Just re-read it after 30 yrs. I still love it. A true classic.

The test of a great sci fi: how many dreams does it inspire years after you read it. The Mote passes the test!

Just finished and it was really fantastic! I agree with you about the slow down about 2/3 through. The energy kind of sagged there but I thought the ending was very satisfying. You have a real talent for communicating literary concepts which are intelligent and relatable in a straight forward, unpretentious way. You would be a good English teacher.

One of the best sci-fi books ever written! Great video, outstanding analysis! Keep up the good work!

Right on. I loved reading The Mote.

One of the finest sci fi novels ever written. My only issue with it was it took too long to encounter the Crazy Eddie Probe. The whole Battle of New Chicago sequence could have been truncated. I understand they already cut out about sixty pages on Robert Heinlein's suggestion. I think they could have cut a bit more. Otherwise, it's just the best first contact novel I've ever read. So well thought out, surprising, scary, and also very funny at times. The Moties just felt very real.

This is a really well thought out review for having no notes! Thank you!

Have read it several times, and each time it’s very enjoyable. Must read!

Excellent review. I read this book 1980 and just re-read it this month. Your praise and criticisms are spot on. If it were rewritten today, it would likely keep the best parts and elevate some of the lesser parts (lack of women and minority characters, the Exposition March, slim down the characters and give them some more "character", etc.). Still, an important First Contact novel worth reading. I'm glad I re-read it.

I read this book when I was like 21 years old and I remember it being a pretty tuff read. Nice review.

Fun to see the chronology that is laid out in front of this story. Reminds me how we looked at 2020 in the 70s; it seemed to be far far into our future. I think Interstellar colonies by 2020 was a little bit optimistic. Well I think you did well there, without a script.

I think the very 1st top XX sci-fi books video i watched was yours, and had this (and Fire Upon the Deep) in your top 3. I built this huge TBR (and still growing). I had these two in my 2nd TBR batch, but i decided to move the Mote to the 3rd batch (as i assumed it could be similar to AFUTD). Futher videos from Media Deatch Cult and FIT2BR reinforced he feeling i needed to read these early. I finished the Mote in the last day of 2022, and indeed these 2 books are in my top 5. The Moties and the Tines are absolutely fascinanting, but i think the Mote is even better as a 1st contact story. You favourite (Blindsight if i remember well) is in my 4th batch, very likely to be read in February. Thank you for the suggestion and the review. Have a great reading 2023!

Absolutely love it - read it numerous times

This is some of the Good Stuff. Niven and Pournelle made a bunch more.

childhood's end is one of my favorites - I cannot read most of the old classic books - they can't keep me interested because of the slow writing- this one kept me engaged

Read this back in the late 1970s, so may be time for another look... My impression then was of a promising concept that didn't survive an apparent Committee Stage, spread out in too many directions & got rather messy. Niven's excursions outside Known Space (and plenty of the later ones within it) are pot-boilers: workmanlike, but ultimately lacking the flair of Ringworld, Protector et al. Thank you for a thoughtful & insightful appraisal. 👍

Thank you, will have to give it a read

I also read this book recently. It seems to have some 70's obsession with population explosion, nuclear war, and the resulting genetic effects of radiation. Other than the "magic" of the Alderson Drive and Langston Field they approach the mechanics of space travel and combat in a believable way. I walked away after this with a feeling that the book was a warning about the state of the Earth during the Cold War.

Up there with Clarkes 'Rendedvous with Rama' ....fer sure. 😎

Very nice review of a truly great book. I agree with all of your concerns about it, especially why Sally was the only female onboard (with "predictable" motivation for the romancing of Captain Blain) and the inconsequential storyline for Chaplain Hardy, etc. I read the whole book within 1 day after getting it in 1974 (not much schoolwork done that day) and have often reread it. It basically still holds up. The Moties are a very different, non-stereotyped, alien, driven by their biology in a way that quietly became apparent as the story evolved. It's a really good read. Thanks!

