Harry Turtledove is now advertised as the King of Alternate History. No argument.
Despite my criticism, Orson Scott Card reigns as the King of Morality-based Sci-Fi. (He can have either title, or both.)
But one man rises above all, and that man is Larry Niven, the King of Collaboration.
Niven, who made his own name with Ringworld, has since made a career out of collaborating with other people, and in every case the whole was greater than the sum of the parts. His strength is technical detail, but especially when he's working with someone else he manages, somehow, to humanize every character, and take the rough edges off his collaborator.
You can do worse than spend this summer with Larry Niven and Co. Following is a short course. Note that it's not exhaustive. The man types fast.
Start with the & Pournelle classics like The Mote in God's Eye, Footfall, Lucifer's Hammer, The Burning City, and their latest, The Burning Tower. Yummy!
That's a career for some people. For your Niven collaboration course, it's just an appetizer. Click below for more.
Move on to the Niven-Pournelle work with Steven Barnes, Beowulf's Children and The Legacy of Heorot. Note what the author of Lion's Blood adds (and what's missing in the later Dragons of Heorot. Note also what happens when Niven and Barnes work sans Pournelle, in Saturn's Race.) Great fun for any student of writing, let alone a student of sci-fi.
Finally, I may be saving the best for last, there's his new book with Brenda Cooper, Making Harlequin's Moon. Cooper's work is all about relationships, but this one is grounded in conceptions concerning far-off technology and, for the discerning, a thinly-veiled analogy to the disputes between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois. (That's right, and Barnes is nowhere in sight -- so he also takes from earlier collaborations and adds on his own. Brilliant!)
I don't want to spoil this for you, but Harlequin is a true masterwork, Cooper's best by far, and puts the cherry on top of the sundae that is my title for the great Larry Niven.
Have a great summer
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for over 25 years and has covered the online world professionally since 1985. He founded the "Interactive Age Daily" for CMP Media, and has written for the Chicago Tribune, Advertising Age, and dozens of other publications over the years.
1. Joshua Beall on July 9, 2005 12:00 PM writes...
You left out one of my favorite Niven collaborations, namely Fallen Angels, written with Jerry Pournelle & Michael Flynn. It is very politically incorrect, as Niven and Pournelle are want to be (I describe them as a few sigma to the right of Rush Limbaugh). They also auctioned off characters at SF conventions (the money went to charity) so the book is peppered with semi-well known people, if you can recognize them (easy for hard core SF geeks, but not for danes).
Best of all it's available as a free download from Baen's free library in multiple e-book formats, plus HTML. The library has many other really good books for free download. They don't do this out of the goodness of their hearts. Like any good dealer to addicts, the first taste is always free.
http://www.baen.com/library/defaultTitles.htm
Of the books you listed my favorites are Lucifer's Hammer (the ultimate "something hits the Earth" book) and Footfall (the ultimate "someone invades the Earth" book). Both would make fabulous mini-series on SciFi channel, though both probably need some updating to deal with 30 years of better science (and to get rid of some of the not nice aspects of LH).
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