The Mote in God's Eye

"We have wrought upon ourself and others
With a slow and vicious gun
And although pratfalls can be fun
Encores can be fatal

 

And we don't wanna read the signs that you bore
You know, the kind of sign you hang on a door
Saying "we'll be back" what a crack
Now, don't you think we might have heard that before?"

 

Andrew Bird - Heretics

 

 

Guess I'm on a bit of a Niven kick this year. In addition to The Integral Trees I queued up its sequel for later, re-read Protector (which always felt more packed with ideas than Ringworld, absence of big dumb object notwithstanding) and picked up The Mote in God's Eye while I was at it. Often title-dropped but rarely discussed so that I honestly didn't even know what subgenre of SF I'd be reading, it turned out to be one of the finest first contact stories I've ever run across!

 

Most of the book's flaws come from playing up its setting, which even in 1974 would've been readily recognizable as a space opera space empire with a space navy and space marines... and that's about it. (I'd guess Pournelle's CoDominium normally gives politics primacy instead of relegating it to plot-unrelated backstory filler.) Also, had it limited itself to a five-man band or similar roster, the lengthy introductions may have felt less painful, but a full warship's complement took me until mid-novel to even partially distinguish, especially as their personalities rarely diverge from HelloSailors #1-15. More concisely obstructive, the climax gets interrupted so the daring space captain/prince and the plucky princess can marry... and keep getting married for a whole chapter or two... and if you're waiting for that to acquire some relevance to meeting an alien species, no, not unless you count women hailing from Venus. I kept imagining storyboard space allocated to: "a wedding, a wedding, we're going to have a wedding!"

On the flip-side, that weird pause also demarcates the last third of the novel, one third longer than you'd expect it to run. After the space marines battle valiantly against an invasion plus a plucky band of heroes stumble upon the grand reveal, leading to a climactic chase scene and heroic stand, you'd think a story'd just wind down for a few pages to a sappy conclusion. Mote instead uses the wedding breather to launch into the real pay-off: the stand-off. In the end, the two writers did end up complemeting each other well, as human militarism and political infighting reflects on the moties' own quirk recalling pak mental inflexibility and bouts for supremacy.

A fifty year old novel inevitably suffers from some more or less excusable lapses. For one thing it places heavy emphasis on security to prevent spying and invasions. On closer inspection their security measures are laughable, with lots of spottily supervised physical contact and ship boardings. Given what we now know about miniaturization, letting a potentially hostile alien just pack an overnight bag (including housepets!) and hop on over to our boat sounds crazy. Crazy Eddie even. And if the lack of teleoperation, video conferencing, simulations or automation merely reflects how badly Moore's Law blindsided us all, 1970s epidemiology would certainly have raised an eyebrow at the lack of quarantine. The moties' focus on engineering contrasted with an apparently rudimentary understanding of biology would've also been better served by the explicit absence of a doctor caste as plot point.

 

But overall The Mote in God's Eye does an excellent job of presenting an alien species strange enough to be alien but without reaching for nonsense as originality, at once sub- and super-human, initially inscrutable before discovering their driving psychosis, the proverbial beam in their own eyes. It obviously inspired many of the caste-divided aliens I've run across in later decades' scifi. Motie history itself, though not given enough worldbuilding attention for my tastes, recaps several popular scifi scenarios offhandedly. If anything, the writing lingers on the human point of view for too long and would've benefited from a more decisive shift to motie psychology toward the end, recalling Asimov's The Gods Themselves whose third part I can barely remember, a let-down after the highly thoughtful middle section. Nevertheless, the last three chapters deliver solidly on the ambiguity of a well-executed first contact premise. Neither devils nor angels, potentially both beneficial and dangerous, destructive and self-destructive, the extraterrestrials' handling is ultimately ruled by a game theoretical analysis of possibilities, not idealized expectations.

Despite some gratuitous lulls, definitely worth a read.

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(Spoiler) P.S.: If you'll permit me to nitpick the evolutionary angle, at one point it's mentioned that tribes with mediators lived longer than tribes without, falling at least verbally into the group selection fallacy. Selection must operate on units of information transfer across generations, which is to say genes. The precept can work, but it's better viewed as kin selection bias, in which mediator mules would favor the propagation of their genetically similar relatives, as genetically similar as possible. Likely each individual master would have to be served exclusively by its own mediator offspring. (If not this may, in fact, work as an alternate explanation for the mediators' tendency to go off the rails.) Also, as mediators are a master/engineer mix, engineers better able to coordinate with their mediator offspring to propagate their own line would be equally favored by the arrangement. Imagine Heinlein's The Roads Must Roll if the villain had benefited from the unshakeable familial loyalty of several media and public relations operatives.

Of course, that doesn't take into consideration that such kin recognition instincts can be hijacked even in humans (that's what uniforms, anthems, hymns, slang, fandoms and other communal badges and rituals are) but still, an interesting idea.