Rating: 
Summary: Cool. Can't say much more than that.
Review: A billion years ago the galaxy was ruled by a real brutal race of toughguys known as the Thrintun to themselves, (Slavers, to you and I), and then one had the displeasure of being encased in a bubble of non entropy for a billion years, only to be reawakened in a laboratory on some strange planet with some weird looking creature, (Larry Greenberg, to you and I), staring it in the face and invading its mind. By the way, Thrintun controlled their servants with extreme telepathy, turning their minds into slave minds, so imagine what happens next! Cool.
Rating: 
Summary: A Great Feat of the Niven Universe!
Review: By far my favorite Larry Niven book of all time, this book explains HOW WE GOT HERE!!! Larry Greenberg, a telepath, touches minds with an alien frozen for billions of years! However, an "incident" occurs, and Larry thinks he is Kzanol (weird name for an alien, huh?). the book is about how he and the real alien race to find an object that can allow you to control the entire population of Earth! I won't say more than that, so you'll have to read it yourself (I really encourage you to!).
Rating:
Summary: A Great Feat of the Niven Universe!
Review: By far my favorite Larry Niven book of all time, this book explains HOW WE GOT HERE!!! Larry Greenberg, a telepath, touches minds with an alien frozen for billions of years! However, an "incident" occurs, and Larry thinks he is Kzanol (weird name for an alien, huh?). the book is about how he and the real alien race to find an object that can allow you to control the entire population of Earth! I won't say more than that, so you'll have to read it yourself (I really encourage you to!).
Rating: 
Summary: And whatever became of the dolphins?
Review: I first read World of Ptavvs when I was about 16, and remembered nothing of it other than the title when I came across a copy last week. That surprised me a bit since I'd felt fairly strongly about most of Larry Niven's other works--loved Ringworld, hated Footfall. So I grabbed it up and since it's really just a novella, thought I'd finish it rather quickly. World of Ptavvs didn't hold my interest, though, and so I put it aside in favor of other more substantial books and took more than a week to complete it. If this were not the first of Niven's Known Space books, honestly there would be no particular reason to spend time with it. Other reviewers will cover the plot--suffice it to say that this is a real sci-fi gadget-driven-"technology and its consequences" story with cardboard characters--I couldn't even say, afterward, who I thought the main protagonist was. Characters have never been Niven's strong suit, ideas have, and in Ringworld that was no bad thing. But World of Ptavvs lacks the alien environment of Ringworld to a great extent, and so Niven's explorations are less compelling. There were moments of interest, and the idea of a superwar that destroys almost all sentient life in the universe is horrifying, but the method Niven postulates given his own premises is so obviously flawed that it took me a mere 20 seconds to think, "Wait, that doesn't make sense, couldn't they...?" One plot point, the exploration of space by dolphins (!) was completely dropped and seemed almost entirely irrelevant to the story. Completist fans of Known Space will surely want to read World of Ptavvs. Other sci-fi fans might prefer The Apocalypse Troll by David Weber, a work indebted to Niven but in some respects better written; or the Peter F. Hamilton Night's Dawn series.
Rating:
Summary: Background on Known Space
Review: If you haven't discovered Larry Niven, or just recently discovered him, you need to read his early novels that set the tone of more recent work in his future history "Known Space." This book gives the origin of Humans (in the Known Space Universe)and is a great SciFi thrill ride. The story is rather short, especially if you are used to horror stories from the likes of Stephen King and Dan Simmons (who writes SciFi, Horror, and Detective novels)and you won't get the character development that you would with Niven's more recent work like The Ringworld Throne or The Legacy of Heorot. But remember, this was published in 1966. You have to forgive the use of science that has been disproved since 1966 (you can't land on Neptune -- its a gas giant. And the suspected 10th planet in our solar system apparently does not exist). But it is still a great, suspenseful story. If not for the lack of sick, disgusting murders (and the inclusion of spaceships), this could be a horror story.
