When a tremendous spacecraft took orbit around Earth’s moon and began sending smaller sized landers down toward the North Pole, the newly arrived visitors quickly set up a permanent spaceport in Siberia. Their presence attracted many, and some grew conspicuously rich from secrets they learned from talking to the aliens. One of these men, Rick Schumann, established a tavern catering to all the various species of visiting aliens, a place he called the Draco Tavern.

From the mind of bestselling author about The Draco Tavern Larry Niven come twenty-seven tales and vignettes out of this interplanetary gathering place, collected for the first time in one volume. Sign up for Rick and his personnel because they chronicle the seemingly infinite alien varieties that spend a few moments pondering life and everything its questions inside the Draco Tavern.

The tales include “The Subject Is Closed,” when a priest visits the tavern and goes one-on-one with a chirpsithra alien about God and life after loss of life; “Desk Mannners: A Folk Tale,” where Rick Schumann is normally invited to hunt with five folk aliens, but he’s not quite sure what their hunt entails-or if he’ll end up being the hunted; “Dropping Mars,” a previously unpublished tale in which a band of aliens who contact Mars and its moon home reach the tavern only to find that humans have mostly overlooked about their neighboring planet; and many more.