Destroyer of Worlds

Fair warning: this is a commercial announcement. (But likely my last for a while. Gotta refill the pipeline.)

Destroyer of Worlds

Destroyer of Worlds, released today, is a far-future space epic. It's also my latest/third collaboration with Larry Niven -- all part of our Fleet of Worlds series.

Destroyer, like our earlier books, deals with Puppeteer manipulations -- these aliens are aptly named for more than their appearance. And the afraid-of-everything Puppeteers have more than ever to fear, because on the horizon looms another, particularly scary, alien species: the Pak.

(That brings us to our second cover snap [below the fold].

The Pak first appeared in Larry's solo novel Protector. More than thirty years after its first appearance, Protector remains one of my favorite SF novels. Pak are scary smart, and (as Larry likes to say) it's a challenge to write about beings smarter than the authors.

It also takes beings smarter than the authors to rival the Pak. Enter (or re-enter, if you happened to have read Fleet of Worlds), the enigmatic and aquatic Gw'oth.

(Despite what you may read elsewhere, Fleet / Juggler / Destroyer of Worlds do not comprise a trilogy. Books in a trilogy -- think: LOTR -- can't be read standalone. These can.)

As for early reviews, here are two:

"Old-fashioned cerebral science fiction, with a huge array of fascinating aliens, subtle interactions between them, and knotty problems for them to solve."

— Kirkus Reviews

"Combines sparkling wit and 'old school' hard sf with masterly storytelling and cosmic vision… enjoy the return of good, old-fashioned sf, packed with ideas, philosophical musings, and plenty of space action."

— Library Journal

Finally, if you'd like to know more, here's what the publisher has to say.