Explore: Known

Prince Rogers Nelson (June 7, 1958 – April 21, 2016) was an American singer, songwriter, musician, and actor. Called "the greatest musical talent of his generation" by Billboard magazine, Prince was known for his flamboyant, androgynous persona, wide vocal range—which included a far-reaching falsetto—and high-pitched screams, as well as his skill as a multi-instrumentalist, often preferring to play all or most of the instruments on his recordings. His music incorporated a wide variety of styles, including funk, disco, R&B, rock, new wave, soul, synth-pop, pop, jazz, blues, and hip hop. Prince produced his albums himself, pioneering the Minneapolis sound. Born and raised in Minneapolis, Prince signed a record deal with Warner Bros. Records at the age of 18, soon releasing the studio albums For You (1978) and Prince (1979). He went on to achieve critical success with the influential albums Dirty Mind (1980), Controversy (1981), and 1999 (1982). In 1984, Prince became the first singer to simultaneously have a number-one film, album and single in the US, with the film Purple Rain, its soundtrack, and his first Billboard Hot 100 chart-topping single "When Doves Cry", which later ranked as the biggest hit of the year. The album, recorded with his new backing band the Revolution, spent six consecutive months atop the US Billboard 200 chart and won the Academy Award for Best Original Song Score. The movie grossed $70.3 million worldwide and it has been regarded as one of the greatest musical films. After disbanding the Revolution, Prince released the album Sign o' the Times (1987), widely hailed by critics as the greatest work of his career. In 1993, in the midst of a contractual dispute with Warner Bros, he changed his stage name to the unpronounceable symbol (known to fans as the "Love Symbol") and was often referred to as The Artist Formerly Known as Prince (or TAFKAP) or simply The Artist. After moving to Arista Records in 1998, Prince reverted to his original name in 2000. Over the next decade, six of his albums entered the U.S. top 10 charts. In April 2016, at the age of 57, Prince died after accidentally overdosing on fentanyl at his Paisley Park home and recording studio in Chanhassen, Minnesota. He was a prolific musician who released 39 albums during his life, with a vast array of unreleased material left in a custom-built bank vault underneath his home, including fully completed albums and over 50 finished music videos. Numerous posthumous collections of his previously unheard work have been issued by his estate. Prince has sold more than 100 million records worldwide, ranking him among the best-selling music artists of all time. His awards include the Grammy President's Merit Award, the American Music Awards for Achievement and of Merit, the Billboard Icon Award, an Academy Award, and a Golden Globe Award. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2004, the UK Music Hall of Fame in 2006, and the Rhythm and Blues Music Hall of Fame in 2016, and was inducted twice into the Black Music & Entertainment Walk of Fame in 2022. Estimates of the complete number of songs written by Prince range anywhere from 500 to well over 1,000.

Known Space is the fictional setting of about a dozen science fiction novels and several collections of short stories by American writer Larry Niven. It has also become a shared universe in the spin-off Man-Kzin Wars anthologies. The Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDB) catalogs all works set in the fictional universe that includes Known Space under the series name Tales of Known Space, which was the title of a 1975 collection of Niven's short stories. The first-published work in the series, which was Niven's first published piece, was "The Coldest Place", in the December 1964 issue of If magazine, edited by Frederik Pohl. This was the first-published work in the 1975 collection. The stories span approximately one thousand years of future history, from the first human explorations of the Solar System to the colonization of dozens of nearby systems. Late in the series, Known Space is an irregularly shaped "bubble" about 60 light-years across. The epithet "Known Space" refers to a small region in the Milky Way galaxy, one centered on Earth. In the future that the series depicts, spanning roughly the third millennium, humans have explored this region and colonized many of its worlds. Contact has been made with other species, such as the two-headed Pierson's Puppeteers and the aggressive felinoid Kzinti. Stories in the Known Space series include events and places outside of the region called "Known Space" such as the Ringworld, the Pierson's Puppeteers' Fleet of Worlds and the Pak homeworld. The Tales were originally conceived as two separate series, the Belter stories set roughly from 2000 to 2350 CE and the Neutron Star / Ringworld stories set in 2651 CE and later. The earlier, Belter period features solar-system colonization and slower-than-light travel with fusion-powered and Bussard ramjet ships. The later, Neutron Star, period features faster-than-light ships using "hyperdrive". Niven implicitly joined the two settings as a single fictional universe in the short story "A Relic of the Empire" (If, December 1966), by using background elements of the Slaver civilization from the Belter series as a plot element in the faster-than-light setting. In the late 1980s—having written almost no Tales of Known Space in more than a decade—Niven opened the 300-year gap in the Known Space timeline as a shared universe, and the stories of the Man-Kzin Wars volumes fill in that history, bridging the two settings.