I had never really thought much about it before, but it does make sense that science fiction novels take a little while to get going in the beginning. In a "normal" novel set in the familiar world, the reader already knows a great deal of background information, what has come before and how everything works. In a science fiction novel, much of that has to be explicitly explained in some way and mostly before the story gets going.

I'm from Samoa, in the NUS library I saw this on the shelf. Just picked it up for no reason and thought, " hm cool title". Boom! Best Sci-fi book I've ever read! It's got gory action! It's got a wide range of badass characters! It's got romance and heeaps of space awesomeness!! 👌 the cover is purple tho with an eye in front lol I think it was a really old edition not sure. But it was pretty cool. This got me into star trek and lower decks is the best one of the new series. Anyways highly recommend Edit: never occurred to me the book was a best seller, but I guess it makes sense seeing how a copy was found on the corner of the most unvisited shelf in the library😂

I have really been finding myself with the itch to get back to the roots of this genre and the classic older books that paved the way for today’s SciFi… it’s been on my TBR and moving up dramatically along with Vernor Vinge, Hyperion by Simmons and Asimov’s the Foundation…Also Iain M Banks, Philip K Dick and Arthur C Clarke etc…I enjoyed this review…Nice job and keep up the good works…👍🏻

Vinges childhoods end and The mote in gods eye are some of my enduring favorites that have not been unseated - ive reread both multiple times. I picked up mote in gods eye for 5pence in a second hand bookshop and held on to the dogeared corner clipped copy for about 20 years. I still regret letting it go

I loved this book, it really set up the mystery of the moties very interestingly. Not sure if I could have guessed the big secret, but It was interesting how the moties crafted their entire society around it. The concept of Crazy Eddy was very interesting, I'd love to see more books that dive into the philosophical abstracts of alien society, or rather how aliens much different from us think of themselves in the grand scheme of things. I am afraid to read the follow up books because they don't get as good reviews as this one.

For some reason I couldn't get Captain Kirk out of my head every time Captain Blaine had a scene. So I just went with that. He has a lot of Captain Kirk energy.

I was nervous about your review, going in. Hadn't read it in years and I only just reread their treatment of Dante, Inferno, which I found a bit cringy on my second dive. Having been a huge fan of Mote, I have been hedging going back to read it again, given my response to the other. I recall loving a lot about it. The characters, from alien to human, against the well set sense of historical sweep wrapped in a compelling mystery at the center, resonated with me long after I set it down. I remember thinking, "I wonder if special effects will ever let this make it to the big screen?" and thinking, after LOTR, that the answer was fast closing on "Yes." I feel better about the prospects of a reread now. Thanks, again.

Good review

I read this book 30 years ago when I was in my 20s, and it scared the shit out of me. Those aliens, damn you did not want to encounter them.

Good review! Thanks!

The Gripping Hand is a fun return to the universe of Men and Moties, must read.

Sorry to spam this comments section, but the only other SF book with the same sense of mystery and discovery I've read is "Rendevous With Rama" by Arthur C. Clarke.

Love that first contact happens in the midst of a broader war, out of nowhere The moties are so odd, and even horrific at times. So unique The book just sits with you afterwards. You appreciate it the more you mull it over. Yeah, an utter classic

Love this book. Another first contact book series I love are the Commonwealth Sage (Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained)

They had Robert Freaking Heinlein doing multiple critiques and editing passes on it, so much that he arguably should have been a co-author. Without giving spoilers, I realized on a later re-reading that it had a lot of the elements of a horror story, too. As for the big expository lump, the original manuscript had been something like 150,000 words longer, and Heinlein had counseled Larry & Jerry to make huge cuts. The remaining large lump was something of a confessional- the negotiators were pleading for their species' survival, and it seemed to me to be an understandable act of desperation. And did Jerry predict tablet computers and smart phones, or what?

Nice review.

