Thursday, October 22, 2020

A Mixed Bag in Space

 Just finished reading A Hole in Space, a 1974 short story collection by Larry Niven.  Don't know why I'd never read, or even heard of this one before, because back in the '80s I burned through just about everything he'd written up until then.  So, how was it?  Mixed, with everything between C+ to A.  There's a classic Louis Wu story in there (There is a Tide, which I'd read long ago), a very noir-ish story about a criminal gang using flash mobs to pull off their heists (the enabling technology is a little different than cell phones however), some bribery mixed with game theory, an alien contact story where a bartender saves the Earth, why pure theoretical physicists can't be trusted with alien hardware, etc.

It's a good way to spend a couple of evenings.  Really wishing he'd get an English edition of Protector out on Kindle though.  My copy's packed up, and it just feels like time to re-read it.  In the meantime though, it was nice to stumble across a previously unknown collection like A Hole in Space.

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