Crashlander Beowulf Shaeffer has long been one of the most popular characters in Known Space. Now, for the first time ever, Larry Niven brings together all the Beowulf Shaeffer stories-including a brand-new one-in one long tale of exploration and adventure! PLUS-an all-new framing story that pulls together all of Beowulf Shaeffer's adventures and allows Shaeffer and his family to make a clean start at life once and for all!

Phssthpok the Pak had been traveling for most of his thirty-two thousand years. His mission: save, develop, and protect the group of Pak breeders sent out into space some two and a half million years before… Brennan was a Belter, the product of a fiercely independent, somewhat anarchic society living in, on, and around an outer asteroid belt. The Belters were rebels, one and all, and Brennan was a smuggler. The Belt worlds had been tracking the Pak ship for days — Brennan figured to meet that ship first… He was never seen again — at least not by those alive at the time. The work fleshes out a species called the Pak, originally introduced in a story called Pak Protectors. The first half of the novel is titled Phssthpok and the second half is titled Vandervecken. The first half was previously published as The Adults. The novel Destroyer of Worlds will serve as a semi-sequel to Protector. Nominated for Hugo and Locus awards in 1974

World of Ptavvs is a science fiction novel by Larry Niven, first published in 1966 and set in his Known Space universe. It was Niven's first published novel and is based on a 1965 short story of the same name