Excellent collection of stories and tidbits. Also displays Niven's flaws. The physics of the Smoke Ring world have never made sense to me. His fascination with sex with aliens is juvenile. And his support of Reaganomics is naive. ( )

A sample book of Niven's works. Contains short stories, exerpts from books, and my personal favorite, an essay called "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex." Great stuff. ( )

There's a good variety in this collection of Niven short stories, excerpts and articles. The articles are the most interesting parts, surprisingly. Niven is an excellent non-fiction writer and The Aliens in Our Minds is a must read. But I still feel like something is missing when I read Niven's fiction. ( )

(Amy) So, I had a jones for some Niven, but was not in a novel mood (this whole array of books I'm reviewing now were all selected during the "all work and no sleep makes Amy a crazy girl" phase of the quarter). So, I picked this up, which I have read before, long enough ago that I had forgotten I'd done it. It was still enjoyable, though. I do like to read collections wherein an author is all conversational about Stuff related or somewhat-related to the works in question. It's like half of the fun of the active form of fandom without the traveling or introverted-person-in-crowd panic attacks of cons. Also, rather less necessary in this age of author blogs and the new Tor site and so on, but still fun.

...I don't actually think I have anything else to say about this book, except perhaps that it serves as a nice snapshot of Niven's style, and also perhaps a bit of his personality, though having not met him I don't know if it's the real him or an additional fictional character that was writing the introductions to these stories and excerpts. In any case, recommended.
( http://weblog.siliconcerebrate.com/zenos-library/2008/08/n-space_larry_niven.htm... ) ( )

A collection of some of Larry Niven's finest stories. It is hard to rate an anthology as some of the stories are not up to the standards of others. Overall, the outstanding stories make up fo rthe weak ones. Well worth while addition to the si-fi bookshelf of any sci-fi reader. ( )