8.4 /10 1 Votes
Country United States Publication date August 1975 Pages 240 Originally published August 1975 Page count 240 Publisher Ballantine Books | 4.2/5 Goodreads Language English Media type Print (Paperback) ISBN 0-345-24563-6 Genre Science Fiction Cover artist Rick Sternbach | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Similar Larry Niven books, Science Fiction books | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Tales of Known Space: The Universe of Larry Niven is a science fiction collection by Larry Niven, collecting thirteen short stories published between 1964 and 1975 (all in Niven's Known Space future history) along with several essays by Niven and a chronology.
Contents
Contents
Literary significance and reception
In John Clute's survey of Niven's work in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, he described the sequence as a "wide-ranging, complex, unusually well integrated Future History which, within an essentially optimistic and technophilic frame, provides an explanatory structure for the expansion of humanity into space, one notable from the first for the complexity of the Universe into which it introduces the burgeoning human race." Particular note is given to the inclusion of the timeline chart in Tales of Known Space.
In his essay on the theme of "Future Histories", Alastair Reynolds said that Known Space was the first of the kind he encountered as a teenager and remembered reading this collection (though he incorrectly gives the title as Tales from Known Space). Reynolds describes it as having "a sense of the future as teeming, chaotic, prone to unexpected swerves and lurching accelerations." His earliest attempts at SF (Union World, Dominant Species and a number of short stories) were set in a Niven-inspired background and, although they were not published, elements of them were incorporated into his later novels.