Niven on Known Space
Be warned: don't take this historical organization too seriously. I kept Known Space chaotic, like the history of the past.
Known space was never my prison. This imaginary future was an elobarate background, like other alternate futures and alternate pasts. When a story idea fit Known Space, it joined Known Space. Otherwise, I worked out something else.
In Known Space I allowed FTL, a prevalence of intelligent life, near-magical engineering, and other unlikely things. Known Space gradually grew clutterered with implausible assumptions, inconsistent dating, half-fantastic hardware, obsolete astrophysics and /limits/. I came to prefer the slower-than-light universe, which has room enough for miracles.
(The Ringworld properly belongs to a slower-than-light universe. You don't need to build vast habitats when habitable worlds are so easily available.)
But known space won't let go of me. World of Ptavvs was the beginning; Madness has its Place is the latest; and there is no end.
Niven in Playgrounds of the Mind
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