Customer Reviews

The Draco Tavern

5 star:		(23)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I've been critical of Niven in my reviews of his most recent works. While some of his earlier works are among the very best science fiction, his more recent novels have been disappointing. With the publication of his Draco Tavern short stories, there's a return to his earlier form. Partly because he is writing to his strengths.

These stories span the period 1977-2006. Some of the older stories seem to have been revised a bit for this collection. But the stories illustrate what Niven has always done best: examine strange ideas. Not his limited skills at characterization, or his plotting. He's best at dreaming up ideas and exploring their implications. And his aliens have always been aliens.

Rick Schumann owns the Draco Tavern, and these are his stories. The owner-bartender is the narrative voice, and the adventures mostly, but not exclusively, happen to him. The stories are fairly short - some are very short - and involve the interaction of aliens with humans and with each other. Niven's subjects range from the existence of God to the perils of advanced computing. The last half of the collection focuses on various aspects of terrorism. I have the impression that some of them may have been revised to alter their focus. The refocus is mostly successful. But I wonder why Niven chose to be topical.

Reviewers should keep in mind this is a collection of loosely linked short stories. They were written over a period of nearly thirty years. So they offer only limited continuity, and there are some inconsistencies. But they do not seriously detract. The stories are fun, thought-provoking and offer glimpses of Larry Niven's best writing. Recommended.

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These stories date from 1977 to 2006, and feature the very long-lived Chirpsithra, the masters of the galaxy's red-dwarf planets, and the owner-operators of the great interstellar liners that occasionally stop at Earth. The chirps mingle with the locals, and an amazing variety of other star-travelers, at the fabled Draco Tavern near their shuttle landing-ground at Mt. Forel, Siberia.

So pull up a really high barstool, so you can look the eleven-foot tall chirps in the eye, and order a tee tee hatch nex ool-compatible cocktail from the Draco's amazingly versatile barkeep....

Boy, are the Draco stories good. Age shall not wither, nor custom stale, the best of these remarkable vignettes: "The Green Marauder," "War Movie," "Limits." They might well become his literary immortality.

And some of the newer ones might well join the classics. The collection spans 1977 to 2006, including one or two first published here. There are minor retcons and continuity fixes, which help the flow. Check it out.

Happy reading--
Peter D. Tillman

The only reason this collection didn't get five stars is simple:
Lack of Continuity
If the editors had simply arranged them in order of publication date, which incidentally would have also put them in imaginary chronological order, then the book would be perfect.
Unfortunately, since the stories are arranged in random order, you have characters refering to events in the past, which are two or three stories further back in the book.
Still, it's Larry Niven. All the tales are great.
Buy it.

This book is comprised of connected short stories written from 1977 to 2006. They are presented here ordered by internal chronology, creating a sort of episodic novel. Most of the individual stories are quite short; some are only a few pages.. The main character is Rick Schumann, owner and bartender of the the Draco Tavern, Earth's only multispecies bar, serving the many strange aliens who come to Earth on slower-than-light trading ships.

With exception of the story "Folk Tale,"you're not going to get much action and adventure here; many of the stories never leave the confines of the bar, and some are basically just conversations. Despite their sedentary nature, however, these stories are a lot of fun. Using the spaceport bar setup as a way to bring a wide variety of aliens into contact with (almost) present-day humans in a hard science fiction setting, Niven then precedes to examine all sorts of interesting topics with it, usually through the device of discussions in the Tavern. The tone varies from story to story, from the lighthearted ("Playhouse," "The Heights") to the wondrous ("The Convergence of the Old Mind" ) to the horrifying ("Assimilating Our Culture, That's What they're Doing!"). The topics Niven examines likewise varies widely, ranging from religion to artificial intelligence to cosmogony to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. Lots of stuff to think about here.

I recommend The Draco Tavern very highly for anyone who likes Niven's style, and for anyone interested in idea-focused science fiction. It's an odd book, but a very rewarding one.

This is a collection of 27 short stories written by Larry Niven over the past 25 years about a bar on Earth that caters to a wide variety of aliens. The first of the stories was published in the 70s, and several news stories have be written specifically for this edition. A race called the Chirpsithra first visited Earth about thirty years ago and they regularly bring a wide variety of alien races from all corners of the galaxy to Earth on their ships. Draco Tavern is a bar/restaurant where the Chirpsithra landers come to Earth and where the various aliens meet and interact with humans. All of the stories center around the tavern and it's owner/patron Rick Schumann. Niven uses this relatively simple plot device to comment (largely from an outsiders perspective) on a wide range of issues including politics, love, death, religion, computer intelligence, predator/prey relationships, male/female relationships, and a host of others.

