（外文电子版资料）Larry Niven - Convergent Series.doc

CONVERGENT SERIES -- A COLLECTION OF SHORT STORIES by Larry Niven (c) 1979 by Larry Niven v1.1(Jan-24-1999) If you find and correct errors in the text, please update the version number by 0.1 and redistribute. STORIES INCLUDED IN THIS BOOK: Bordered in Black One Face Like Banquos Ghost The Meddler Dry Run Convergent Series The Deadlier Weapon The Nonesuch Singularities Make Me Nervous The Schumann Computer Assimilating Our Culture, Thats What Theyre Doing! Grammar Lesson The Subject is Closed Cruel and Unusual Transfer of Power Cautionary Tales Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation Plaything Mistake Night on Mispec Moor Wrong Way Street INTRODUCTION This book is my solution to a moral problem. If youve opened this book, youre already involved, and I suppose youd better hear about it. In 1969 I published a short-story collection, The Shape of Space. It was my second collection, my fourth book in five years of writing. The stories were a varied lot, ranging from vignette to novelet length and from hard science fiction to fantasy and mainstream. Half the stories were set in a single consistent future. The Known Space timeline now covers a thousand years of the future, a huge volume of interstellar space, three collections, and four novels. In 1975 I did something a lot of friends and strangers had been nagging me to do. I gathered together all of the Known Space stories and published most of them in Tales of Known Space. Two stories were left over, and I was writing a third. Those three science-fiction/detective stories became The Long ARM of Gil Hamilton, published in 1976. Now, heres the problem. The first of the Gil the Arm stories, and many of the stories in Tales of Known Space, came out of The Shape of Space. About half the book. In the meantime, I keep meeting p