He’s not dead yet, and I hope that holds true for many years, but today (April 30) is Larry Niven’s birthday. He was born in 1938.

I usually don’t do birthday posts for living writers. I’m not sure why I started it  that way. Too many to keep track of, I guess.

But I do make exceptions. Larry Niven is one of those.

I first became aware of Larry Niven in seventh grade. The library of the junior high I attended that year had a numbdr of anthologies edited by Robert Silverberg. There were  two Niven stories I read in them. One was “All the Myriad Ways”. The other was “Wrong Way Street”.

I started looking for Niven in bookstores. He was in print in those days. When I discovered Known Space, it was over for me. There was  no going back. I was hooked.

Beowulf Shaeffer. Gil “The Arm” Hamilton. Louis Wu. The Ringworld.

The timeline in the front of Tales of Known Space, which was the same format is other Cel Rey books that dealt with future histories  (The Best of Cordwainer Smith) fixed in my mind for years how those timelines should be presented.

Ever since then, I’ve had a fondness for future histories. They’re hard to do well, and few people in my mind have pulled them off.

But Niven wrote other things. The Integral Trees. The collaborations with Pournelle, although I admit I read Lucifer’s Hammer a little before I was mature enough for  it. The Magic Goes Away. Draco’s Tavern.

There are some titles I’ve missed and some I have but haven’t read yet. But Niven is a hardcover buy for me.

I had the pleasure of meeting him at one of the early FenCon’s. Maybe the first. I can’t find cponfirmation online and don’t have a lot of time to look.

So, Mr. Niven, while I don’t expect you to see this post, if you do, I want to say two things.

First, Happy Birthday!

Second, thanks for all the great reading through the years. May there be manhy more to come.