Synopses & Reviews
When a tremendous spacecraft took orbit around the Earth’s moon and began sending smaller landers down toward the North Pole, the newly arrived visitors quickly set up a permanent spaceport in Siberia. Their presence attracted many, and a few people grew conspicuously rich from secrets they learned from talking to the aliens. One of these men, Rick Schumann, established a tavern catering to all of the various species of visiting aliens, a place he named the Draco Tavern.
From the mind of #1 New York Times bestselling author Larry Niven come twenty-six tales and vignettes from this interplanetary gathering place, collected for the first time in one volume, including:
“The Subject Is Closed”: A priest visits the tavern and goes one-on-one with a chirpsithra alien on the subject of God and life after death.
“Table Mannners: A Folk Tale”: Rick Schumann is invited to hunt with five folk aliens, but he’s not quite sure what their hunt entails, or if he will be the hunted.
“Losing Mars”: In this previously unpublished tale, a group of aliens who call Mars and its moon home arrive at the tavern only to find that humans have mostly forgotten about their neighboring planet.
Review
"A must for Nivenites and just plain good reading for everyone else."--
Booklist on
The Draco Tavern "There are wise elder races and there are scamsters and folks who raise interesting questions. In some ways, the object-lesson stories remind one of pundits' political columns.... Thought provoking.--
San Diego Union-Tribune on
The Draco Tavern
"Brilliant . . . These stories are best taken a few at a time to savor their inventiveness."--Publishers Weekly on The Draco Tavern
"Reads more like an episodic novel.... There's joy and sadness and everything in between in these stories--which seem to have devised as vehicles for Niven to explore a wide variety of ideas and also happen to be about what it means to be human. One of the ways in which we learn about who we are is to see what we are not, and in this book there are many examples of what humans are not."--Romantic Times Bookclub on The Draco Tavern
Synopsis
When a tremendous spacecraft took orbit around the Earth's moon and began sending smaller landers down toward the North Pole, the newly arrived visitors quickly set up a permanent spaceport in Siberia. Their presence attracted many, and a few people grew conspicuously rich from secrets they learned from talking to the aliens. One of these men, Rick Schumann, established a tavern catering to all of the various species of visiting aliens, a place he named the Draco Tavern.
From the mind of #1 New York Times bestselling author Larry Niven come twenty-six tales and vignettes from this interplanetary gathering place, collected for the first time in one volume, including:
"The Subject Is Closed": A priest visits the tavern and goes one-on-one with a chirpsithra alien on the subject of God and life after death.
"Table Mannners: A Folk Tale": Rick Schumann is invited to hunt with five folk aliens, but he's not quite sure what their hunt entails, or if he will be the hunted.
"Losing Mars": In this previously unpublished tale, a group of aliens who call Mars and its moon home arrive at the tavern only to find that humans have mostly forgotten about their neighboring planet.
Synopsis
Human entrepreneur Rick Schumann builds a tavern catering to various species of visiting aliens, an interplanetary gathering place situated in Siberia that is known as Draco Tavern, in an entertaining anthology of short fiction that includes such tales as "The Subject Is Closed," "Table Manners: A Folk Tale," "Wisdom of Demons," and the previously unpublished "Losing Mars." Reprint.
About the Author
Larry Niven is the award-winning author of the Ringworld series, along with many other science fiction masterpieces, and fantasy novels including the Magic Goes Away series. His Beowulf's Children, co-authored with Jerry Pournelle and Steven Barnes, was a New York Times bestseller. He has received the Nebula Award, five Hugos, four Locus Awards, two Ditmars, the Prometheus, and the Robert A. Heinlein Award, among other honors. He lives in Chatsworth, California.