The Draco Tavern

Larry Niven

Apr 2007 · Sold by Tor Books

About this ebook

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"Losing Mars" in this unpublished tale, a group of aliens who call Mars and its moon home, arrive at the Tavern only to find that humans have mostly forgotten about their neighboring planet.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.

Ratings and reviews

The stories were fun and the alien characters gained depth over the course of the set, but the whole seemed strained. The rate of alien visits would not support the tavern. It seemed to be more of a plot device to allow alien stories on Earth rather that a place with its own story.

Niven is at his best with novels that consider science driven social change, but I enjoy his short stories. The Draco Tavern is good, but Neutron Star is a much better set of short fiction.

Good read, first read in 20 years since ringworld series, not disappointed. Finished it in a few hours, will start over in a couple weeks. I always read a good book a couple of times

About the author

Larry Niven is the multiple Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author of the Ringworld series, along with many other science fiction masterpieces. His Beowulf's Children, co-authored with Jerry Pournelle and Steven Barnes was a New York Times bestseller. He lives in Chatsworth, California.