9 Must-Read Science Fiction Titles by Hugo Award-Winning Author Larry Niven

Ringworld was described as "arguably one of the most influential science fiction novels of the past 50 years" by The Guardian and it's not hard to see why. It won the triple crown of sci-fi novels: The Nebula, Hugo, and Locus. The Ringworld is a gigantic artificial ring about one million miles wide and the diameter of Earth's orbit. It encircles our planet like a curious ribbon. 

Pierson's puppeteers, the aliens who discovered it, are putting together a team to explore it. Louis Wu, a bored human who just turned 200 years old, is recruited alongside a kzin, a huge cat-like alien, and Teela Brown, his new human girlfriend, to delve into the great unknown.

In the year 3017, humanity is slowly recovering from an interstellar civil war that tore apart the first Empire of Man. The Second Empire is working to reclaim control over the battered remnants left behind by the first era. After a rebellion on the planet New Chicago is quashed, Captain Bruno Cziller of the Imperial battlecruiser INSS MacArthur travels instantaneously across the stars via the Alderson Drive. 

In the dust cloud covered lands of a yellow star nicknamed the Mote in God's Eye, intelligent beings have been discovered. The cloistered civilization, at least one million years old, are welcoming, kind, yet undeniably suspicious. And they've got a problem they've been trying to solve for a million years. Can the new age of Man figure it out?

A reflective statue is found at the bottom of one of Earth's oceans, a strange creation that is over a billions years old. Humans believe that this statue may actually be a space traveler stuck in a time-slowing field. To uncover the truth, a telepath named Larry Greenberg is sent in as part of a dangerous experiment. Both Greenberg and the statue will be engulfed in a new time-slowing field to see if communication can be established. 

The statue is indeed an alien, a Thrint named Kzanol whose species once ruled the galaxy by enslaving others through mind control. And Larry is about to become their next victim.

A human expedition to a faraway star system is jeopardized by an encounter with an unexpected behemoth of epic proportions. A bowl-shaped structure large enough to engulf half of an entire star is moving towards our own star system. It's capable of a habitable area equivalent to millions of Planet Earths. 

A landing party is sent to investigate the Bowl, but they are quickly separated: one group captured by the gigantic structure's alien inhabitants, the other pursued across the vast surface by a strange force. Is it malevolent or a beacon of a new era of inter-universe communication? 

Kirsten Quinn-Kovacs is one of the best and brightest of her kind. She serves The Citizens, a gentle race that rescued her human ancestors from a dying starship and gave them a new home world free of the shackles of their past. A chain reaction of supernovae at the galaxy's core unleashes a wave of lethal radiation that will sterilize the galaxy. 

The Citizens flee, taking their planets, the Fleet of Worlds, with them. Kristen volunteers to be a scout to lead the way, guided by Nessus, a Citizen mentor. They need a new home world but finding one will uncover some dark truths about their old worlds.

The Draco Tavern is located in Siberia, near the Mount Forel spaceport, a hub that caters to a race of sentient aliens called Chirpsithra, 11-foot-tall hyper-intelligent creatures with pink exoskeletons, who now live on Earth. Bartender Rick Shumann mans the bar and listens to the hopes, fears, and backstories of many a patron. 

This collection includes 26 short stories of those tales.

Centuries into the future, artificial intelligences and nanotechnology are commonly used across the Solar system. It's changed humanity irrevocably, often for the worse. Many have grown suspicious of this tech and wish to reject it entirely in favor of a Luddite life on a distant planet named Ymir. Three sleeper ships leave the Solar System bound for Ymir, using suspended animation to keep the crew and settlers alive during the long journey. But along the way, things go very wrong.

At the edge of the desert stands the ruined city, abandoned after the Great Quake of 1995. Almost 60 years later and it has become Dream Park, a massive theme park where participants act out the roles of heroes and villains in elaborate role-playing games. It was all harmless fun, but now a murderer has entered the game, and his crimes are very real.

Eviane's first visit to the-state-of-art amusement arena Dream Park was meant to be a jaunt into the fantasy. But she soon realized that the holograms she was shooting with live ammunition were real flesh and blood. Haunted by her accidental crimes and having spent time in a mental hospital, she has returned to Dream Park to exorcise a nightmare and uncover the truth. A new game master is in charge, and a killer wants to ensure that Eviane never finds out what really happened to her.