The Pub as a setting in fantastic literature has long and interesting history. There’s the White Hart in Arthur Clarke’s Tales from The White Hart, Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon in a series of novels by Spider Robinson, Munden’s in Orstrander’s Grimjack series, the Gaff and Slasher Inn as depicted by Peter S. Beagle in The Innkeeper’s Song and many, many more. Even video storytelling has its share, such as Quark’s on Deep Space Nine, and Mos Eisley in the first Star Wars movie, several less than reputable bars shown in the Firefly series, not to mention the Nightmare Cafe on the very short-lived series of the same name. Bars make great settings to bring folks together to tell and hear tales.
Now we can add to the list of great SF and fantasy pub tales this Larry Niven collection, The Draco Tavern, which collects all of the previously printed Draco Tavern tales, with a few new pieces thrown in for a bit of value added like all the extras we get on DVDs these days. Draco Tavern is a rather unique place, as it was constructed after humanity’s first contact with the technologically advanced alien race called the Chirpsithtra, who look like very large lobsters (sort of). Draco Tavern is owned and operated by Rich Schumann, who invested in a bar built at Mount Forel Spaceport where the Chirpsithtra first came to Earth. (The fortune he used was from developing something a Chirpsithtra told him.) This bar’s a mecca for humans and aliens alike. A costly mecca, as food, drinks and other intoxicants — such as sparklers for the Chirpsithtra — are not cheap. But still the Chirpsithtra come to partake in the bar and apparently to tell tales. Humans, in turn, come to drink at the bar to see the aliens, hear them tell their tales and (sometimes) to do business with them, if possible. And everyone, particularly Rick the proprietor, will always listen to a good story.
Start off your reading of it by paying close attention to Niven’s introduction, as it is one of the best such creatures I’ve ever encountered. I like introductions, but rarely are they well done. Niven, in a smidgen over three pages, tells you everything you need to know about this series, with even a few tantalizing hints about possible future stories to come. One wishes all such introductions were this well-written!
There is very little new here if you’ve read the stories as they were published, but you won’t really care about that, as everything here, previously published or not, is excellent. (One wishes for a novel set in the Draco Tavern, even if it was short like the aforementioned The Big Time novella, as seeing Niven expand on some of his ideas would be cool.) Some, such as ‘Assimilating Our Culture, That’s What They’re Doing’, verge on the chilling, while one piece, ‘One Night at The Draco Tavern’, (published in 1991’s Playgrounds of the Mind) was the script of a skit done at the WorldCon Masquerade in Los Angeles in 1984. (Yes, Niven has been playing around with the Draco Tavern for a very long time: the dedication in this book says ‘I have been writing these stories nearly as long as we’ve been married. This book is for Marilyn.’) It’s silly and fun and is largely an excuse to get many of Niven’s characters — and Niven himself — into the same space: Wunderlanders, Grogs, Machine People, Moties, Kzin, Puppeteers, and so forth. All in three pages of script!
It is worth noting that all the stories here are fairly short, as there’s twenty-six entertaining tales in a tad over three hundred pages of text. I certainly enjoyed getting to read them in the order which they were written, as there’s a very obvious evolution of both the Tavern itself and the complexity of the stories being told.
My favorites? All of them. Seriously. This is one of the best single author, single series collections that I’ve had the pleasure to read. I like the premise, the characters are interesting, and Niven uses both to tell great stories. What more could I want? Well, there is that Draco Tavern novel…
(Tor, 2006)
