This collection of stories includes the title story, which looks at what happens when a nice guy messing around in witchcraft succeeds. The Nonesuch follows Doris as she discovers that a mind-reading, flesh-eating alien is stalking her. Also includes stories from the Draco's Tavern series. Table of contents Reprinted from The Shape of Space "Bordered in Black" (Nebula Award nominee) "One Face" "Like Banquo's Ghost" "The Meddler" "Dry Run" "Convergent Series" (fantasy) "The Deadlier Weapon" (mainstream work of short fiction, not sf or fantasy) Newer stories "The Nonesuch" (sf based loosely on Little Red Riding Hood) "Singularities Make Me Nervous" (whose protagonist has an art collection of "Eddie Jones originals") "The Schumann Computer" (Draco's Tavern) "Assimilating Our Culture, That's What They're Doing!" (Draco) "Grammar Lesson" (Draco) "The Subject is Closed" (Draco) "Cruel and Unusual" (Draco) "Transfer of Power" (fantasy inspired by Lord Dunsany's stories set at the "edge of the world") "Cautionary Tales" "Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation" "Plaything" "Mistake" "Night on Mispec Moor" "Wrong Way Street" [source: wiki]
Author
Laurence van Cott Niven's best known work is Ringworld (Ringworld, #1) (1970), which received the Hugo, Locus, Ditmar, and Nebula awards. His work is primarily hard science fiction, using big science concepts and theoretical physics. The creation of thoroughly worked-out alien species, which are very different from humans both physically and mentally, is recognized as one of Niven's main strengths. Niven also often includes elements of detective fiction and adventure stories. His fantasy includes The Magic Goes Away series, which utilizes an exhaustible resource, called Mana, to make the magic a non-renewable resource. Niven created an alien species, the Kzin, which were featured in a series of twelve collection books, the Man-Kzin Wars. He co-authored a number of novels with Jerry Pournelle. In fact, much of his writing since the 1970s has been in collaboration, particularly with Pournelle, Steven Barnes, Brenda Cooper, or Edward M. Lerner. He briefly attended the California Institute of Technology and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in mathematics (with a minor in psychology) from Washburn University, Topeka, Kansas, in 1962. He did a year of graduate work in mathematics at the University of California at Los Angeles. He has since lived in Los Angeles suburbs, including Chatsworth and Tarzana, as a full-time writer. He married Marilyn Joyce "Fuzzy Pink" Wisowaty, herself a well-known science fiction and Regency literature fan, on September 6, 1969. Niven won the Hugo Award for Best Short Story for Neutron Star in 1967. In 1972, for Inconstant Moon, and in 1975 for The Hole Man. In 1976, he won the Hugo Award for Best Novelette for The Borderland of Sol. Niven has written scripts for various science fiction television shows, including the original Land of the Lost series and Star Trek: The Animated Series, for which he adapted his early Kzin story The Soft Weapon. He adapted his story Inconstant Moon for an episode of the television series The Outer Limits in 1996. He has also written for the DC Comics character Green Lantern including in his stories hard science fiction concepts such as universal entropy and the redshift effect, which are unusual in comic books. http://us.macmillan.com/author/larryn...
