The Draco Tavern - Larry Niven (.mobi)

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 at Mount Forel 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, opened the Draco Tavern, a public house catering to all species of visiting aliens.

In “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. Rick Schumann is invited to hunt with five folk aliens in “Table Manners”, but he begins to wonder if he will be the hunted. And in the never-before-published tale “Losing Mars”, a group of Martians arrive at the Tavern only to find that humans have mostly forgotten about their neighboring planet.

About the Author

Larry Niven was born in 1938 in Los Angeles, California. In 1956, he entered the California Institute of Technology, only to flunk out a year and a half later after discovering a bookstore jammed with used science-fiction magazines. He graduated with a B.A. in mathematics (minor in psychology) from Washburn University, Kansas, in 1962, and completed one year of graduate work before he dropped out to write. His first published story, “The Coldest Place,” appeared in the December 1964 issue of Worlds of If. He won the Hugo Award for Best Short Story in 1966 for “Neutron Star” and in 1974 for “The Hole Man.” The 1975 Hugo Award for Best Novelette was given to The Borderland of Sol. His novel Ringworld won the 1970 Hugo Award for Best Novel, the 1970 Nebula Award for Best Novel, and the 1972 Ditmar, an Australian award for Best International Science Fiction.