The Mote in God’s Eye is yet another book that I’ve been meaning to read for a long time. It’s co-authored by Larry Niven of Ringworld fame and is considered one of the finest examples in the sub-genre of alien first contact stories. I’ve been actively looking for stories of this type ever since I read Peter Watts’ Blindsight earlier this year. For the most part, it holds up surprisingly well for a book originally published in 1975 and the alien species at its center compares favorably even against the strangeness of today’s science-fiction.
The most dated aspect of the novel is the banality of its vision for the human civilization of the future. It basically amounts to aristocratic feudalism in space, with absolute loyalty to an emperor justified on the grounds that human unity must be upheld at all costs because of the horrific devastation interplanetary warfare can cause. To modern eyes, the novel’s glorification of military service looks positively quaint. Here the good guys are invariably the noble and hard-headed soldiers while the bad guys are the civilians, whether businessmen who are out to make a quick buck at the expense of humanity as a whole, or bleeding heart civilian scientists who are woefully naive about the harsh realities of survival.