Larry Niven’s The Magic Goes Away is an extended metaphor for resource depletion, seen through the lens of 1970s-1980s environmental pessimism, of course. This much is known. But it will still be taught in literature classes a hundred years from now, while other suchlike metaphors have been justly exiled to the dusty hells of graduate thesis footnotes, because Larry Niven can in fact write. Not to be impolite, but there are authors out there who seem to favor other qualities above the ability to write well. Not as many as I might like*, but they’re out there.
*…What? I’m competing with these people, and the supply of books that I want to read more or less matches my demand. I gotta be practical about this, folks.