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The Mote in God's Eye, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, was called "possibly the finest science fiction novel I have ever read" by Robert A. Heinlein. It appeared in 1975. 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 book is notable for the complex alien civilization which the authors have developed — the Moties are believably different both physically and psychologically in a way that becomes more clearly explained as we progress through the book. The human characters range from the typical hero type in Captain Roderick Blaine to the much more ambiguous merchant and traitor Horace Bury.

The novel is an example of hard science fiction, in that attention is paid to scientific detail. Larry Niven is noted for this type of 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 shield system are literary inventions, but they are presented against a background of established science knowledge.

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 U.K. as The Moat around Murcheson's Eye.

Synopsis

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Opening in the year AD 3017, Mankind is shown by the book to be recovering slowly from an interstellar civil war which destroyed 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. Lt. 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, with orders to take Horace Hussein Bury, a powerful interstellar merchant who is suspected of fomenting the revolt, to the Imperial capital, Sparta. Blaine is already heir to more wealth than Bury can offer in a bribe, so he is the ideal man for the mission. Macarthur is to repair in the New Caledonia system, then proceed to the capital. Also to be returned to the capital is Lady Sandra Fowler, daughter of an Imperial Senator and a prisoner of the rebels.

New Caledonia is the capital of the Trans-Coalsack sector, which is located on the opposite side of the Coalsack Nebula from Earth. Also in the sector, and invisible from Earth, is the 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.

In the New Caledonia system, resupplying in orbit around the gas giant planet Dagda, MacArthur gets a message saying that an alien space craft has been detected. Human ships use the Alderson Drive, which allows them to "jump" instantaneously between points in specific star systems. The alien craft, by contrast, is a solar sail vessel which has taken 190 years to cross between stars at sublight speed. MacArthur 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, the pilot is found to be dead.

The single pilot is a bizarre asymmetric alien with two arms on one side of its body and a single, large and very strong arm on the other. Although it is bipedal and has a head and face that are similar to human, its anatomy is entirely different. It is the first alien race that humans have come into contact with.

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, whilst Lenin is there to "ride shotgun" on the mission, avoiding all contact with the aliens. The Mote has only one Alderson point leading to it, and to reach this the ships must actually penetrate the outer layers of the red supergiant itself before using their Alderson drive systems, only possible because they have the Langston field shield technology. 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 are found to have much advanced technology and seem friendly and willing to share it. Indeed they would likely have been formidable competitors to Humanity, except for the fact that they lack Langston Field technology and so are unable to leave their system via the Alderson point leading into the red supergiant. They have independently invented the Alderson drive, but call it the Crazy Eddie drive, as the ships which attempt to use it disappear and never come back. In fact, the ships were destroyed by the hot gas of the Eye.

The Moties are a species divided into many forms. The first live one encountered is an Engineer, a brown form with amazing technical abilities but limited speech. The next ones are Mediators, brown and white forms like the dead pilot, who have astounding communications skills. Each adopts a human in the contact party, becoming their Fyunch (click), and learns all about them, even reproducing their voices and mannerisms. Later forms include the white Masters and even some non-sentient versions kept for menial work.

As MacArthur prepares to leave, disaster strikes. A pair of the Motie Watchmaker caste has previously escaped into the machinery spaces on the ship, and although they were thought to have died they have actually been breeding furiously. Watchmakers are not sentient, but have an extremely highly developed instinct for technology — and unknown to the human crew have been quietly redesigning and rebuilding MacArthur. The crew is forced to abandon the ship, which Lenin then destroys. Lenin proceeds back home, taking with it Motie ambassadors — in violation of her orders to avoid contact with the aliens — which her captain does only after great debate. The ambassadors, two Mediators and a Master, become major characters in the final part of the novel.

As Lenin leaves, three MacArthur midshipmen who managed to escape the ship in lifeboats land on the Motie planet, Mote Prime. Exploring unsupervised for the first time, they make a startling discovery - the Moties are not nearly so peaceful as they seem. Their biology forces the species to be extremely prolific, with a birth rate that ensures a never-ending population explosion. Once the population pressure rises high enough, massive wars result which kill off almost everybody - only for the survivors to rebuild and repeat the cycle again. So devastating are these wars that, in the past, Mote Prime has been completely sterilized and eventually repopulated by societies 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. The Moties are utterly convinced that the Cycles cannot be ended by any means. The midshipmen also find that there is a Warrior caste, far superior in combat to any human soldier, and these ultimately overwhelm and kill the three humans despite some help from a friendly Motie Master.

Back home, the Empire holds talks aimed at establishing trade and peaceful relations with the Moties, not realising what a disaster it would be to allow the species loose on the galaxy. Fortunately, the humans at the conference manage to put together various clues they have picked up during the course of the story and realise the threat in time. It seems that they will have no choice but to send the Fleet to destroy the Motie civilisation totally, but at the last minute the Motie ambassadors convince the humans instead to blockade the Alderson point and keep their people confined to their own system for at least the foreseeable future. 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 have 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, or indeed accelerate continuously, except for short runs. In pursuit of the Motie probe, MacArthur accelerates at up to 6 gee for a three days to match velocities at about 5% of the speed of light, then has to decelerate to reach New Scotland safely, arriving more or less out of fuel. The rest of the novel has MacArthur in long transfer orbits, conserving fuel and providing artificial gravity by spinning the ship. These long periods are used for character development.

In spite of these limitations, the ships are actually immensely powerful, not only with their armaments of high-power lasers and nuclear missiles, but with the fusion drives themselves which can be used as plasma weapons, especially against unprotected ground targets.

Motie Culture

Master Moties command the loyalty and obedience of groups of other kinds of Moties, such as Engineers, Warriors, Doctors etc. However they are not good negotiators, so to prevent wars between rival Masters, the Mediators were created as sterile hybrids of the white Masters and brown Engineers. Mediators will always obey Masters, so they cannot themselves change the direction of Motie civilization, but they have enough independence to do their jobs. There is no money economy as such, but rival Masters trade in prestige, material goods etc. A few Masters, themselves sterile and therefore unlikely to attempt a takeover for their children, are designated as Keepers and given control of the Museums where all the knowledge of previous Motie civilizations is stored to aid recovery after collapse. When a civilization is doing well, alliances of Masters can cooperate to achieve great things, but always the urge to reproduce will cause the alliances to break down, usually resulting in catastrophic wars.

Crazy Eddie

This is 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 in 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 his idealism.

Interestingly the term Crazy Eddie was probably conceived independently of the eponymous electronics discount store. At the time the novel was written, the Crazy Eddie stores were confined to a small part of New York City, while the authors lived in California.

• Science fiction novels
• 1975 books
• CoDominium series
• Space opera