N-space [Hardcover]

Larry Niven's first collection of book excerpts, short stories and essays is full of Big Ideas, interesting aliens, and scientific puzzles disguised in story form. There are also excerpts from his book-length fiction and thought-provoking essays on writing, science and technology. It was difficult to pick a small set of favorite pieces. Here are four very, very good selections from the thirty-one chapters:

"Down in Flames" is a paranoid's paradise. It is not a story, but a set of notes for a book that was never written. Fueled by late-night discussions with fellow authors and friends, Niven outlines how almost everything in his Known Space stories could be deception and illusion. Whole species are not who they seem and many important events never really happened. Its scope is staggering.

"Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex" is perhaps Niven's most famous nonfiction offering. He speculates in some indelicate detail about the problems presented by physical intimacy, pregnancy and parenthood in the relationship between Lois Lane and Superman. He thinks it through with an engineer's attention to detail and entertains readers with deadpan delivery. It is spot-on hilarious.

"Inconstant Moon" paces through the long, sleepless night after its protagonist figures out the puzzle of the evening sky's too-bright moon. One of his very best tales, it is not connected to Niven's Known Space, nor to any of his other sets of related stories.

"Night on Mispec Moor" is loosely connected to Known Space. It is fundamentally a vampire story rewritten onto a future alien landscape, with plausible biological explanations for the nightstalkers and the potions that keep them at bay. As in many vampire tales, we wonder if our hero will make it through the night.

The collection is recommended to serious science fiction readers as well and to those just looking for good stories. Satisfied readers can proceed to Niven's second book of stories, essays and excerpts, Playgrounds of the Mind. With forty-nine chapters, it contains even more of the same good stuff--and is really "Volume Two" of this book. I'd buy them both before beginning to read.

At one time the term "science fiction" caused eyebrows to raise. "Isn't that reading for losers who can't relate to others well?" Larry Niven is one of the authors who forever changed the way SF is perceived, one whose fiction emphasizes science without cutting short on any of the tools of your typical brilliant writer of fiction. This gives us well-sculpted characters, even in the shortest of stories, with eye-opening and theoretically sound scientific concepts, plot twists, and remarkable endings. Satisfying story after satisfying story.

What's unique about this collection isn't that it includes a foreward with comments by other authors and fans, or that the author comments on each piece within the collection. Those are commonplace. But in Niven's world, he likes to let you into his world in a special way, perhaps by dishing some dirt on an SF mag who rejected a story that turned out to win a Hugo, etc. He openly questions his finished product, saying that "Today I'd write this story differently," etc. As if we could lift the lid on his cranium and step inside for a moment, seeing how the stories are crafted. Very interesting.

Not as interesting as the work, however, another unique thing about this collection: Not only short stories are collected here, many of which only appeared in one issue of some now-defunct SF mag or other, dating back to the mid 1960s upward to 1990 when this book was first published. He also includes essays, such as an unforgettable commentary on the problems Superman would have if he tried to mate with Lois Lane, as well as excerpts from his published novels at the time. A terrific sampler of a terrific author, whose early-70s work "Ringworld" stands as one of the most brilliant works of speculative fiction of all time. Intelligentsia still debates the validity of its scientific assumptions, and while even Niven admits that most of these have been disproven, how many SF works do you know that sparked so much debate while still being so widely admired?

Niven is far, far beyond any alien shoot-em-up author. This ain't "Star Trek." This is real scientific fiction told by a natural storyteller who loves what he does. We readers love him for it.

I am a lapsed Niven fan having discovered him in the late '70s as a kid. Something spurred me to buy N-Space as a way to rediscover what I cherished about his unique mix of hard sci-fi and realistic human emotion.
Thank goodness! When I was done I had to immediately start picking up where I left off with "The Mote in God's Eye" and I look forward to re-reading treasures like "Footfall." Perhaps I'll just start at the beginning and work my way up? :)