Space Opera Roundup

I was quite a science fiction fan when I was young, and had sufficient free time that I just plowed through everything I could get my hands on, especially if the books were packaged together in a series. On the implicit assumption, no doubt, that if an author was willing to devote so much time to a fictional creation, it must be interesting. Larry Niven was one of the guys I kept coming back to, especially when he teamed up with Jerry Pournelle--but the Ringworld series was all his own. (And, as it happens, exactly as old as me.) It's been more than fifteen years since Niven last visited his artificial....um, planet's not quite the right word to describe an elliptical band that stretches millions of miles around a yellow dwarf star, is it? Anyway, it's been ages, but apparently Niven's been semi-lurking on a mailing list devoted to his books, which inspired a story idea, and now we have Ringworld's Children. Interestingly enough, it seems he's doing this one for Tor but has another Ringworld book in the works for Del Rey...

Alastair Reynolds is one of the better young writers who've been following in Niven's hard sci-fi footsteps, debuting just four years ago with Revelation Space. That turned out to be the first volume in a trilogy, the last segment of which, Absolution Gap, just came out in hardcover from Ace. Here's a beginner's guide to the series, and an interview with Reynolds.

Peter F. Hamilton has been at it a while longer, and he writes sprawling space sagas; the episodes in his first series were each broken into two bits when they were first published in the U.S. (as noted in this Locus interview). Pandora's Star is just over 750 pages, and it's only the first of two volumes. Hamilton got into the background of the story for Del Rey.