All the Myriad Ways

I was surprised to find that we had this volume of short stories by Larry Niven on our bookshelf; I believe zandperl had recommended either it or Larry Niven to me. About half the stories appealed to me. I really enjoy short science fiction stories because it's too easy for science fiction to be overly padded and a genius idea is usually lost. I just didn't care for Niven's style half of the time, and the most of the time I was wondering if the technological and scientific concepts he wrote about were still applicable. This was probably my first time reading hard science fiction as well.