Most of Niven’s ’60s and ’70s work is worth reading, IMHO. They’re mostly set in one consistent future history often called ‘Known Space’, and the chronology, up through “Ringworld”, tends to match the order in which they were written. “Ringworld” is excellent; it starts slowly, but really takes off once the characters arrive at the ringworld itself. The short stories in “Neutron Star” are also very good, as is his first novel, “World Of Ptaavs”.

Even some of the Niven/Pournelle collaborations are worthwhile. “Inferno” is quite interesting as a satire of Dante, and as a character study of a deeply skeptical hard-SF writer who comes up with one SF scenario after another to explain the impossible fact that he appears to be quite literally in Hell. “The Mote In God’s Eye” goes on too long, but has some great human-alien interactions. (One of Niven’s greatest strengths was his ability to imagine bizarre alien species and make them plausibly alien in everything from language to psychology.)

Maybe I’ll check out some of Niven and Pournelle’s earlier works someday, but I’ll get them from the library; I don’t want to support these guys monetarily after those comments.

Preachiness was definitely one of Heinlein’s weaknesses, but I never found it as annoying as some people do. Underneath the preaching and surliness, there’s an optimism about the human race that I have always found appealing. And I think you could argue that even though Heinlein was just as radical in some of his views as Niven’s and Pournelle’s, his attacks were generally on attitudes, not people, which seems an important distinction to me.

I must admit to not having read much by Niven and Pournelle. I generally give authors one chance unless I have a compelling reason to give them a second one: if they don’t impress me with the first book, I just don’t bother with them any more. I bought one of the Ringworld books many years ago in an airport based on several people’s recommendations (don’t even remember which one) , and really just wasn’t captivated at all. Considering I was stuck in an airport alone, that’s saying something, so I’ve not bothered with other books by them. I realize this policy has caused me to miss some good books, but it has also filtered out an awful lot of bad ones.

I do like Philip K. Dick and Harlan Ellison (though I think Harlan himself is a bit of an abrasive jackass). I will have to check out some of the others you mention. Cheers.

Are they going to fill said Undisclosed Location with cement once occupied?

Heinlein did create good characters, but he’s even more guilty of writing himself into all of his stories than Niven is — too much of Heinlein’s fiction (especially the later stuff) consists of him lecturing at you through his characters about The Way Things Are.

Higher up on my personal list of Old School Grand Masters would be the likes of Alfred Bester, Henry Kuttner, C.L. Moore. Moving forward into the 1960s, there’s an explosion of great stuff by Philip K Dick, J G Ballard, Harlan Ellison, and the like. And even Larry Niven — I think many of his works up through the ’70s are classics of the first rank, especially “Ringworld”.

Actually I’ve been doing a great job of ignoring Niven and Pournelle for about 20 years. I just couldn’t help posting about this one thing, though.

It was at least a well-written book even if it was silly - his engineering-obsessed writing is great if you’re engineering-obsessed yourself. His last few books are unfortunately insane AND bad, though.

Then there is a whole slew of second-string SF authors who take mundane stories and set them in the future and surround them with inane techno-babble. Sometimes there is a novelty to these stories, and some of these types of authors are commercial successes during their lifetime, but their books fade away after they die.

I have no doubt that the works of these two men will just… fade away. You cannot create timeless art with such a shocking inability to understand people not like yourself. I just wish that people would stop giving these guys so much attention for this stupidity. The best response to ill-informed and self-important statements such as these, is simply to ignore them altogether.