Authors: Larry Niven
ISBN-13: 9780765347718, ISBN-10: 0765347717
Format: Mass Market Paperback
Publisher: Doherty, Tom Associates, LLC
Date Published: November 2006
Edition: First Edition
Larry Niven is the multiple Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author of the Ringworld series, along with many other science fiction masterpieces. His Beowulf's Children, co-authored with Jeery Pournelle and Steven Barnes was a New York Times bestseller. He lives in Chatsworth, California.
The #1 New York Times bestselling author and multiple award winner has collected for the first time, twenty-four tales and vignettes of that interspecies gathering place knowns as the Draco Tavern.
The cantina scene in Star Wars, as Niven (Ringworld) points out in his introduction, partakes of "a hoary old tradition," as do the 27 Draco Tavern stories in this solid SF collection. Most of the tales, set in the 2030s, are short-shorts, often reading like brilliant, half-whimsical notebook jottings. The inverted city carved out of the ice by ocean-dwelling creatures on Europa in "Playground Earth" could be the basis for a novel. Niven tosses it off in a sentence. Many of the best moments are similar hints: an overheard conversation about how an alien species casually denied humans immortality because the perception of death flavors human poetry ("Limits"). The most startling perspective of all comes from "The Green Marauder," in which a two-billion-year-old creature explains how the Earth was "ruined" by "pollution" long ago. These stories are best taken a few at a time, to savor their inventiveness without noticing the undeveloped characters or that, even for bar stories, there's sometimes too much chatter and not enough action. (Jan.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
The subject is closed | 17 | |
Grammar lesson | 25 | |
Assimilating our culture, that's what they're doing! | 33 | |
The Schumann computer | 41 | |
The green marauder | 49 | |
The real thing | 57 | |
War movie | 65 | |
Limits | 73 | |
Table manners | 81 | |
One night at the Draco Tavern | 101 | |
The heights | 107 | |
The wisdom of demons | 123 | |
Smut talk | 131 | |
Ssoroghod's people | 145 | |
The missing mass | 155 | |
The convergence of the old mind | 175 | |
Chrysalis | 185 | |
The death addict | 199 | |
Storm front | 209 | |
The slow ones | 215 | |
Cruel and unusual | 225 | |
The ones who stay home | 231 | |
Breeding maze | 239 | |
Playhouse | 255 | |
Lost | 273 | |
Losing Mars | 283 | |
Playground Earth | 291 |