LARRY NIVEN'S KNOWN SPACE IS AFLAME WITH WAR!Once upon a time, in the very earliest days of interplanetary exploration, an unarmed human vessel was set upon by a warship from the planet Kzin -- home of the fiercest warriors in Known Space. This was a fatal mistake for the Kzinti, of course; they learned the hard way that the reason humanity had decided to study war no more was that humans were so very, very good at it.And thus began THE MAN-KZIN WARS. Now, several centuries later, the Kzinti are about to get yet another lesson in why it pays to be polite to those hairless monkeys from planet Earth.

The Mind Slavers are back--and only the cat-like Kzinti can save mankind now. This volume includes all-new tales of Larry Niven's Known Space--including one by Niven himself. Another blockbuster in the ongoing chronicle of humanity's greatest war.

Traces the earliest days of the first Man-Kzin War, during which humans foil the huge feline warriors' attempt to turn them into slaves by enslaving them instead, until one of the cats turns out to be gifted with mental telepathy.

The ninth shared-world anthology laid in Niven's Known Space universe during the wars against those fighting felinoids, the alien Kzin, offers four notably readable long stories. In the late Poul Anderson's "Pele," a human couple on a research expedition rescue a Kzin with more courage than sense. Hal Colebatch's "His Sergeant's Honor," probably the book's strongest entry, features a Kzin who backs up his race's fanatical concept of honor with keen tactical sense. In Paul Chafe's "Windows of the World," a member of the UN police, ARM captain Joel K. Allson, and Allson's Kzin partner confront a mysterious murder aboard an orbital habitat, along with several conspiracies and a beautiful suspect. Niven's own "Fly-By-Night" features Beowulf Shaeffer rescuing the title character from another Kzin with vaulting ambitions and a keen eye for legal loopholes. For action and military SF fans, these four tales intelligently develop the Kzin, who still have all the ferocity of their carnivorous, predatory ancestors but have assumed more complexity as they carry their civilization into space. At a time when mindless brutality may strike a somewhat negative note with many readers, more sophisticated Kzin will add to the audience for these well-wrought aliens and their human friends and foes. Stephen Hickman's menacing, prosthetically enhanced catlike hero from "His Sergeant's Honor" almost jumps off the jacket.

The Kzin were the mightiest warriors in the galaxy, which they were wasting no time in conquering, one star system at a time. Then those feline lords of creation ran into those ridiculous weed-eating pacifistic apes who called themselves humans. And the catlike Kzin found they had their collective tail caught in a meat grinder. When the mighty Kzin moved in to take over the monkey-infested worlds, they got clobbered. The humans, with their underhanded monkey cunning, turned communications equipment and space drives into weapons that cut the dauntless Kzin heroes into ribbons. And then those underhanded humans gained a faster-than-light drive, and no amount of screaming and leaping could keep the Kzin from losing their first war in centuries of successful conquest. But you can't keep a good warcat down, and the Kzin have by no means given up. New weapons, new strategies, and new leaders: Here they come again and those monkey-boys from Earth had better watch their backs. Once again, it's howling time in Known Space!