I love Larry Niven. Well, actually, not Niven himself, really I love his writing. Well, not so much his writing in toto, but I really do love his Known Space stories. Though he's got the occasional interesting story that's unrelated to Known Space, most of his other writing is less..uhm...Well, not 'bad' exactly, it just doesn't appeal to me. And with one or two exceptions, his co-authored books (Mostly written with Jerry Pournelle, and the newer "Fleet of Worlds" books) don't appeal to me either. So I guess 'I love Larry Niven' is a bit of an overstatement, huh?

Art does not exist in a vacuum. Even the most self-contained of works, be they painting, sculpture, or literature, are part of the spirit of their time. Good art can be appreciated simply based on its mere existence, and what it says about itself. A grasp of the larger context in which it was created, however, can make it possible to understand it a bit better, as well as appreciating it.

History is carved in stone, but our perception of it is built on shifting sand.

I’m a huge fan of Larry Niven. Star Trek? Not so much. I don’t hate it, I just don’t care about it, in much the same way that I neither hate nor care about The Wonder Pets. It just sort of *is* and it’s clearly not meant for me, so I just kind of ignore it.