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I've started reading The Mote in God's Eye (Larry Nivens/Jerry Pournelle) and finding it pretty dull so far. It's set 1,000 years in the future and is supposed to be about humanity's first contact with aliens, and I thought I'd heard good things about it... but so far it's bad characters and a cliched navy-style starfleet.
(Navy-style starfleets are kinda interesting to read about when Heinlein and Asimov were writing about them in the 1940s -- cause then it's an interesting reflection of the WW2 experience on SF -- but for Nivens and Pournelle to be still writing about them in the '70s is really, really dull.)
Is it worth reading on? I liked Ringworld, I didn't mind Nivens's writing there, maybe because he was mostly writing about aliens and alien wonders and not so much about humans. So far this one is all about the humans though...
Posts: 2911 | Registered: Aug 2001
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I found it to be fairly typical Niven/Pournelle fare, with interesting ideas crippled by bad writing. If you like their other collaborations, stick with it and you'll eventually get to the interesting ideas.
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I liked Mote better than I liked the later Ringworld novels, by far. Part of this might be because I read The Gripping Hand first, and liked that quite a bit. I still think it is even better than Mote.
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I read Lucifer's Hammer and sorta enjoyed it -- it made a miserable bus ride much more bearable. That one was interesting for being a big, thick, it's-the-end-of-the-world thriller (one of the first ones?), so it had some good what-if scenarios, but also had some amazingly, appallingly bad characters.
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What's funny is how close to identical Lucifer's Hammer and Footfall are. The latter is basically the former book, but with elephant-like aliens instead of an asteroid.
Porter, another collaboration you might enjoy would be George R. R. Martin and Lisa Tuttle's Windhaven. I thought it was pretty solid, anyway. As far as Larry Niven collaborations, Legacy of Herot is by far the best I've read. Steve Barnes combines pretty well with Niven and Pournelle, if that book is any indication.
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There's a reason for that Noemon. They started out with the idea of Footfall, and got sidetracked onto the effects of a big rock hitting us. They didn't get back to Footfall for a long, long time. Lucifer's Hammer feels a little bit like a science fiction version of The Stand (though I read Lucifer's Hammer many years before I read the Stand, so it was really The Stand that reminded me of Lucifer's Hammer).
But Footfall is my favorite of their collaborations, followed by Inferno and Fallen Angels.
Robert Heinlein said that The Mote In God's Eye was his favorite SF novel.
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I liked Lucifer's Hammer but I really enjoyed Footfall. It seemed a much easier read.
Lisa: I can totally see Heinlein loving "Mote" except there's not enough red-headed incest in it. (joke)
Posts: 7085 | Registered: Apr 2001
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quote:Originally posted by Lisa: [QB] There's a reason for that Noemon. They started out with the idea of Footfall, and got sidetracked onto the effects of a big rock hitting us. They didn't get back to Footfall for a long, long time.
You know, I always figured it had to be something like that. I read it back in the pre-internet era, though, and never had any way to research it. I hadn't thought about those two books in a long time. Thanks for the information!
quote:Lucifer's Hammer feels a little bit like a science fiction version of The Stand (though I read Lucifer's Hammer many years before I read the Stand, so it was really The Stand that reminded me of Lucifer's Hammer).
It feels more like the stand than it does any other "end of the world as we know it" type book? Say, Walter Jon Williams' The Rift?
quote:But Footfall is my favorite of their collaborations, followed by Inferno and Fallen Angels.
Inferno's probably my favorite of them, and back when I first read it I liked the first Dreampark book quite a bit, though I don't think I'd care for it now. Legacy of Herot is my favorite of Niven's collaborations that I've read, though.
Niven always has such interesting ideas; I really wish he were better with characterization.
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One of my favorite books ever is Hoka! Hoka! Hoka! by Poul Anderson and Gordon R Dickson. The tagline? Alien teddy bears conquer universe!
The Hoka love Earth culture and throw themselves completely into whatever part they decide to play. Sometimes they're cowboys, sometimes they're opera singers, and sometimes they're spacemen. It's good stuff.
I'm also a fan of various Weis & Hickman series: Dragonlance, Death Gate, Sovereign Stone. I like em all.
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quote:Lucifer's Hammer feels a little bit like a science fiction version of The Stand (though I read Lucifer's Hammer many years before I read the Stand, so it was really The Stand that reminded me of Lucifer's Hammer).
It feels more like the stand than it does any other "end of the world as we know it" type book? Say, Walter Jon Williams' The Rift?
I don't know. I've never read that one. When it comes to post-apocalypse books... wow, that's a good topic by itself. I'm sure someone else has done it before, but the search never works well for me, so I'm going to go start one.
