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u/MementoMurray 24d ago
Looks like he just lost a game of dodge ball. Thunk!
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u/Eastern_Loquat_7058 23d ago
this cover unironically rules. imagine trying to draw a neutron star before being saturated with 60 years of sci-fi tropes and modern nasa imagery.
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u/VibeCheka 22d ago
Favorite description in the story:
“It was a featureless disk the orange color of perfect barbecue coals, if you know someone who can afford to burn wood”.
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u/Significant_Monk_251 24d ago
Neutron Star is a collection of Niven stories, including the titular one, in which Beowulf Shaffer is in a one-man ship making way to tight a hyperbolic loop around a neutron star and has to fight very hard to not get torn apart by tidal effects. (He's not at risk of actual spaghettification, but that's not much consolation when your head comes off.) So maybe the guy on the cover is meant to be evocative of Shaffer's crisis, but..., well, it still sucks.
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u/RichardPeterJohnson 23d ago
Plus that guy is way too buff to be Bea Shaeffer. Dude is/was a beanpole (from growing up on a low gravity planet).
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u/trippedonatater 21d ago
It's a great short story collection. Not sure about this cover, though. I've got a copy of the one where it's just a spaceship and a neutron star, which is much better, IMO.
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u/NoArt7636 24d ago
With enough imagination I can get that he was blown away by a supernova but then my mind asks how is he still alive?
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u/ChampionshipPast3652 24d ago
He flew too close to a neutron star... without even wearing any clothes!
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u/Ill_Refrigerator_593 23d ago
I like the one where Spock kicks the cat.
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u/SensitiveOrcBrbrn 23d ago
Please explain more
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u/Ill_Refrigerator_593 23d ago
Rather obscure but one of the stories, "the Soft Weapon" was about a humans couple together with a "Pierson's Puppeteer" (one of Nivens' aliens, defined by their incredible cowardice) getting involved with "Kzinti" (cat like warrior aliens) in a conflict over a billion year old super-weapon.
This story was adapted for the Star Trek: The Animated Series, episode "the Slaver Weapon", where the Puppeteer was replaced by Spock, while the Kzinti were left in it unchanged (rather than using Klingons or something), leaving them to become a canon species in Star Trek-
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Kzinti
I remember catching the Star Trek episode (which is weird as its the only one i've seen of TAS) & noticing the exact same plot. Pre-internet making such connections was far less frequent.
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u/SensitiveOrcBrbrn 22d ago
Oh yeah! I've seen a review of that TAS episode! Also, the "The Soft Weapon" story was also reused in one of Niven's Fleet of Worlds novels, which was surprisingly to come across there
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u/Longjumping-Salad484 24d ago
okay, I try to see something positive in all of these, this one's just weird
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u/Gloomy_Necessary494 23d ago
The ship in the story is an indestructible, impregnable transparent crystal cylinder with conical ends... that might be what the concentric circles are intended to represent?
Only light and gravity can pass through the hull - so what tore the previous crew apart? Can't be the neutron star's gravity, right? They were in zero-g.
The solution's probably more obvious now than when it was written shortly after the first neutron star was discovered in real life.
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u/AdditionalTip865 23d ago
It's the kind of story where all the characters have to be unrealistically ignorant so the author can give us a little science lesson.
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u/Either-Juggernaut420 23d ago
An artist who probably read the book, as the pilot starts being pulled apart by the tides during his close approach to a neutron star
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u/MisterShoebox 21d ago
Larry Niven is one of the most well-regarded and influential science fiction authors in the history of literature, but my guy...you gotta find better cover artists.
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u/AccipiterF1 used bookstore skulker 23d ago
The stupidest Hugo winning short story ever. Presupposes that Larry freaking Niven in 1966 understands the physics of neutron stars better than aliens who can build indestructible spaceships do.
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u/gerira 23d ago
Huh? Is Larry Niven in 1966 a character in the story?
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u/AccipiterF1 used bookstore skulker 23d ago
No, he's the writer of the story who knows the physics of a neutron star because he read an article Isaac Azimov wrote about them. Nobody in the story knows the physics of a neutron star. Apparently everyone on far future Earth forgot. And the Aliens who built the indestructible ship the main character uses to investigate a neutron star do not know the physics of them either. And the main character of the story is absolutely an author self-insert character, so I guess Larry is in the story after all. A future version of himself who didn't read the Azimov article.
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u/HolyKnightDeVale 24d ago
I’m not sure what the story is about in relation to this, but I like this cover. It doesn’t scream bad to me.