Larry Niven

Nominated for both the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award, this short story introduces the Warlock, who discovers to his horror that the world's mana, the fuel that makes magic work, is rapidly dwindling. The news spells doom for magic-based society. Unfortunately, no secret that powerful can stay hidden for long.

The tragic story of the first manned expedition to Pluto, and the fate of the surviving astronaut who finds a unique way to prolong his lifespan in hopes of rescue.

Nothing quite prepared telepath Larry Greenberg for mind-to-mind contact with an alien. In the interest of science, Larry tapped the mind of Kzanol-and that was his first mistake. Kzanol was a thrint from a distant galaxy. He had been trapped on Earth in a time-stasis field for two billion years. Now he was on the loose, and Larry knew everything he was thinking. Thrints lived to plunder and enslave lesser planets-and what the planet Kzanol had in...

The world named Mount Lookitthat was never meant for humans-it was shrouded in lethal mists. Life existed only on one plateau, unreachable except from space. But the disastrous decision to colonize the planet could not be reversed. So the settlers survived somehow-under a ruthless dictatorship. Mount Lookitthat was rebellion proof. Then fate dealt the colonists a wild card named Matthew Keller, who had a talent that neither he nor anybody else knew...

A group of pretend adventurers suit up for a campaign called "the South Seas Treasure Game." As in the early role-playing games, there are dungeon masters, warriors, magicians, and thieves. The difference? At Dream Park, a futuristic fantasy theme park full of holographic attractions and the latest in VR technology, they play in an artificial enclosure that has been enhanced with special effects, holograms, actors, and a clever story line. The players...

Louis Wu, two hundred years old but still considering himself a young adventurer, becomes one of the first humans to set foot on the Ringworld, and odd events follow closely behind as he contends with the destruction of incoming spacecraft and a large gathering of vampires.

Two hundred years before the discovery of the Ringworld, covert agent Sigmund Ausfaller represents Earth's secret weapon, humanity's best defense against all conspiracies--real and imagined. Who better than a brilliant paranoid to expose the devious plots of others? Yet he may finally have met his match in Nessus, representative of the secretive Puppeteers, the elder race who wield vastly superior technologies. Nessus schemes in the shadows with Earth's...