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| Author | Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | Science fiction novel |
| Publisher | Simon and Schuster |
| Publication date | 1974 |
| Publication place | United States |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover & Paperback) |
| Pages | 537 pp |
| ISBN | ISBN 0-671-21833-6 Parameter error in {{ISBNT}}: invalid character |
| Followed by | The Gripping Hand, 1993 |
The Mote in God's Eye, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, is a science fiction novel that was first published in 1974. The story is set in the distant future of Pournelle's CoDominium universe, and charts the first contact between Mankind and an alien species. The title of the novel is a wordplay on Luke 6:41
The book describes a complex alien civilization, the Moties. The Moties are radically different (both physically and psychologically) from humanity, in ways that become clearer over the course of the book. The human characters range from the typical hero type in Captain Roderick Blaine to the much more ambiguous merchant prince and suspected traitor Horace Bury. According to a quote on the cover of the original edition, Robert A. Heinlein called the book "possibly the finest science fiction novel I have ever read".
The novel is an example of hard science fiction, in that attention is paid to scientific detail. Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle are noted for writing in this genre, and it is especially evident in this work with regard to the theoretical mechanics and physics of interplanetary travel. The book's Alderson Drive and Langston Field are literary inventions, but they are presented against a background of established science knowledge.
One interesting aspect of the novel — in comparison to other works of science fiction — is how the alien race's psychology is influenced by its physiology. Prior to this work, most aliens in science fiction would have a physiology radically different from human, but act and think in much the same way.
A sequel to The Mote in God's Eye, entitled The Gripping Hand, was written by the same authors over twenty years later. It was published in the UK and other countries as The Moat around Murcheson's Eye.
Plot summary
Template:Spoiler The book is split up into four parts.
The Crazy Eddie Probe
In the year AD 3017, Mankind is recovering slowly from an interstellar civil war that tore apart the old Empire of Man. A new Empire has risen and is occupied in establishing control over the remnants of its predecessor, by force if needed.
Cmdr. Lord Roderick Blaine, having participated in the suppression of a rebellion on the planet of New Chicago, is given command of an Imperial battlecruiser, INSS MacArthur when the captain has to stay behind to restore order on the planet. Blaine is given secret orders to take Horace Hussein Bury, a powerful interstellar merchant who is suspected of fomenting the revolt for his own profit, to the Imperial capital, Sparta. Blaine is one of the few people wealthier than Bury, so he is the ideal man for the mission since he can't be bribed. MacArthur is to be repaired in the New Caledonia system, then proceed to the capital. Another passenger is Lady Sandra Bright Fowler ('Sally'), the niece of an Imperial Senator and a rescued prisoner of the rebels.
New Caledonia is the capital of the Trans-Coalsack sector, located on the opposite side of the Coalsack Nebula from Earth. Also in the sector is a red supergiant star known as Murcheson's Eye. Associated with it is a yellow Sun-like star. From New Caledonia, the yellow star appears in front of the Eye. Since some see the Eye and the Coalsack as the face of a hooded man, perhaps even the face of God, the yellow star is known as the Mote in God's Eye.
While in the New Caledonia system, Blaine receives a message saying that an alien spacecraft has been detected, and that orders MacArthur to intercept it. Human ships use the Alderson Drive, which allows them to "jump" instantaneously between points in specific star systems. The alien craft, by contrast, is propelled by a solar sail, taking 150 years to cross between stars at sublight speed. MacArthur duly intercepts the craft and is fired upon by its automated systems, but manages to capture it relatively intact. However, on arrival at the planet New Scotland, its single occupant, evidently the pilot, is found to be dead.
The alien is bizarrely asymmetric, with two delicate arms on one side of its body and a single, much larger and stronger arm on the other. Although it is bipedal and has a head and face similar to humans, its anatomy is entirely different. It has no flexible spine and the face is capable of little expression. It is the first alien race that humans have come into contact with. The ship itself is composed of alloys with remarkable properties and designed around unique, custom-built parts, no two alike, that perform multiple unrelated tasks simultaneously.
