The crowning achievement of any professional writer is to get paid twice for the same material: write a piece for one publisher and then tweak it just enough that you can turn around and sell it to someone else. While it’s specious to accuse...
This is the third installment in Stephen Baxter’s Manifold trilogy. It sees Manifold regular Reid Malenfant and others once again dealing with possibilities of primate evolution in all forms and grappling with the Fermi Paradox. This time an...
An honored SF writer returns to his best-known creation: the artificial world, built far from Earth by aliens over a half million years ago, in the form of a ring 600 million miles in diameter, hosting an astonishing multitude of inhabitants and...
Ringworld, the most celebrated work in Niven’s “Known Space” sequence, posited a vast body of matter — enough for an entire solar system — spinning around a sun in the form of a single giant artifact of unknown origin: a continuous...
A sequel to Orbitsville.
Alien beings, Ultrans, built an enormous sphere, millions of times the size of Earth, which contains its own sun as a trap for sentient beings of the universe. The artificial world attracts the world’s population to...
When the young son of Elizabeth Lindstrom, the autocratic president of Starflight, falls to his death, Vance Garamond, a flickerwing commander, is the obvious target for Elizabeth’s grief and anger. She is not a forgiving employer and Garamond...
Life under the thumb of the Spark Lords — the League's Earthly representatives — is dull but comfortable for Philemon Abu Dhubhai and the other teachers at a third-rate private school for second-rate rich kids. But all that changes when a...
A slower-than-light starship that was launched in the beginning of 21st century to Tau Ceti, after more than a thousand years of flight is nearing its destination. But technical progress did not stand still back on Earth through all those...
Like much of Niven's work, the story is heavily influenced by the setting: a gas torus, a ring of air around a neutron star. The gas giant Goldblatt's World (abbreviated "Gold") orbits this star just outside its Roche sphere. Thus, Gold's gravity...