Larry Niven is one of the big names in hard science fiction, a genre always concerned with getting the astrophysics right. N-Space is a collection of short stories, novel excerpts, essays and other material from all stages of his career, with comments by Niven and many forewords by his friends. I was worried at first that I would not like space exploration stories intended for what I feared would be an audience of nit-picking physics students, but all the stories (which are quite different from each other) turned out to be great reads. Like Tom Clancy says in his introduction, Niven creates all these perfectly modeled worlds, but he also populates them with interesting characters.

All arriving passengers at Narita Airport have to walk past a thermoscopic camera which measures their body temperatures. A nice, hassle-free security measure to spot feverish SARS victims (or maybe vampires).