The Crazy Eddie Point
MacArthur and the battleship Lenin are sent to the Mote: the star from which the alien ship came. MacArthur carries civilian research teams intended to meet with and investigate the Moties, while Lenin is there to "ride shotgun" on the mission, avoiding all contact with the aliens. Aboard Lenin is the commander in charge of the mission, Admiral Lavrenti Kutuzov, a ruthless, supremely loyal officer who had already sterilized one rebellious colony planet to safeguard Imperial Reunification. Bury goes along (since they need a merchant to assess the trade possibilities and also because there is nobody trustworthy enough to take him to the capital), as does Sally, a trained anthropologist. Despite (or, rather due to) the civilians' distrust, Blaine remains in command of MacArthur
The Mote has only one Alderson point leading to it, and to reach it, the ships must actually enter the outer layers of the red supergiant itself before activating the drive. This is only possible because they also have the Langston Field for protection. Supergiant stars are up to 500 million km in diameter, but the outer layers are basically a hot vacuum.
MacArthur successfully makes contact with the Moties. They have advanced technology (in some areas superior to that of the First Empire, much less the current Second), but seem friendly and willing to share it. Indeed, they would have been a formidable threat to Humanity, had they not been bottled up in their home system. They had independently invented the Alderson Drive, calling it the "Crazy Eddie" Drive, but the ships that used it had all disappeared and never come back. In fact, they were destroyed because the other end of the tramline ended inside the supergiant. The Moties deduce that humans use the drive because MacArthur and Lenin appear at the "Crazy Eddie Point".
Meet Crazy Eddie
The Moties are an old species that has evolved into many specialized subspecies. The first encountered is an Engineer, a brown form with amazing technical abilities but limited speech. The next are Mediators, brown and white forms like the dead pilot, who have astounding communication and negotiation skills. Each one adopts a particular human in the contact party, becoming his (her in Sally's case) Fyunch (click), studying its subject and learning how to think like him or her, even to the point of exactly reproducing voices and mannerisms. Other forms include the white Masters and non-sentient versions kept for menial work.
These and others are encountered when the contact party visits the planet Mote Prime at the invitation of the Moties. They reside in a special building created for them, protected from the polluted and poisonous atmosphere. From there, they are taken to places of interest in the surrounding city, such as an "art gallery", which seems to be more of a monument to events in history. The Moties attempt to interest their visitors, especially Bury, in the commercial possibilities of continued contact between the civilizations.
Back on MacArthur, disaster strikes. A pair of tiny Motie Watchmakers brought aboard by the Engineer the humans first met had escaped, and although it was assumed they had died, they had actually been breeding furiously. Watchmakers are not sentient, but have an extremely highly developed instinct for technology — and, unknown to the human crew, had been quietly redesigning and rebuilding MacArthur - whilst continuing to breed. When they are discovered, there are already large numbers aboard, and a furious battle for control of the ship breaks out. The crew is eventually forced to abandon ship; Lenin has no choice but to destroy MacArthur. The contact party is recalled without explanation and told to rendezvous directly with Lenin.
Three MacArthur midshipmen who managed to escape from the ship in lifeboats (ironically enough, lifeboats constructed by the descendants of the escaped Watchmakers) land on Mote Prime. Exploring unsupervised for the first time, they make a startling discovery — the Moties are not nearly as peaceful as they had carefully portrayed themselves. They are sequential hermaphrodites, changing sex over and over again over the course of their lives — with one quirk: if a Motie remains female for too long without becoming pregnant, the hormone imbalance will kill her. This forces the species to be extremely prolific, with a birth rate that ensures a never-ending population explosion. Attempts at population control through chemicals or infanticide have always failed for the Moties, because those who (secretly or openly) breed uncontrolled eventually swamp those Moties who complied. Once the population pressure rises high enough, massive wars inevitably result, which kill off almost everybody — only to have the survivors rebuild and repeat the cycle. So devastating are these wars that, in the past, Mote Prime has been completely sterilized several times, to be repopulated by those living in outer space, mostly in hollowed-out asteroids.
The Cycles of civilization, war, and collapse have apparently been going on for millions of years. In the process, the Moties mutated from earlier symmetrical forms. They have become fatalistically resigned to the neverending Cycles, and have evolved an instinctive aversion to birth control of any kind. Only a mythical character called "Crazy Eddie" believes there is a way out, and any motie who comes to believe a way out is possible is labeled as insane and a "Crazy Eddie."
