Neutron Star (collection)

This is some of the first Niven I ever read, back there in the early 1970s - and it was great!

Seriously, what's not to like? Good characterisation, hard physics, and puppeteers: he creates a universe with these stories that went on, got bigger, wider, more serious - and has in fact been pretty much stitched together quite recently, by him and collaborators, into a pretty seamless whole.

So if you like these - they're just a set of small windows onto a MUCH greater corpus. They're also storeis by someone near the top of his game - and unburdened by the need to make stupid puns and snarky political allusions in his latest stuff. Keep your Niven pre-2000s, and you'll be fine.