The Draco Tavern

Summary

When a tremendous spacecraft took orbit around Earth's moon and began sending smaller landers down toward the North Pole, the newly arrived visitors quickly set up a permanent spaceport in Siberia. Their presence attracted many, and a few grew conspicuously rich from secrets they learned from talking to the aliens. One of these men, Rick Schumann, established a tavern catering to all the various species of visiting aliens, a place he named the Draco Tavern.

From the mind of bestselling author Larry Niven come twenty-seven tales and vignettes from this interplanetary gathering place, collected for the first time in one volume. Join Rick and his staff as they chronicle the seemingly infinite alien species that spend a few moments pondering life and all its questions within the Draco Tavern.

The stories include"The Subject Is Closed," in which a priest visits the tavern and goes one-on-one with a chirpsithra alien on the subject of God and life after death; "Table Mannners: A Folk Tale," in which Rick Schumann is invited to hunt with five folk aliens, but he's not quite sure what their hunt entails—or if he will be the hunted; "Losing Mars," a previously unpublished tale in which a group of aliens who call Mars and its moon home arrive at the tavern only to find that humans have mostly forgotten about their neighboring planet; and many more.