The midshipmen also find that there is a Warrior caste, far superior in combat to any human soldier (even the hated, enhanced Sauron supermen). The three humans are killed by Warriors from one faction, despite assistance from a friendly Motie Master. One of the Mediators helping them, known as Charlie, is returned to its Master and sent as one of the ambassadors to Lenin.
Crazy Eddie's Answer
Lenin returns home, taking with it — in violation of explicit orders to avoid contact at all costs— three Motie ambassadors. Kutuzov takes this step only after much debate.
The Motie party consists of two Mediators, Charlie and Jock, and a sterile white Master, known as Ivan. Their mission is to open the galaxy to their ships while concealing from the humans the frightening facts about the Moties: the Cycles, the wars and the Warriors. They have to deal with problems ranging from the conditions in their quarters, where the atmosphere is breathable but too pure, to their inability to fully understand human motives.
When the Alderson Drive is used to Jump out of the Mote system, it becomes obvious that as bad as the Jump is for humans, Moties suffer much more from the nervous system effects and remain incapacitated after a Jump for a longer period of time.
Back at New Caledonia, the Empire holds talks aimed at establishing trade and peaceful relations with the Moties, not realizing the danger. Fortunately, McArthur's sailing master, the unconventional Kevin Renner, manages to put together various clues they had picked up during the expedition-particularly a series of images gained from the probe that led the Empire to the Mote(showing, in detail, the well-kept secret of the Motie Warrior caste)-and proves to the others the magnitude of the threat in time. The threat they face is that the inescapable destructive cycles, which had been restricted to Mote Prime because the Moties could not leave their system, would be inflicted upon the entire galaxy. The Moties can not stop breeding, and while expansion to other planets seems a solution, this only works until all planets are full with Moties - at which time a devastating war for space and resources will begin.
It seems that they will have no choice but to send the Fleet in to destroy the Motie civilisation totally, but at the last minute, Charlie convinces the humans to blockade the Alderson point instead and keep their people confined to their own system for the foreseeable future. The Moties are so helpless after a Jump that they will be unable to fend off any attack by human ships stationed in the Eye itself. This turns out to be the case— even when Motie ships come equipped with improved versions of the Langston Field, they cannot survive both the Eye's hot photosphere and the blockading ships both inside and outside the star.
The book ends with one of the Motie Mediators predicting that the humans will take over the Motie civilization after the next collapse, and wondering if perhaps the humans might be able to force an end to the Cycles after all.
Notes
Setting
The original intent of the authors was to write the ultimate First Contact novel. Casting around for a model society, they decided to use the CoDominium future history already written by Pournelle. Various features of this, particularly the form of government, the Alderson Drive and Langston Field technology, and the existence of Murcheson's Eye on the other side of the Coalsack, were ideal for their purposes.
Technology
Although they invented the Alderson Drive and the Langston Field technology, the authors go to great lengths to keep the rest of the novel within the bounds of known science. The spaceships, in particular, have significant limitations despite having highly efficient nuclear propulsion systems based on hydrogen fusion, aided by the ability of the Langston Field to confine and direct hot plasma. They cannot zip from planet to planet in mere hours. In pursuit of the Motie probe, MacArthur accelerates at up to 4 g for five days to match velocities at about 6% of the speed of light, then has to decelerate to reach New Scotland safely, arriving more or less out of fuel. Warships like MacArthur tend to get to their destinations as fast as possible using constant acceleration and deceleration, while commercial ships coast on long transfer orbits to conserve fuel. When artificial gravity is needed, the ships are spun to produce centrifugal force.
The Alderson Drive and Langston field also have their drawbacks. Alderson Jumps are bad for delicate electronics and biological systems, especially nerves. Electronic equipment has to be shut down for the duration of a Jump and carefully restarted afterwards. For this reason, the crews of Navy ships are quite young, as the young recover faster than their elders. Blaine is only 25 standard years old. His junior officers range down to midshipmen in their mid-teens. It turns out that the Moties suffer much worse than humans in this respect.
Jumps can also only be performed from specific jump points or Alderson Points. These are said to be points of equipotential thermonuclear flux between two stars and can be difficult to find. Thus, escaping a battle by "jumping to lightspeed" is nearly impossible in this universe.
The Langston field can absorb energy, but must store it somewhere or redirect it away to the outside, otherwise the field will overload and collapse, with all the energy being directed into the ship, vaporizing it.