The Mote in God’s Eye is a great novel, once of the rare examples of what i call a classic. The sequel is so-so, but readable, but this novel is brilliant. I feel it would make a great movie, assumed the movie is true to the book which is not a common result once Hollywood gets a novel.

I _love_ a good first contact book. What I find strange about this book is that sociology of Moties is rather well drawn, with interesting factors creating cyclical overpopulation crises and even more interesting outcomes of those crises, while _human_ society, navy in particular, is described in decidedly YA way - swashbuckling in space, damsels in distress and all. This gives a pretty juvenile taste to me - entertaining, no doubt, but not much more.

Since 1999 I have knocked 130 items off a meta-list called "162 Science Fiction and Fantasy Classics". Plus a bunch of other scifi. This is definitely among the very best.

A good review, thanks. A good First Content is "To Serve Man" by Damon Knight. Not as good and it is a short story, but worthwhile. "To Serve Man" is a science fiction short story by American writer Damon Knight. It first appeared in the November 1950 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction and has been reprinted a number of times, including in Frontiers in Space (1955), Far Out (1961), and The Best of Damon Knight (1976).

Wonderful book.

Great novel. Signal to Noise by Eric Nylund is another great first contact novel.

There is a sequel (The Gripping Hand) that is, if I remember correctly was not too bad, not as good as the original, but doesn't ruin the overall concept of the original. Suggested classic SF reading, Sten series by Allan Cole and Chris Bunch - The first good military SF I read, you will like the protagonist as he grows up an indentured servant on a space factory. Liege-Killer series by Christopher Hinz - Nice post apocalypse series.

Ugh. I read it years ago and it seemed OK at the time. When I tried it recently, I couldn't get further than a few pages. Its acceptance of the military paradigm is worse than Heinlein's. It's tough getting old.

I ran into this review, and it's correct. I have a couple ideas to add without spoilers: The 70s sexism is present with the "rape" swear word. It was jarring even when I read the book in the 80s. Fair cop. However, I believe that the future-Empire's sexism is an intentional part of the setting and is directly relevant to the plot. That there is only one woman onboard the MacArthur, and that the mores of Empire society are paternalistic, hinders the human characters' ability to solve the mystery. This is implied many times and stated out loud at least once. The biology of the Moties is what it is because otherwise they would have solved their central problem the same way humans on Earth have solved it- without going into spoilers, social change driven by technology. The Moties, being all the same in ways humans are not, can't follow the same path. The sexist flaw in the story is that Sally isn't the one to crack the mystery even when she is so well positioned to do so. By training, status, and direct observation she should have. That would have been a hell of an arc. As for the romance, I didn't even notice it when I first read the book because it's so irrelevant. The nicest thing I can say is that the primary drive of the main characters is duty, and there's a conversation about it that almost excuses the subplot. Re-reading the book, there was some subtle humor early on when the Moties are answering the phone and telling Rod and Sally if the other was around or had called recently, showing the aliens understood what was going on better than the supposed lovers. Jerry Pournelle, for some reason, seems to be very talented at creating future dystopian societies which are so believable that many readers come away thinking he is advocating for them. His CoDominium stories, which are the backstory for the "Mote" universe, were intentionally dystopian but have been criticized as pro-fascist because his characters are stuck in it. He didn't like the way the world was going in the 70s, extrapolated it into the future, and used it as a setting. The Empire of Man as portrayed in "Mote" is paranoid, authoritarian, unnecessarily violent, and the final chapter implies that it had to make political changes as a result of the events of the novel. This is an implied critique of the state of things at the beginning, when the main characters are suppressing a revolt. The novel's resolution is as hopeful as it could be given what has happened, showing that human (and Moties) aren't simply pawns of fate (maybe). It's not a postmodern downer ending where nothing was learned and nothing changed. Pournelle and Niven had an opinion about how a large galactic state could be organized politically and socially, and they did the work to back it up. It's not simply their own society projected in the future (they lived through the 60s.) Neither author was particularly conservative for the time. It's a tragic view of human, and Motie, nature. Pournelle in particular seems to have believed that humans have a tendency to fall into certain ideologies and social organizations unless they actively resist. He doesn't like it, but that's how it is. In my own books, I tried to make a future society consistent with the setting even though it required beliefs and attitudes I don't personally agree with. It wasn't possible to have the setting without a flawed society. That experience may give me a different perspective. Larry Niven is more of a weirdo, and I'm positive MacArthur's fate was his idea. This is one of the few collaborative SF novels worth a damn.

