title: Themes In Science Fiction
author: McGraw-Hill
description: McGraw-Hill authors represent the leading experts in their fields and are dedicated to improving the lives, careers, and interests of readers worldwide
zlib_text: 
  
  
  ## Neutron Star
  
  
    
  
  
  ### Larry Niven
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Hugo Best Short Story winner (1967).
  
  
  
  
  
  Asimov Comments on Neutron Star
  
  
  For the last dozen years or so, what we might call “hard science fiction” has
  receded somewhat into the background. By hard science fiction, I mean those
  stories in which the details of science play an important role and in which
  the author is accurate about those details, too, and takes the trouble to
  explain them clearly.
  
  
  In its place, there has moved into the foreground the emotional story in which
  science is relegated to the background. Literary style, not physical theory,
  is what counts; experimentation in form, not in the laboratory, the wrenching
  of souls, rather than of minds.
  
  
  As for myself (for I will conceal nothing from you) I’m a hard science fiction
  man myself. For instance, in the same issue of the same magazine in which
  Harlan Ellison published “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” which was all
  emotion and which won a Hugo, I published “Bill