In spite of these limitations, the ships are immensely powerful, not only with their armaments of high-power lasers and nuclear missiles, but with the fusion drives that can themselves be used as plasma weapons, especially against unprotected ground targets. These plasma beams can also be used to burn roadways across the landscape to help in terraforming a world. This is mentioned during the MacArthur's stopover at New Scotland in the New Caledonia system. While the ships seem to have vast reserves of power, from time to time, all engine power has to be allocated to send a message across interplanetary distances using a maser. The Langston Field or some variant thereof is used within the fusion drive, presumably to contain a fusion reaction sufficiently intense to provide enough energy to power the ship.
Some other technologies of the Second Empire of Man are mentioned. Marines are armed with lasers and laser resistant armor. People use PDA-like pocket computers, which at the time of the novel’s writing, was considered futuristic and fantastic. Despite this, the Second Empire is not quite as advanced as the First Empire. Some knowledge, such as the fabrication of ultrastrong materials, has been lost. Due to interstellar war, some worlds have even reverted to primitive levels of civilization.
Motie culture
Masters command the loyalty and obedience of groups of other kinds of Moties, such as Engineers, Warriors, Doctors, etc. However they are not good negotiators, Mediators were created as sterile hybrids of the white Masters and brown Engineers to minimize the number of wars between rival Masters. Mediators will always obey Masters, so they cannot themselves change the direction of Motie civilization, but they have considerable latitude to do their job. There is no money economy as such, but Masters barter prestige, material goods, etc. A few sterile Masters (unlikely to attempt a takeover for their children) are designated as Keepers and given control of the Museums where knowledge is carefully stored to aid recovery after collapse. When a civilization is doing well, alliances of Masters can cooperate to achieve great things, but the urge to reproduce always causes the alliances to break down, usually resulting in catastrophic wars.
Motie technology
After thousands of Cycles, the Motie system is depleted of important materials like metals. Where human technology relies on specialized devices, often with multi-redundant backups, Moties rely on the technological idiot savant Engineers, assisted by the semi-intelligent miniature Watchmakers, to constantly build and rebuild devices to order, recycling existing parts that are not needed at the moment. For instance, rather than have a programmable autopilot in a ship, an Engineer would build one to send a ship to a new location, using its ever-present kit of tools and advanced materials. Moties do not use computers as such, relying on the instincts of their specialized castes for jobs such as space navigation. On the ground, Engineers drive at breakneck speed on crowded roads without fear of collision, and upon reaching destination, will dismantle their cars so they won’t take too much parking space.
Another feature of Motie technology is that, to save material and weight, devices perform multiple functions simultaneously, such as being both structural components and sensors. However, having adapted to space, the off-planet Moties are at home in zero gravity and do not have to spin their ships. This has important consequences for the structure of their ships, which is always in flux in any case.
One of the complaints of the ambassadors is they have no Engineer with them to customize their cabin and beds, and to build them devices to help them live more comfortably. An Engineer would have given away the secrets of Motie biology, especially the reproductive compulsion.
Crazy Eddie
This is a translation of the term the Moties use for any exercise in futility, or any attempt to do, or even think about doing, anything to try to stop the inevitable collapse of their current civilization which is war driven by overpopulation. Their version of the Alderson Drive was called the Crazy Eddie Drive. The spaceship sent to New Caledonia was called the Crazy Eddie Probe, particularly since the effort needed to send it on its way with huge lasers caused a collapse all by itself. The Mediator assigned to Rod Blaine goes Crazy Eddie, infected by Blaine's idealism. Going Crazy Eddie is an occupational hazard for these Mediators, who cannot deal with humans ability to switch between different roles in their society, or who succumb to the altruism in human nature.
It is unknown whether the term Crazy Eddie was conceived independently of the electronics discount store of the same name or inspired by it. While at the time the novel was written, the Crazy Eddie stores were confined to a small part of New York City and the authors lived in California, the Crazy Eddie brand had become a pop culture phenomenon appearing in comedy routines and trivia references.
Awards and nominations
- Nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1975.
- Nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1975.
External links
- A review in Classic SciFi
- A review on Tal Cohen's Bookshelf
- Portions of the book are available online for free (or the entirety, for pay) through Baen's WebScription service including the never-before published "prologue".