I agree about the admiral in particular I mean you go in wanting to hate him as much as everyone else hates him but he is so much more complex

Love this book.❤❤❤

Can I make a request, can you order these books your reviewing in order of most favorite to least. Maybe a year bi-yearly round of top favorite books and re-recommendation for new readers to sci-fi, hidden jem that is passed over, etc.

Quozl By Alan Dean Foster is a good foil to this book.

Almost all the books written together by Niven and Pournelle are interesting, but this is the best. Not totally convinced by the idea of idiot savant engineers, but it works well plot wise.

“I’ve done nothing in the way of preparation.” Great!

Lucifers hammer, Footfall, Nivea and Pournelle wrote a lot of great books, but this one is truly the best. And don't forget the sequel. This is the world history of the co-Dominion of Russia and the United States, and what came about after the first space faring civilization collapse, which led to a kind of techno feudalism. This and Footfall are my two favorites of this writing team.

Vinge's _A Deepness in the Sky_ and MacLeod's _Learning the World_ both feature aliens that are neither out to conquer us nor to benevolently guide us. Similarly _cheela_ in Forward's _Dragon's Egg_ novels. Interestingly, all those alien races develop swiftly after the contact with us. Then, of course, there are Lem's aliens, with whom we are utterly incapable of communicating.

The original premise of this novel - interstellar FTL travel becomes possible in the early 21st century - is very silly imho. I think quite a few scifi writers went in overdrive in the 1970s. Maybe they thought: Yesterday the moon? Well, tomorrow the stars! This happens in The Mote in God's Eye, The Forever War (Joe Haldeman), Spacecraft 2000 to 2100 AD (Stewart Cowley) etc. Incredible leaps in technology in just a few decades after the viewpoint of the writers (the 1970s). However I liked The Mote in God's Eye, an interesting first contact story between two cilivizations, each in its own cycle of rise and decline. The crazy Eddie concept was interesting. Maybe more important is that we humans are just amateurs compared to what the Moties could achieve... IF they can break the restrains of their Cycles. I have one or two other novels set in the CoDominium universe, although in the real timeline the Soviet Union fell apart before the CoDominium even started.

The sequel, The Gripping Hand, is also pretty darn good.

On the gripping hand...

Try Footfall by the same duo!

Have you read the other 2 books? One By Pournelle & Niven the other by Pournelle's child (middle east archeologist, get that tied in).

Is there any relevance to the pocket computer in your interpretation?

Another Niven, Pournelle collaboration with Steven Barnes thrown in The Legacy of Heorot

I’m really, really surprised this got such a glowing review from you. Full disclosure, I’m just a bit beyond the two thirds of the book and so I may still be missing some plot points (although I think the central secret about the Moties has already been revealed), but at the moment this seems to me like a long Star Trek movie, and I don’t mean it in a good way. In my opinion it’s poorly written (not a native English speaker, so I can accept I may be missing some subtleties, but not sure how much given that 3/4 of the novel seem to be dialogue among the crew, not a small part of it quite prosaic). In my favour, I’ve never heard Niven or Pournelle being mentioned as outstanding literary stylists. Ok, so I don’t like the style. The problem is that I haven’t found any specially good or original ideas either (maybe if I had read this when it was published I would think otherwise, but I doubt it). The treatment of the details of the first contact is strikingly poor in my opinion (I’m thinking Contact by Sagan for comparison) and it seems to me that the crew does really dumb things in dealing with such a risky and trascendental occasion. The aliens’ psychology, despite the authors trying hard to make us think the opposite, is quite human from my point of view (ok, we can’t be reading all the time things like Solaris, but you get my point). To sum up, I can’t see anything remarkable in it (leaving aside nostalgia for juvenile readings that transpire many of the comments). Pity, because I was using your public videos as source of recommendations for my next readings (giving your insistence in literary quality), but this makes me doubt that we share the same taste… or maybe I’ll change my opinion after I finish the novel, all is possible, though at this point quite unlikely.

