n the not-too-distant future, an alien spacecraft enters orbit around the Earth's moon and sends landing craft to Mount Sorel in Siberia, where they build a spaceport. Among the humans who visited and profited from meeting with the chirpsithra aliens was Rick Schumann, who garners their assistance in building the Draco Tavern near the spaceport, equipped to provide food and drink for dozens of species of sentient aliens. The Draco Tavern includes 26 stories involving incidents and conversations at Schumann's unique eating and drinking establishment, along with a brief introduction providing background to the series by the author.
The chirpsithra are skinny 11-foot arthropods that have colonized worlds around red-dwarf stars throughout the galaxy and now convey other intelligent species to visit alien civilizations, providing them translators to talk with locals and each other. "The Schumann Computer" tells of Rick's initial interaction with the chirps as he obtains technology to build a supercomputer, a project that succeeds temporarily until he finds why the chirps consider the technology of little value. "Assimilating our Culture, That's What They're Doing," introduces the gligstith(click)optok, small tank-like aliens who are masters of biotechnology. "Green Marauder" concerns an ancient chirp who tells about his observations of the first native civilization on Earth a billion years earlier, destroyed by environmental collapse. "The Real Thing" involves alien virtual reality equipment. In "Limits," Rick overhears an alien conversation about the ability to make humans immortal, but he is unable to identify which of the many aliens in his tavern were speaking.
In "Table Manners: A Folk Tale" we are introduced to the Folk, civilized predators resembling wolves with heads on upside down, who invite Rick on one of their hunts. "The Heights" involve bird-like aliens who must carry off unsuspecting prey before they can eat. In "Smut Talk" Rick meets his future wife, but also discovers he is infected with a sentient bacteria with which she must negotiate his coexistence. "The Missing Mass" involves a human astrophysicist and a cybernetic alien called Terminator Beaver seeking to discover the secret of the chirps' interstellar drive, which they believe might relate to the "missing mass" needed to create enough gravity for a "closed universe." "The Slow Ones" introduces massive sentient aliens who move so slowly that one is just entering the tavern 26 years after landing. "Breeding Maze" involves two new aliens, a Joker, who plays elaborate practical jokes, and two Pazench, who are sentient only in their mating cycle, when the female tests the male's intelligence in a complex game of hide-and-seek. Other Draco Tavern stories involve other various and sundry incidents and conversations among the dozens of alien species.
Enough ideas for a dozen novels
The fertile imagination of Larry Niven has been creating Draco Tavern stories for more than 25 years. The tavern frequented by both humans and nonhumans is a familiar trope with a long tradition in the science fiction and fantasy genre, beginning long before it was visualized in the first Star Wars movie and more recently in Star Trek TV shows. Some of the more memorable such venues have included Arthur C. Clarke's White Hart, L. Sprague de Camp's Gavagan's Bar, Spider Robinson's Callahan's Saloon and Mike Resnick's Outpost, in addition to Niven's Draco Tavern. There have even been entire theme anthologies of spaceport bar stories.
These 26 stories contain enough science-fiction ideas to spin off a dozen interesting novels. The chirpsithra, the gligstith(click)optok, the folk, the slow ones and many other aliens often little more than briefly glimpsed in these novels could easily sustain successful novel-length stories. These stories also touch on numerous philosophical and ethical themes in their presentation of the differing natures of these diverse aliens—the existence of an afterlife, the difference between knowledge and wisdom, the ethics of predators, environmental preservation, immortality, sexual ethics, potential dangers of biotechnology, the desire to experience fear and many more. The themes of the latest stories, starting with "The Ones Who Stay Home," were clearly influenced by the events of Sept. 11, 2001, as they follow up the 1985 story "Cruel and Unusual" (a story on the ethics of crime and punishment) with stories set in the aftermath of a human terrorist bombing of Draco Tavern.
The biggest problem here is that these stories are mostly just ideas, with minimal plot, little sustained dramatic narrative and minimal characterization. We never even get to know Rick Schumann that well, despite his being the protagonist and viewpoint character in every story. Most of these stories are mere vignettes at best. Even some of the stories that do aspire to the level of complexity of a short story are extremely muddled, or even just lame. "Playhouse" is a silly and contrived extended incident where dozens of disparate alien children must be turned loose unsupervised (along with Rick's 2-year-old son!) in the tavern for some hours until the chirps can fix their cold-sleep units. The bird-predator-alien problem in "The Heights" is solved by Rick with one of the dumber ideas ever written down. The biotechnology phobia in "Ssoroghods People" seems very dated for a story written just a few years ago. "War Movie" is a silly tale about aliens who surreptitiously filmed World War II but have gone bankrupt because of the lack of subsequent human wars. "Losing Mars" is a pat and simplistic story where the chirps award Mars to another alien race because Rick can't substantiate why non-spacefaring humans have a claim. "Playground Earth," the never-before-published story that ends the collection, is a follow-up to "The Ones Who Stay Home" that merely sums up a few of the events subsequent to the terrorist bombing of Draco Tavern and provides an unfortunately weak closure to the volume.
To enjoy The Draco Tavern, you must be willing to forego much of the usual literary qualities of plot and characterization and delve right into the ideas and themes that compose these brief vignettes and stories. For most science-fiction readers, these aliens and incidents will provide sufficient food for thought to make up for much of their literary deficiencies.