Rating:
Summary: Background on Known Space
Review: If you haven't discovered Larry Niven, or just recently discovered him, you need to read his early novels that set the tone of more recent work in his future history "Known Space." This book gives the origin of Humans (in the Known Space Universe)and is a great SciFi thrill ride. The story is rather short, especially if you are used to horror stories from the likes of Stephen King and Dan Simmons (who writes SciFi, Horror, and Detective novels)and you won't get the character development that you would with Niven's more recent work like The Ringworld Throne or The Legacy of Heorot. But remember, this was published in 1966. You have to forgive the use of science that has been disproved since 1966 (you can't land on Neptune -- its a gas giant. And the suspected 10th planet in our solar system apparently does not exist). But it is still a great, suspenseful story. If not for the lack of sick, disgusting murders (and the inclusion of spaceships), this could be a horror story.
Rating:
Summary: A foundation for Known Space
Review: In this book, Larry Greenberg, earthly telepath,
arranges to touch the mind of the Sea Statue -
the enigmatic sculpture found at the bottom of
a marine trench years before only recently
identified as an alien being in temporal stasis.
Greenberg contrives to break the stasis field long
enough to read the being's mind - only to discover
that the creature is a Thrint, a being who
enslaves other beings through its overwhelming
psionic power.
Greenberg becomes convinced he _is_ the thrint,
and begins a trek across space to find his other
equipment left behind billions of years ago but
still pristine and new in stasis, equipment that
will help him enslave the entire human race. This
soon becomes a race, when the stasis field of the
Sea Statue, destabilized by Greenberg's meddling,
releases the Thrint itself, with precisely the
same ideas.
With this story, Niven lays the foundation for his
Known Space novels, introducing the idea of the
stasis box, the Slavers, their favorite slaves
the Tnuctipun, and the great war they waged that
wiped out every intelligent being in the galaxy
a billion years ago. Not a bad read, but not
a great one either, it fits well with the rest of
the Known Space stories and as a member in good
standing of that arc, well worth reading, and far
superior to Niven's later efforts.
Rating:
Summary: First "Known space" novel-chronologically.
Review: The foundations for the basic backround of "Known-space" are laid here. The story itself is of Larry Grinberg and Kzanol the thrint-an "enslaver" bilion years old who crashed into earth and got stuck in his stasis-suit protection system. Since objects in stasis are perfect mirors , when Kzanol is found he's treated as the "sea-statue". Larry , a human telepath who works with dolphins , agrees to try and read the sea-statue's thoughts when a friend suggests he's an alien in stasis. Kzanol , who's powerfull psionic powers allow him to enslave (allmost!) any intelligent being , is awakend into the connection with the human telepath. As a result , Larry thinks he's Kzanol and starts a race against the real Kzanol towards neptun inorder to reach Kzanol's spare space-suit which is also in stasis , and has in it a kind of telepatic-enhancer that will allow whoever finds it first to overcome the other and control earth ( a common thrint aspiration ). The end I will leave untold. It is a good book , nothing more , and I recommend it particularlly to those avid sci-fi and Niven fans as myself , that have to read every Known-space story , if only to the purpose of saying-"I've read'em all!"
Rating:
Summary: World of Ptavvs
Review: This chase-through-space novel is very exciting to read, partly because of the two-billion year-old backstory that supports the whole thing. A mind-control weapon stashed somewhere in our solar system by an alien--who's frozen in time for just a liiiiittle longer than he planned--causes a sort of solar scavenger hunt. Even intelligent dolphins are in on it, plus a telepath who talks with dolphins, Larry Greenberg, the unlucky fellow who makes mental contact with the "frozen" alien and thus alters his own destiny and perhaps that of all humanity. The mind-controlling alien gets free--twiceover, in fact, since his mental essence gets duplicated inside Greenberg's skull--and wants to get his clawlike, three-fingered hands on a hidden device that will boost a telepath's hypnotic abilities to the Nth degree. The plot is much more intricate and rewarding than my synopsis, or the length of the book, would suggest. The ending, though, is a bit quick, and a bit too easy a solution to what could have been a major problem for Earth and her asteroid colonies, as envisioned by Niven. This is my first, but not my last, foray into Niven's Known Space.
Rating:
Summary: Great ideas!
Review: This is one of Larry Niven's excellent Known Space stories. The premise is pretty fascinating, and I think the Slavers are one of Niven's best-developed alien races. This engaging book makes the most of Niven's talent for interesting ideas.
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