Review: The Mote in God's Eye

The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I read The Mote in God's Eye basically because it was convenient. I accidentally let my free Audible trial continue and paid for an extra credit, and there was a buy-one-get-one sale on specific SF books. This was one of them. It wasn't a bad choice; it's a pretty long book, the authors are classic authors I've never read, and I enjoyed parts of it.

This is a classic - and maybe the defining? - first contact story. A bug-like creature in a spaceship shows up in the middle of an inter-solar human empire, and the humans mount an expedition to the home planet. It's also a very military-SF book as the expedition is primarily military. All in all, it's not exactly what I expected from a classic first contact story... and yet it somehow is exactly what I expected from a classic first contact story. There are so many interesting ways in which the story innovates, and there are just as many where it falls back on tired tropes and uninteresting moments. The aliens are both strange and alien, and also conveniently similar to humans.

The plot, in brief (spoilers follow): a military-led expedition travels to an alien solar system. They find evidence of civilization going back hundreds of thousands of years, and yet these creatures have no faster-than-light travel and even seem to have lost some of their technological development. The aliens have several castes - worker/engineers, negotiators, masters - that are highly specialized. Negotiators can mimic individual humans down to their thought patterns. Workers can take any piece of technology, even if they've never seen it, and remake it into something better and more efficient instantly.

The humans are simply trying to see if they are a threat to humanity - and based on those two castes alone I feel like the answer should very obviously be an emphatic YES, but the humans think solely in terms of whether or not there are weapons or technology that could be used as weapons. The humans initially host one worker on one of their ships, but that worker brings some smaller versions of itself that get loose and end up making the ship unsuitable for habitation, so they have to blow it up. They really should leave at this point because, again, it's clear how big a threat these creatures are (they rerouted the warnings and weapons systems of the whole ship!), but instead they go down to the planet's surface.

They see some fascinating things - artwork geared solely toward commemorating mediation, an indoor zoo that includes "city ruins" as one of its habitats, a better-than-real mock-up of a human castle. Just as they are heading back to their ship, there's a conflict in which several human ships are shot down. At this point the narrative takes a sharp turn and follows the humans on the alien planet for a bit as they discover the big thing the aliens are hiding: they can't control their population. They've essentially been in a boom-bust culture cycle for hundreds of thousands of years, which doesn't bode well if they ever get access to interstellar travel. The resolution of the conflict isn't as exciting as I would've liked but I won't go into that here.

These are some crazy interesting aliens! They are obsessed with their population control issue and it defines every aspect of their culture. They have museums full of artifacts from previous civilizations so that they can jump-start their culture once they get back to a certain point after falling back into ruin and dark ages. There are creatures evolved to live in city ruins. And the fact that this all centers around reproductive policy is fascinating. If they don't have children on some regular basis, they die. They can't figure out a way around this that prevents them from having children entirely (though... they do have a hormone treatment that allows sterilization prior to ever having children, which seems like it could at least partially solve their issues). In some ways, this doesn't seem plausible - couldn't you remove whatever their ovaries are and only provide a fertilized egg when it's wanted? Could inducing pregnancy and then aborting solve the issue? How does this species of entirely female (I think?) creatures even reproduce, since it's shown that in isolation they cannot? But I'm willing to look past that and think about what it means for the story and the themes. There is only one woman on the human expedition (womp). If there were more women, the humans probably could've figured out the aliens' secret much quicker. I like to think that maybe this is intentional. Maybe this should make us think about why diversity of perspective is important and not just incidental.

There are other interesting critical readings that are present, even if not explicit. For example, I'm not sure if the book means to critique military culture, but there are certainly elements that sound like critique. There's a lot of formality, ceremony, rigidity in the humans even as they are confronted with a species whose defining characteristics are their irreverence and flexibility. Only the non-military humans even come close insight into the alien psychology (though to be fair, they are not much better than the military men). The commanding officer follows standard protocols and *believes* in those protocols. On the other hand, the narrative doesn't ask us to question this belief even when it precludes obvious solutions and fails to stop threats, and even when there couldn't possibly be a protocol in place for the situation at hand.

As I mentioned, though, all of the humans are spectacularly and unbelievably bad at dealing with the aliens. Isn't rule number one of NASA that there can't even be a 1/10000 chance of contaminating an alien plant if you want to launch a mission? Would you want to completely avoid interacting with alien biology until you were very damn sure there are no microscopic beasts that could kill you? Why would you even accept the *chance* of letting tiny alien creatures loose aboard your ship, and why further would you not then evacuate when they couldn't be found? All of these things and more seem irresponsible to the point of incredulity. But again, maybe Niven and Pournelle want us to think about how our ideals and rules hold up when thrown into completely uncharted territory and when managed by perfectly adequate but unexceptional people. Would we really do much better if we made first contact today?

I can't complain about a book that made me think as much as this one did, even if a lot of what I thought about were the implausibilities.


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