After reading some of the other Amazon reviews and reading the first few stories in this collection, I really thought that this was the work that would elevate Niven from a great sci-fi writer to the level of Heinlein/Clarke/Asimov. Some of the first stories are the best - a tale of a priest questioning the Chirpsithra about religion, another about evolution of life on planets very different than Earth. As I worked through the book, however, I found that the stories got less imaginative and really somewhat tedious. The focus of the tales changed somewhat and became more centered on the adventures of the patron of the tavern, Rick Schumann, and less on questioning/studying the important issues of the human condition. Many of the later stories have references and plot threads to Iraq, terrorism, etc. as well. Such topical threads will almost certainly doom this work to oblivion in twenty years.

Bottom line - there are definitely some gems in this collection that will get you thinking, but not enough to raise this above a middlin' work overall, certainly well below a `classic'. This perhaps could have been a work that moved Niven in with the big three, but in the end it falls well short. Definitely worth a look, but don't expect quite as much as the most optimistic reviews suggest.

It is about time that someone gathered all of Nivens Draco Tavern tales into one compendium. These 27 short stories, written over the past 30 years, form a thought provoking exploration of ideas by Niven--using science fiction to comment on subjects such as technology, anthropology and the human condition. The author's wry humor is not absent here, and helps tell these stories that read as the journal of Rick Schumann, proprietor of the interspecies watering hole known as the Draco Tavern. If you enjoy the stories of Spider Robinson and his Callahan's Saloon universe, you probably will enjoy this collection. The humor is not as slapstick, and these stories are more thought provoking, both being very enjoyable reads.

Although I have read and enjoyed most of his novels (in particular his Barnes/Pournell collaborations), Niven really shines with the short story. Often a neglected form in the novel-heavy world of commercial publishing, the short story has always been a great showcase for ideas that may or may not pan out into novels, but are singular gems in themselves. These tales read as though they were written during the golden age of sf. The science is solid, and the characterization equally so. Few writers few posses such a powerful sense of wonder as the great Larry Niven. Highly recommended.

This collection of tales included some that were new to me, and provided me with a single place to go for that Draco Tavern goodness.
In this fictional universe, Earth was visited by aliens years ago. As a minor planet, we only get a few visits a year, but the passengers have to have somewhere to go. They dock at Pluto, and the place to go there is The Draco Tavern.
Owned and run by a man who got rich with a casual remark by an alien, the Tavern is a place where people (those who can pass the screening and get to Pluto) can meet aliens.
These stories are hard science fiction, concentrating on science that is more or less as known today. Nevertheless, there is a reality to the characters, and most of the plots are driven by the differences between cultures. This gives the stories an appeal to those that don't like 'straight' science fiction.
I like Larry Niven because he brings a humanity and richness to his stories without leaving behind the good old science fiction.

Let me start out by saying that when I was a kid, Larry Niven was hands down my favorite writer. I read everything of his and I think enjoyed it all. Included would be his large collection of short stories. I really enjoyed Draco Tavern back in the days. I thought that these were interesting and engaging at the time.

Revisiting old favorites and exploring a few new ones, I recently read 'the Draco Tavern' and found it startlingly dull and dry. I have tried to read a few of Niven's books written over the last 20 years, and have really not enjoyed it. This short story compilation is no exception.

Either I was a totally different person 20 years , with out a great deal of reading to make me realize just how tired and formulaic Niven's writing was. Or I have been reading so long that my primary taste in literature style has managed to change drastically as I decide what makes a good book, and what does not. Ether way, something must be amiss with my overall review because from what I can tell here at amazon.com, Niven's work just does not shine the way I once thought it did. Instead it was dull and pretty bad.

"The Draco Tavern" is a compilation of twenty-seven thrilling science fiction tales by award-winning author Larry Niven. This complete and unabridged audiobook production (6 hours on 5 compact discs) is superbly narrated by Tom Weiner and flawlessly recorded by Blackstone Audiobooks. The setting is the Draco Tavern, a dive found on the fringe of the Siberian spaceport and the haven of humans and aliens who spend a few moments downing assorted beverages and pondering life and their manifold adventures. A 'must' for the legions of Larry Niven fans, "The Draco Tavern" is very highly recommended listening for both the entertainment values of the individual stories, as well as the deft use of a science fiction format to address some of the universal questions of life in our universe.