Larry Niven

Allan Carpenter escaped from hell once but remained haunted by what he saw and endured.  He has now returned, on a mission to liberate those souls unfairly tortured and confined.  Partnering with the legendary poet and suicide, Sylvia Plath, Carpenter is a modern-day Christ who intends to harrow hell and free the damned.  But now that he's returned to this Dantesque Inferno, can he ever again leave?  

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 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 the various species of visiting aliens, a place he named the Draco Tavern.
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, including:
 
“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.
 
“Losing Mars”: In this previously unpublished tale, a group of aliens who call Mars and its moon home arrive at the tavern only to find that humans have mostly forgotten about their neighboring planet.

Arthur C. Clarke was once asked to name his favorite writer. His answer was "Larry Niven." Countless others agree. The Baltimore Sun and Kirkus Reviews have both dubbed Niven "the premier writer of hard SF," and Gregory Benford has hailed him as "the paradigm of SF personality of the last several decades."

Now Larry Niven presents us with his undisputed masterwork. N-Space contains, very simply, the best SF of his career--marvelous fiction, a wealth of anecdotes and gossip, plus Niven's own special brand of wit and excitement. N-Space includes: *Excerpts from some of Niven's most loved novels, including The World of Ptavvs, a Gift from Earth, Ringworld, and The Mote in God's Eye *His bets short fiction, including "Bordered in Black," "The Fourth Profession," "Madness Has Its Place," and many others  *Quips like the ever growing list of "Niven's Laws" *Notes from Niven describing his inspirations and building blocks for his writing. *And an introduction by Tom Clancy, one of Niven's biggest fans.