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The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle

    The Mote in God’s Eye is a contemporary science fiction classic that Robert Hienlein apparently called, “possibly the finest science fiction novel I have ever read.”  I thought Battlefields of Silence was better, but who am I to argue with the master of anticlimax.  This book was my first Audible audio book, and I must warn the reader that this colors my perception.  I was able to sit back and let someone else read to me rather than having to trudge through it myself.  With this qualifier, I give it a relatively high recommendation.  
    The story opens in a galaxy torn apart by war.  The second human empire is attempting to stitch its holding back together after a series of rebellions.  The reader is introduced to the battlecruiser MacArthur just after her commander and crew have quelled an uprising.  
    The main players in the story are introduced with a rapid pace.  There is Lord Blaine, the first officer of MacArthur, who assigned command of the warship after her Captain is promoted.   Lady “Sally” Fowler--niece of an imperial senator and an anthropologist--is a released captive taken prisoner during the rebellion.  The triad of starring roles is completed with the introduction of Horace Bury, a very wealthy trader who also happens to be a traitor (play on words unintentional).  
    The first two characters prove to be relatively flat.  Bury is the most interesting, but I often found myself to be uncomfortable with the way he was written.  He is a muslim man and portrayed as disingenuous, conniving, and self-serving.  The novel was published in 1974, and I doubt that there is any rascism intended.  Nevertheless, I could not help but be a little bothered by the fact that only character who “happens to be muslim” is also the book’s macguffin antagonist.  At least his background and personality give him some depth.
    Another individual I liked was Kevin Renner, the ship’s sailing master.  His smart-Alec personality was a much needed foil to Blane, the flat, crusty, royal commander.  It is an interesting quirk of the book that the secondary characters actually prove to be the most engaging.  It was not that I had a problem with Blaine or Sally’s characters; it was just that they worked because they are all too typical.
    While perhaps the quality of the characters varied, one thing I did like very much is that many introductions occurred in the midst of some ongoing action.  Blaine comes into the story battered, burned, and torn in an admiral’s office where he must explain his actions in the prior battle.  Renner is introduced as a sailing master in the act of being a sailing master and so on.  
    In general the opening scenes were good, and the exposition seemed important too the action.  After being pulled into the narrative, the reader watches the crew of the MacArthur face a new threat.  A solar sailing craft appears from the outsite the planetary system, and after preventing the ship from plunging straight into the sun, the MacArthur’s crew find that all aboard the extraterrestrial craft are dead.  This leads the empire to mount an expedition to the alien’s home system.
    The planet is located around a star behind the nonfictional Coalsack Nebula.  The yellow star is relatively close to a red supergiant, and from a nearby system, the coalsack appears to be a hooded man, the red star his eye, and the yellow star a mote or splinter.  The yellow star is thus “The Mote in God’s Eye.”  
    After traveling to the Mote (as the star comes to be known), MacArthur and the accompanying battleship Lenin investigate the source of the alien craft, and discover a species that is highly strange both biologically and socially.  The “Moties” are interesting aliens.  First their bodies are asymmetrical.  Second, their physical and mental traits are heavily tailored to function in specialized casts.  Engineers have incredible mechanical skill, watchmakers or workers efficiently repair and modify machinery, mediators exhibit incredible language learning and negotiation skills, and so on.  Similar ideas usually involve some sort of hive mind, but that is not the case in The Mote.  The Moties are a creative invention, and they are not like Star Trek aliens, who are essentially human but with a bumpy forehead and pointy ears.   
    My one critique is that I prefer when authors create aliens based on a little more elegant of a premise.  The Moties do not seem alien, as in truly distant and enigmatic, they just seem complicated.  The Buggers from Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game and its subsequent sequels were a good example of truly alien beings.  They were so different, that although the reader could relate to some of their thoughts motivations, there was always a sense that there was more behind the curtain.  Because they were alien, you could not truly enter their minds and understand them.  There was sense of depth, but it was a depth you could never explore, like pitch black cave that never sees any light.  On the other hand, the Moties are much more transparent.  
    The Mote in God’s Eye tries to be Hard Science Fiction with a capital “H.”  The spacecraft are fusion powered and can produce artificial gravity only through rotation or acceleration.  There are no “inertial dampers” or “anti-grav field.s,” so the crew must deal with high accelerations with good old-fashioned padded couches.  Interplanetary distances take weeks or months to traverse given the limits of acceleration and propellent.  Weapons systems are limited to lasers and fusion missiles.  
    There are two inventions that in the very least are implausible with known science, and at worst simply impossible.  The first is the Alderson drive, a jump drive that allows instantaneous travel from one solar system to another.  However, it is an extremely limited technology.  They can only be used at very specific locations within a solar system, and so spacecraft still spend a lot of time moving through a solar system trying to go from one “Alderson point” to another.  The second technology is the Langston field, a force field that absorbs energy and then reradiates it.  However, if too much energy is absorbed by the field, it will overload.  Each of these technologies, though completely fictional, has well defined limits.  This is why despite the prevalence of these technologies throughout the book, The Mote is a quintessential example of a Hard SF rating of 4.  
    The only implausible component spacecraft design that I noticed was the paper thin walls of the Motie ships.  These would not be very good for radiation protection, but Niven and Pourenelle obviously work very hard to portray interplanetary space travel in a realistic way.  
    The Mote in God’s Eye has many dramatic moments that make it a worthwhile  It is never really slow or boring with a generally engaging narrative.  The style is descriptive, giving a great deal of detail and background, but it never drags or gives information that feel extraneous.  But as I said at the beginning, I did not read this book. I listened to it.  I suspect it might have been slower on the page.  I may buy a hard copy sometime to test this theory.  We will see.  
    I recommend The Mote in God’s Eye to established science fiction fans.  It is probably not a good introduction to the genera for anyone new to it.  If you like technical detail, and unorthodox plotlines, this is a book for you.  
    

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