A hole in space

This is quite a decent collection, all the stories are just about rereadable, although my fondness for them varies. My favourite by a long way is “The Fourth Profession”, which I'd already read somehow before buying this book in 1976.After buying it and reading it, as with all collections of short stories, I didn't normally reread the book as a whole, but dipped into it and reread the odd story from time to time.The “Rammer” story is OK as a bit of a curiosity. It's also available as the first chapter of the novel [b:A World Out of Time 64725 A World Out of Time (The State, #1) Larry Niven https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388988844l/64725.SY75.jpg 1634535]; perhaps the best part? I seem to have read the novel twice but have almost no memory of it now.The next three stories are about the social consequences of displacement booths: instantaneous matter-transmission technology. Mildly interesting.Then “All the Bridges Rusting” is about the effect of matter transmission on space travel.I'm quite fond of “There Is a Tide”, in which a man looking casually for Slaver stasis boxes finds something else that just happens to look like a stasis box. Slaver stasis boxes hark back to Niven's first novel, [b:The World of Ptavvs 218463 The World of Ptavvs (Known Space) Larry Niven https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1392285253l/218463.SY75.jpg 1787391], which I'm also fond of.“Bigger Than Worlds” is a non-fiction essay about Dyson spheres, Ringworlds, and the like.The next two stories are fairly forgettable, and then the book ends with “The Fourth Profession”, which I'm very fond of—although it's a hard science-fiction story with a mischievous touch of added fantasy, which I don't approve of in principle but can't help liking in this case.