A friend of mine was asking about speculative fiction and it’s literary value, so I spent an evening trying to remember the titles of all the sci-fi, fantasy, dystopian, etc that I considered of a literary caliber. It took a while to remember the title of one particular story, but Google came to my rescue and informed me it was “Inconstant Moon” by Larry Niven. And then I learned it was part of a collection of speculative stories that Niven had published in the ’70s and I determined there and then that I would get my hands on a copy.

The collection Inconstant Moon is a fun little collection of tales of adventure and chaos. They are pretty much uniformly dystopian in various distinct and different futures. There is an apocalyptic even with the moon (which would be the title story) and a dark futuristic noir about addiction to stimulation of the pleasure center of the brain.

While I found the stories entertaining, they also don’t seem to stick in my mind much, except for “Inconstant Moon.” I remember enjoying them immensely while reading them, and they were fantastic in their construction, but now, about a month later, I’d be hard pressed to tell you what the individual ones were about. I’m sure I could go back and figure it out, but, frankly, I’m not all that motivated to. “Moon” was just as good as I remembered, but it seems to be the stand alone strong piece in the collection.

But, if you’re a fan of Gaiman flavored dystopian science fiction worlds, you’d probably find this short read just as entertaining as I did!