New weapons, new strategies and new leaders - the Kzin are on the march and the humans had better watch out. Once again, it's howling time in Known Space.

Loosely based on Larry Niven's 1973 novella "Flash Crowd," Red Tide continues to examine the social consequences of the impact of having instantaneous teleportation, where humans can instantly travel long distances in milliseconds.*** This is a theme that has fascinated the author throughout his career and even appears in his seminal work Ringworld, where the central character celebrates his birthday by instantly teleporting himself to different time zones, extending his "birthday." The author also discusses the impact of such instantaneous transportation in his essay, "Exercise in Speculation: The Theory and Practice of Teleportation." *** Larry Niven is joined by two younger writers, Brad R. Torgersen and Matthew J. Harrington, as they take on this challenging idea and further develop the theories and concepts that Niven originally presented in "Flash Crowd."

"A man wakes up with over a month's gap in his memory. He remembers being hired by a mysterious woman for a job with the condition that his memory would be scrubbed afterward. Obviously, the scrub worked, but now the police suspect him of murdering the missing woman. And a kzin is threatening him with much worse than anything the police would do." "The Protectors - powerful ancestors of the human race who live only to guard it and destroy all its enemies - have learned that the kzin have discovered a rich cache of anti-matter in deep space. One Protector brings a human out of stasis-sleep and enlists his involuntary help in her desperate mission to stop the kzin from gaining this source of unimaginable power."--BOOK JACKET.