The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the distillation, it is
I finished Niven’s Neutron Star today at lunch. It’s such good work, a collection of his early short fiction, all of it based in the “known space” future history series for which he’s very well known. I’d never read this book before, but I’d probably read about 3/4 of the stories in it, because they’ve been so heavily anthologized. One of the stories, The Soft Weapon, was even made into an episode of the animated Star Trek series. Larry Niven’s writing, especially his early work, can be loosely categorized as “hard science fiction”. That is, SF where the emphasis is on the science more than the fiction. Such stories generally revolve around a particular scientific principle and explore the implications of that principle on the characters. For example, the titular story in the collection is about how important it is to take account of the tidal pseudo-forces surrounding an object as small and as dense as a neutron star. The only problem with these older works is that they’re so famous and have been so influential in the field that the tropes he introduced have become commonplace and in some cases, cliched. You have to read some of them with a sense of history.
I’m now about 80 pages into the sequel to Cold War in a Country Garden, Killer Pine. Bleh.