After he firewalked in Polynesia, the world wasn’t the same for Alexander Hergensheimer, now called Alec Graham. As natural accidents occurred without cease, Alex knew Armageddon and the Day of Judgement were near. Somehow he had to bring his beloved heathen, Margrethe, to a state of grace, and, while he was at it, save the rest of the world ….

n the far future, the crew of an interstellar expedition abandoned the main spacecraft, which housed an AI who monitored the crew for the all-powerful State. The “mutineers”, as the AI calls them, made a new home in a gas torus that rotates around a neutron star, rich in trees, animals, sufficient water, but no real gravity. Five hundred years later, their descendants live in various, sometimes waring, clans.

A scouting expedition by men and women from one of these groups meets with hardships and enforced servitude. A revolt ensues. And all the time, the AI of the original ship, observes and waits…

“Niven has come up with an idea about as far out as one can get, a created world without a world. . . . This is certainly classic science fiction.”
– Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine

“The best work yet by one of the best in our business, The Integral Trees is the most imaginative work I’ve seen in the last five years.”
– Jerry Pournelle

“Niven’s masterly use of SF strategies once more hits every note, springing surprises and plot turns with dizzying pace. The bizarre but plausible setting is meticulously worked out and at times lyrically evoked … Niven, one of the princes of ‘hard’ sf, appeals to the aficionado’s delight in working out a basic premise with rigor, yet with unforeseen angles.”
– Gregory Benford, The Los Angeles Times

“… The concept of a human society evolved to inhabit a free-fall environment remains in clear focus; The Integral Trees is a convincing piece of environmental engineering by one of the masters of the art.”
– Newsday

The plot and characters “combine with the happily mind-boggling and original premise to make this marvelous, sense-of-wonder, hardcore SF that’s sure to be popular.”
– Publishers Weekly

Ten years ago the world’s governments collapsed, and now the corporations are in control. Houston’s Pulsystems has sent an expedition to the lost Martian colony of Frontera to search for survivors. Reese, aging hero of the US space program, knows better. The colonists are not only alive, they have discovered a secret so devastating that the new rulers of Earth will stop at nothing to own it. Reese is equally desperate to use it for his own very personal agenda. But none of them have reckoned with Kane, tortured veteran of the corporate wars, whose hallucinatory voices are urging him to complete an ancient cycle of heroism and alter the destiny of the human race.