This is such a good book! I didn’t find it slow at all, and every aspect was fascinating, be it the characters, the universe or the aliens. I like that the aliens’ physiology is realistic, with explanations to support the physical and mental development of their species. I recommend this book, obviously. :)

This is one of the penultimate ‘first contact’ novels of the genre. It’s brilliant, albeit a little dated these days - the boy/girl roles read a little stilted and fifties-retro - but the physical and social design of the aliens is amazing. They’re not bilaterally symmetrical, but they’re completely internally consistent. If you haven’t read The Mote In God’s Eye, do yourself a favor and do it!

A couple of years ago, I joined a sci-fi book discussion group at a local Barnes and Nobel. My logic in doing this was that there was a lot of sci-fi out there and just about all of it claimed to be the greatest sci-fi novel ever written on the cover blurbs. I wanted to branch out and read some new (to me) sci-fi and I figured this would be a good way to do so and also to get recommendations from other fans who enjoyed the genre.

I joined during the summer those two competing asteroid movies came out and to tie into it, we read the novel Lucifer’s Hammer by Niven and Pournelle. After reading this book (I forced myself to complete it…and let me just say the best character was the asteroid (yes, you do get a lot of pages from its point of view before it crashes into Earth and stuff starts blowing up real good!)), I was so burned out by the experience that I swore off reading anything by Niven and Pournelle as a writing team ever again.

That lasted about seven or so years, until I decided to participate in SF Signal’s retro Hugo and Nebula award project. And wouldn’t you know it? Niven and Pournelle were on there with their novel The Mote in God’s Eye.

So, I did what I swore I’d never do—I bought a Niven and Pournelle novel and sat down to read it. I kept justifying it to myself, saying that this was supposedly their best book.

The Mote in God’s Eye is the story of humanity’s first contact with an alien race, called the Moties. And when the story actually deals with humanity encountering the Moties and their secret, it’s actually quite good and compelling. As a culture, the Moties are interesting, compelling and alien. Give Niven and Pournelle credit—they do a good job creating the alien civilization.

Alas, it will take you about 200 pages to get to the alien civilization and another 50 or so before you start sensing that things aren’t what they seem. And those 200 pages are filled with the exact faults that made Lucifer’s Hammer so intolerable for me—shallow characters, pedestrian action sequences and a whole lot of scenes that read like “wow, look at us create a super cool universe for our characters to inhabit.” I understand that backstory of where humanity is at the time of our first encounter is important, but does the plot have to grind to a halt so we can hear about where we are in the universe and how we got to there? By contrast, one of the other novels nominated for the Hugo and Nebula that year Flow My Tears Said the Policeman logs in at a short 200 pages but yet creates a richer, more compelling universe and view of the future simply by putting us in it and assuming that we, the reader, can figure out what’s going on and how the universe works.