survival