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I liked The Mote in God's Eye. I prefer plain Niven to Niven+Pournelle but I did like the Moties and Lucifer's Hammer was a pretty good read too, despite being a fairly formulaic disaster novel. My favorite Nivens are like Protector, World out of Time, and the short story collections like All the Myriad Ways. I think The Inconstant Moon is a great story!
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I've read most of those books. The Mote in God's Eye was pretty good, but the Gripping Hand was nigh on gibberish when it got to the big space-chase in the end. Niven/Pournelle books seem to me to be so outline-driven that you feel like the outline wrote the book instead of two humans.
Posts: 5957 | Registered: Oct 2001
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quote:Originally posted by Noemon: I found it to be fairly typical Niven/Pournelle fare, with interesting ideas crippled by bad writing. If you like their other collaborations, stick with it and you'll eventually get to the interesting ideas.
Agreed.
quote:Originally posted by The Pixiest: Oh I can't believe I forgot Legacy of Heorot! Wow I love that book
Me too. The Heorot books are awesome.
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quote:Originally posted by Noemon: Protector is absolutely brilliant, isn't it? It's really Niven at his best.
<nod> World of Ptaavs, A Gift from Earth. Every time I see a glass of apple juice, I think of A Gift from Earth. All of the Gil Hamilton stories. Gil reaching through a video screen to pick up a pen was just about the coolest thing I've ever read.
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Yes, keep reading Mote. It is worth reading.
The Legacy of Heorot rocks. The sequel to it is Beowulf's Children but it is also sometimes listed as The Dragons of Heorot. Same book though..
Niven rocks too. I’ve never read a Niven book I didn’t like and the same goes for his collaborations. I’ve read almost all of them and several I’ve read more than once.
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quote:Originally posted by Noemon: Protector is absolutely brilliant, isn't it? It's really Niven at his best.
Definitely! The ideas just sparkle off the page! I so see myself as some mad-scientist / inventor / ancient one looking out for the children of earth from afar someday. I wanna be a Pac Protector!
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Doesn't it make sense that if there are creatures less intelligent, less powerful, and less wise than humans in the universe that it's highly likely that there are also creatures who are more intelligent, powerful, and wise as well?
If so then where are they? They should be in our hair all the time like Pac protectors protecting their bloodlines. Unless they've learned that it's really unwise to be like that and the best outcomes result from a hands-off approach, whereas, they should be protecting us from afar, trying to fend off the most serious disasters while letting us learn and grow. Maybe they even give nudges here and there toward more favorable histories, but they really HAVE to let us exercise our own agency and develop our own judgment by seeing the consequences or else we would be stunted in our growth and stuck as children forever.
From that idea comes half-a-dozen good science fiction plots, as well as a fairly close analogy to most major religions. Posts: 6246 | Registered: Aug 2004
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Thanks for the different opinions. Think I'll put it on hold for now, and give it a try sometime again when I'm on one of those bus rides from hell...
(A thought = I think I'm having less patience with it because I'm actually listening to it as an audiobook; if I had a paper copy, I could be skimming through and skipping over the dull parts... but, unfortunately, my audiobook isn't tone-indexed to mark the dull bits...)
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plaid, I can imagine it being much less interesting in audio than in print. Perhaps that's the problem.
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quote:Originally posted by mr_porteiro_head: I don't think I've ever enjoyed a single novel that was written collaboratively.
In fact, I don't think I've ever been able to finish a collaboratively-written novel.
If you like action-oriented sci-fi, let me recommend the Mageworlds series by Debya Doyle and James McDonald. I thoroughly enjoyed the series, especially the first couple and the most recent. Great characters, great background, and great action.
quote:Originally posted by plaid: Ever read Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett's Good Omens?
[Edit: or OSC and Kathryn Kidd's Lovelock? One of my fave OSC books.]
Heh. Lovelock is the only OSC novel I have ever failed to enjoy.
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I despised the central character. I can't stand to read about the doings about people, or monkeys, that I don't like and wouldn't like to have contact with in real life.
Posts: 13680 | Registered: Mar 2002
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quote:Originally posted by mr_porteiro_head: [qb] I don't think I've ever enjoyed a single novel that was written collaboratively.
In fact, I don't think I've ever been able to finish a collaboratively-written novel.
If you like action-oriented sci-fi, let me recommend the Mageworlds series by Debya Doyle and James McDonald. I thoroughly enjoyed the series, especially the first couple and the most recent. Great characters, great background, and great action.
I don't like collaborative novels, usually, but those Mageworld novels are outstanding. I just started re-reading them again last week.
I didn't know you liked them, Icky! Posts: 15082 | Registered: Jul 2001
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I so see myself as some mad-scientist / inventor / ancient one looking out for the children of earth from afar someday. I wanna be a Pac Protector!
