Larry Niven teams up with fellow science fiction writer Edward M. Lerner to take a closer look at the events leading up to Niven’s first Ringworld novel.Kirsten Quinn-Kovacs is among the best and brightest of her people. She gratefully serves the gentle race that rescued her ancestors from a dying starship and nurtures them still. If only the Citizens knew where Kirsten’s people came from!A chain reaction of supernovae at the galaxy’s core has unleashed a wave of lethal rad...

Stories of men and women confronted by the Vietnam War. Contains personal stories of Vietnam War Veterans, people who fled the country, people who refused to go to war, people who beat the draft, people who obtained Conscientious Objector Status, and people who loved and supported them.

In this devastating critique of the mindset behind the failed social policies of the past few decades, Thomas Sowell sees what has happened not as a series of isolated mistakes but as a logical consequence of a vision whose defects have led to disasters in education, crime, family disintegration, and more. This is an empirical study in which “politically correct” theory is repeatedly confronted with facts, and the sharp contradictions between the two are explained in terms of a set of self...

Few know how close the world has come to annihilation better than the warriors who served America during the tense, forty-five-year struggle known as the Cold War. Yet for decades, their work has remained shrouded in secrecy. Now, in this riveting history, W. Craig Reed, a former navy diver and fast-attack submariner, provides an eye-opening, pulse-pounding narrative of the underwater struggles and espionage operations between the US and the USSR that brought us to the brink of nuclear war...

In this groundbreaking book of new reportage, sure to stir a global debate, journalist Jeremy Scahill—author of the acclaimed international bestseller Blackwater—takes us into the heart of the War on Terror's most dangerous battlefields as he chases down the most important foreign policy story of our time.From Afghanistan and Pakistan to Yemen, Somalia, and beyond, Scahill speaks to the CIA agents, mercenaries, and elite Special Operations Forces operators who populate the...

Leaving Earth, the crew of the spaceship Discipline were prepared for a routine assignment. Dispatched by the all-powerful State on a mission of interstellar exploration and colonization, Discipline was aided—and secretly spied upon—by Sharls Davis Kendy, an emotionless computer intelligence programmed to monitor the loyalty and obedience of the crew. What they weren't prepared for, however, was the Smoke Ring—an immense, gaseous envelope that had formed around a neutron ...

This book is a prequel to the Ringworld series, which is considered a classic of the science fiction genre.Two hundred years before the discovery of RingworldThe newly liberated humans of the Fleet of Worlds now face a new threat besides the sly Puppeteers: the Pak, a very smart and utterly ruthless species who are fleeing the exploding galactic core in an armada of ships at near light speed. The Pak are headed toward the Fleet of Worlds, having destroyed entire planets in ...

A prelude to the seminal science fiction classic, RingworldSince fleeing the supernova chain reaction at the galactic core, the cowardly Puppeteers of the Fleet of Worlds have—just barely—survived one crisis after another: the rebellion of their human slaves, the relentless questing of the species of Known Space, the spectacular rise of the starfish-like Gw’oth, and the onslaught of the genocidal Pak.Now fresh disaster looms, as though past crises have returned and...

The explosive finale to the Ringworld and the Fleet of Worlds seriesFor decades, the spacefaring species of known space have battled over the largest artifact—and grandest prize—in the galaxy: the all-but-limitless resources and technology of the Ringworld. Now, without warning, the Ringworld has vanished, leaving behind three rival war fleets.Somethingmust justify the blood and treasure that have been spent.If the fallen civilization of the Ringworld can no longer...

This Hugo-nominated work is a classic of Niven’s Known Space saga.Phssthpok the Pak had been traveling for most of his thirty-two thousand years. His mission was to save, develop, and protect the group of Pak breeders sent out into space some two and a half million years before.Brennan was a Belter, the product of a fiercely independent, somewhat anarchic society living in, on, and around an outer asteroid belt. The Belters were rebels, one and all, and Brennan was a smuggl...

Two hundred years before the discovery of Ringworld…For too long, the Puppeteers have controlled the fate of worlds. Now Sigmund is pulling the strings.Covert agent Sigmund Ausfaller is Earth's secret weapon, humanity's best defense against all conspiracies, both real and imaginary, and all foes, both human and alien.Who better than a brilliant paranoid to expose the devious plots of others?But Sigmund may finally have met his match in Nessus, representative of the ...

At the bleeding edge of space....In the 35th century, mankind has colonized vast reaches of space, yet war remains constant as galactic governments and interstellar corporations fight for control of resource-rich planets and lucrative interstellar trade routes. And if centuries of war has taught man one thing, it's that planets are valuable and lives are cheap.In a desperate attempt to escape his current life, Mark Rizer drops out of his prestigious univers...