Neutron Star
Come to Larry Niven's Universe and meet all the natives: Thrints, Bandersnatchi, Puppeteers -- and a host of other wonderfully created characters. Visit Lookitthat, Down, and Jinx -- indeed, an entire galaxy of planets found only in these stories that trace man's expansion and colonization throughout Known Space. A spectacular cycle of the future... a 10,000-year history of man on Earth and in space! Contents: • Neutron Star [Beowulf Shaeffer] * nv If Oct '66 • A Relic of Empire * nv If Dec '66 • At the Core [Beowulf Shaeffer] * ss If Nov '66 • The Soft Weapon * nv If Feb '67 • Flatlander [Beowulf Shaeffer] * nv If Mar '67 • The Ethics of Madness * nv If Apr '67 • The Handicapped ["Handicap"] * nv Galaxy Dec '67 • Grendel [Beowulf Shaeffer] * nv
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7recommend
19mentions
15people
2010–2026years
53% recommend42% neutral5% critical
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What Hacker News says
- Thanks for the Niven reference. Neutron Star was a fun read. I'm currently working through a collection of 80s SF shorts[0]. It's an entertaining lens into the narratives mores of the time, and or own in contrast.
- I still think Neutron Star is one of the best sci-fi books of all time as it is a short story collection that reads like a novel. I liked Ringworld when I was a kid but fell out of love with it slowly over decades, particularly in that the world of the story was much much much smaller than the Ringworld would have been physically. If Pritchett could get almost 50 novels out of the Discworld, Niven should have been able to get 50,000,000 at least out of the Ringworld but Niven really struggled with the sequel novels.
- 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.
- If you know the mass and radius of the object, you can calculate the tidal force. (You can map this with a gravity sensor on a probe or just throwing a bunch of rocks through the system and watching how it bends their trajectories)
Then it depends on the spacecraft. If your ship is 1 km long and made of cotton candy, then it won't take much force at all to destroy it. If it's 10 m long (dramatically reducing the tidal effect) and made of solid diamond then it can fly much closer. Not that there would be anything to see.
Read Neutron Star by Larry Niven (1966) for a dramatic description of a close flyby of a compact stellar mass object.
- >Can't imagine what kind of crazy magnetic field action is going on in ultra-hot gas giants who are so close to their host star that their orbital period is 1-2 days.
Vaguely connected to this statement. Can anyone recommend any stories (preferably hard sci-fi, although I'm assuming anything tackling this sort of thing would automatically filter into that genre) regarding exotic elements, extreme conditions in space, or those sorts of things?
Like Neutron Star or Cannonball Express by Larry Niven. That sort of thing.
- > additional speed for spacecraft
Extreme rip-your-craft-to-bits tidal effects [0] would make life exciting. Also, see 'Neutron Star' by Larry Niven for a description of such a manoeuvre, albeit a less dangerous one than than sling-shoting a black Hole because of the larger size of the neutron star.
