The Best of Larry Niven [Hardcover]

The Best of Larry Niven (2010) is a collection of SF and Fantasy short stories. It contains twenty-seven tales and an introduction.

- Introduction by Jerry Pournelle praises the author's short fiction.

- "Becalmed in Hell" (1965) puts two astronauts deep within the atmosphere of Venus in a defective ship.

- "Bordered in Black" (1966) takes two astronauts on the first FTL flight to another star, but only one returns.

- "Neutron Star" (1966) forces Beowulf Shaeffer to risk his life to complete a contract with puppeteers. This is the first Shaeffer story.

- "The Soft Weapon" (1967) describes a trap set by the Kzinti for those searching for stasis fields.

- "The Jigsaw Man" (1967) addresses the fate of a minor transgressor in a society desperate for organ transplants. This was the first story about organleggers.

- "The Deadlier Weapon" (1968) considers the relative deadliness of a knife and an automobile.

- "All the Myriad Ways" (1968) is a starkly realistic tale about alternate timelines.

- "Not Long Before the End" (1969) invokes entropy in magic. It is the original story in The Magic Goes Away series.

- "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex" (1969) is a rigorous examination of the propagation of the Kryptonian species.

- "Inconstant Moon" (1971) examines the actions of people facing an increase in solar radiation.

- "Rammer" (1971) discloses the fate of a corpsicle. It is the nucleus of the novel A World Out of Time.

- "Cloak of Anarchy" (1972) considers the flaws of true anarchy.

- "The Fourth Profession" (1972) involves a bartender who takes learning pills from an alien. This may be a predecessor to the Draco Tavern tales.

- "Flash Crowd" (1973) discloses the causes of a major riot.

- "The Defenseless Dead" (1973) regards the ARM, organleggers and a proposed law.

- "The Flight of the Horse" (1969) recounts the first timetravel adventure of Hanville Svetz.

- "The Hole Man" (1974) pits a scientific geek against an astronaut.

- "Night on Mispec Moor" (1974) is a horror story about nightwalkers.

- "Flatlander" (1967) takes Shaeffer to Earth, where he meets Elephant and goes on an adventure.

- "The Magic Goes Away" (1976) continues the story of Warlock and magical entropy.

- "Cautionary Tales" (1978) brings together a human and an alien looking for longer life.

- "Limits" (1981) deals with humanity's fascination with limits in a discussion at the Draco Tavern.

- "A Teardrop Falls" (1983) relates an unusual form of vengeance.

- "The Return of William Proxmire" (1989) is a timetravel story about Robert Anson Heinlein.

- "The Borderland of Sol" (1975) exposes a mysterious enterprise at the fringes of the Solar System.

- "Smut Talk" (2000) discusses propagation of the species at the Draco Tavern.

- "The Missing Mass" (2000) follows a discussion of vacuum energy at the Draco Tavern.

These tales are not necessarily THE best by Niven. His fans differ in their favorites. Nonetheless, these are among the best short fictions written by the author.

The stories range from the far past to several centuries in the future. As Pournelle mentions, they are all HARD SF and Fantasy (see the Introduction for definition of hard Fantasy). The author is known for the consistency of his stories and series.

Naturally, these stories are taken from a variety of sources and often have been published multiple times. Most fans will have already seen these stories in past collections. So this volume is probably more appropriate for readers who are not familiar with Niven's works.

Highly recommended for Niven fans and for anyone else who enjoys tales of leading edge concepts, strange technologies, and quick thinkers. Read and enjoy!

-Arthur W. Jordin

Niven was one of the solid citizens in science fiction, mostly "hard science" tales but rich in imaginative situation-building. This collection pulls together what is probably his best work.

A good scientific theory is said to be like a fine wine glass - easily broken by a single small contrary fact. So too is a good hard science fiction story. Just about every story in this collection of classic Niven stories is obsolete or just plain wrong. For example in one story the narrator mentions in passing that meteorites cause ice ages. That's dead wrong of course. Ice ages are still pretty mysterious but most climatologists today believe in the Milankovich cycle theory. Niven would know that if he were to write a story today but before the Alvarezes and the irridium anomaly at Gubbio, meteorite strikes were not well studied. Niven in the seventies and eighties took the latest scientific findings and wrote stories about them. But many of those new ideas were wrong - like RNA memory. This means that just about every story in this collection has a big error in it. It wasn't an error when it was written - but we know more now.

You would think that having a wrong idea in a story would irreperably damage the piece. But it doesn't. Just the opposite. Science has advanced. Most Sci-fi is so non-specific that it never goes out of date. Niven's early stuff is, if anything, more interesting now than it was originally now that some time has pasted.

Oddly the classic Niven story that best illustrated this phenomenon isn't included. "The Coldest Place" relied on the fact that Mercury didn't rotate. But we learned later that it did. The story was rendered obsolete.

I had read every story in this collection before but once I started reading I couldn't put it down.

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