Shipstar

I was just wondering to myself the other day... "Just where has all the regular adventure in unique/impressive/mindblowing SF environments gone?" I mean, it used to be around all over the place. Often it was a rush to see who would out-do the other, throwing out mind-blowing concepts and super huge t......more

Two hard SF writers decide in a gigantic thought experiment to build a structure bigger than Larry Niven's Ringworld. Having succeeded in doing so, they went on two write two novels about it, populating the structure with a bewildering variety of successively more improbable life forms. Shipstar is......more

I was a Niven fan for a long time, but he's losing me. Not so much a Benford fan, but I respect his work and have read quite a bit of it. Smart guys. Perhaps all that's wrong here is that I know these guys used to be capable of better, and maybe still are. These two books felt rushed (especially th......more

I actually haven't read Bowl of Heaven, so I was a little behind going into this. It wasn't too hard getting up to speed though. While there are some scenes I regret reading about without having first read them, it could have been worse. So an interstellar ramjet has been sent to colonize a distant,......more

In a fascinating afterword, authors Gregory Benford and Larry Niven recount how they doodled around with the concept of the Bowl, which essentially is a ‘smart’ update of the latter’s Ringworld, the classic SF text about a Big Dumb Object. That novel, of course, had an intrepid group of humans and al......more