Five top SFF books written collaboratively

Andrew Neil Gray and J. S. Herbison are partners in life as well as in writing. The Ghost Line is their first fiction collaboration. One of their five best SFF books written collaboratively, as shared at Tor.com:

The Mote in God’s Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle

Set a thousand years in the future, in a culture still recovering from the civil war that caused the fall of the first human empire, this novel is a classic of first contact and the first collaboration of many between Niven and Pournelle. After a slower-than-light alien spaceship arrives in a nearby system, a human expedition is scrambled to visit a red supergiant star called Murcheson’s Eye and investigate the spaceship’s origin. Unlike many aliens-meet-humans books, here first contact comes on human terms, and it’s wildly original. The aliens are complicated, secretive, and intriguingly other, and the book is a thoughtful page-turner.

After this success, Niven and Pournelle went on to write other classics together such as Lucifer’s Hammer, Inferno and Footfall (still one of the best and most realistic alien invasion novels out there). They’ve also both had fruitful collaborations with numerous other SF authors, including David Gerrold, Steven Barnes, Dean Ing, Poul Anderson, and Gregory Benford.

Read about another book on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue