The Draco Tavern
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4.3 • 46 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
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.
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 at Mount Forel 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 various species of visiting aliens, a place he named the Draco Tavern.
This collection includes:
"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.
"Wisdom of Demons": The age-old question of wisdom vs. knowledge is asked when Rick is confronted by a human who has been granted the wisdom of an individual gligstith(click)optok alien.
"Losing Mars" in this unpublished tale, a group of aliens who call Mars and its moon home, arrive at the Tavern only to find that humans have mostly forgotten about their neighboring planet.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
Customer Reviews
Big ideas, shorts stories
This is a very different Niven than that of Ringworld and Known Space. The vignette format allows him to focus on brief explorations of huge ideas, and most of these are left as thought puzzles for the easer. Don't go in executing any conclusions or plot threads throughout and you'll love it - lots of fascinating characters, concepts, and cultures in here.