Inconstant moon
From the back cover: INCONSTANT MOON a moon so bright could mean only one thing. The sun had gone nova. DEATH BY ECSTASY Belters didn't get addicted to current stimulation, so why did the spacer die with electrodes in his brain? BORDERED IN BLACK the continent had a thin black border all the way around. The things that made it drove a space explorer raving mad.
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What Hacker News says
- I wish Niven had been able to keep writing books on his own. I loved the Known Space books but something happened to him after 1970 that was worse than what happened to Heinlein around then. I don't think the books he wrote w/ Pournelle where anywhere near as good as Neutron Star, World of Ptavvs, etc. His great disaster short story Inconstant Moon dates from that period.
- Yeah but Niven's best stories were mostly shorter. (Even Inconstant Moon is a novella.) IMO, Niven and Pournelle were really great complements. Niven wasn't really a great novel writer and Pournelle ended up doing militarist fiction--some of which was OK but not as good as their joint work.
- Inconstant Moon by Larry Niven
- Presumably a reference to: Inconstant Moon by Larry Niven
Worth googling, good short story, and relevant to the "Solar superflares hit Earth" topic.
- If it happened while the moon was not visible from your part of the world, and you were reading HN at the time you might well do.
One of my favourite Larry Niven stories is Inconstant Moon. One evening the moon starts getting brighter and brighter, people start partying in the street and it becomes almost as bright as daylight. The protagonist goes to a bar and starts getting as drunk as possible, because he knows where the light of the moon comes from, the effect this must be having on the sunward side of the Earth, and what that means is about to happen where he is.
- See the classic Larry Niven short story Inconstant Moon, collected in All the Myriad Ways.