I find it interesting that people expect aliens to be alien, but they don’t expect future humans to be alien.

I don't think I've ever felt so at odds with popular opinion on a book. I found the characters extremely two-dimensional, particularly the main protagonist. The stakes never felt high to me, even in the midst of pitched battles. And god yes it feels dated - I had to double check that it was written in 1974, it reads more like something written in 1944. Le Guin's 'The Dispossessed' and Priests 'Inverted World' were written the same year and feel infinitely more modern both thematically and in form. The one thing I did enjoy was the alien world building and culture which was very well constructed. I'd like to have spent more time there. This was my first read of a Niven book, and probably my last.

The sexism is deliberate, to indicate what sort of society the Second Empire has. Empires in the emerging/consolidating phase are always far more sexist than empires in the decadent/degenerate phase (such as we are going through now). It becomes a plot point later on-the Moties named their metaphor “Crazy Eddie” _because_ the Empire was a patriarchy, so a male name would be more relatable to Navy personnel.

I never got spoiler warnings I’m immune so it just washed past me

Aaron Rodgers does a book review.

The non-critical use of an extremely violent militaristic empire as the human setting is weird (especially as an Irish person after what the English did to us).

The most believable, truly alien extraterrestrials in any book. You need to read "The Gripping Hand" several of your concerns are resolved there. A proper review should include both books.

Interesting how the alien culture is complicated and has conflicting self interests... another book that has that kind of contact with humans is "the gods themselves" by isaac asimov (a play on "against the stupidity of masses, the gods themselves contend in vain")

Couldn't get past the boring first act and this is convincing me to give it another try to reach the better paced sections.

Frustrating so few great 1st contact novels, as collectively they may become the most important literature we have. Literature at its best prepares us for situations we might experience, and for which we cannot practice. Aliens will be alien. That truism cannot be overstated.

You have attractive hands. Just saying.

You are concerned about sexism in the book while the plot is about justifying "Final Solution", LOL. I'm not imagining things, the book has direct nаzi and cоmmie referenсes. It's even in the name of one of the chapters. Elephant in the room.

It's kinda shitte. I read this book because of your review and holy hell it was a slog. Deepness in the Sky is like 2 orders of magnitude better

Never read this book, but I have wondered why is it that SF in particular suffers from this problem of sexist or racist or otherwise problematic content as you traverse backwards through the decades. Why does literary fiction not suffer from this problem, seemingly at all? You never come across Faulkner or Nabokov or Joyce being critically "found out" in this fashion. At this point every review of vintage SF has to start with a disclaimer about how high it scores on the sexism and racism meters, and whether or not there's still some core science-fictional pleasures that can be salvaged from it.

I feel like first contact stories is in the similar category of if you read one then you might have read them all lol. It's sub genre of spin takes mainly. Thankfully there's still good ones worth reading.

I just read this quote on Wikipedia about the book in the Reception section: Brian W. Aldiss and David Wingrove reported that while the imagined aliens were "fascinating creations", the "style and characterization [emphasize] the weaknesses of both Niven and Pournelle." If you agree with their reception, would you be able to say what the particular "weaknesses" of Niven and Pournelle are that they say the style and characterization emphasize about them? Thank you.

your etsy link no worky. 404 is a bad answer to life, the universe and your books! PLease correct it so we can drop in and peruse :)