August 2005
The Mote in God's Eye, Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle (1974)

I've mentioned here before that there are certain authors I tend to read over and over, and one of them is Larry Niven. I don't think I'd call Niven the best science fiction writer there is, and possibly not even my favorite, but he does seem to be the one I read the most. Mote is my favorite. Again, I'm not sure I'd claim it's the best science-fiction novel I know (in this case I think it's one of several contenders but probably edged out by Dune), but I like it. I do concur with the general consensus that it is science fiction's best story of first contact with an alien culture, and nothing else is really close.

Niven is actually co-author of Mote, along with collaborator Jerry Pournelle. I can't remember a time when it wasn't obvious to me which part of the book was Niven's and which was Pournelle's. Pournelle isn't the sort of author I would normally like. I've never read any other book of his, but I'm told he inclines toward manly space-cowboy type adventures with lots of wars and heroics.

In my younger days I used to wish that Niven had written Mote alone, since I found the Pournelle aspects boring and/or dopey. Since then I've come to appreciate Pournelle, and even though I still don't have a taste for him, I've come to recognize that the book couldn't have been written without him. Niven is an idea man. His genius is to be able to imagine unusual possibilities of how-it-might-be and extrapolate all the intriguing consequences, especially with respect to cultural trends. It's no accident that Niven's best work is in his short stories while his novels are short, second-rate or both. He's good at telling a tale, but he can't really create a novel.

It was only this past year that I realized something that no doubt has a lot to do with that: Niven has no talent for creating a character. I used to dislike Pournelle's characters, who struck me as one-dimensional, but when I think back on all the Niven I've read I realize that's still one dimension more than Niven has to offer. There's really only one personality in all of Niven. He's sort of a clever, smart-alec rogue who feels slightly estranged from society and yet still manages to get along in it, in a sort of suave-dork kind of way. His smarts and his talents help him solve problems that others can't figure out, and ultimately the world comes to appreciate him for that, if for nothing else. The character isn't entirely realistic — for example, he's clearly a dweeb, and yet he never has any trouble attracting the ladies — but it's exactly how a lot of sci-fi readers (and probably Niven himself) like to see themselves. Pretty much every Niven story has one guy like this, usually the narrator. Everyone else in the story has no personality at all.

That's Niven. I still love him, but I'm old enough now that I can recognize his failings ... which brings me back to Pournelle. In Mote, at least the characters have some personality, even if they're predictable and cliché. The novel wouldn't work nearly so well without them. (Niven's characterization is attached to just one character, Renner, who does indeed think up the answer that the others missed on a few key occasions.) I've also come to realize that although I didn't originally care for the Pournellish prevailing culture of the novel's humans — mostly military culture within an imperial society with 1950s morality — it does work particularly well for the story of its contact with the Mote society.

But if Niven is dull in drawing the character of a human being, he is brilliant in drawing the character of an entire society and the not-so-scrutable thinking of the alien beings within it. (Indeed, his alien characters are often more interesting than his humans.) That's what makes Mote in God's Eye great. In a world of Star Trek aliens where every species is the conceptual equivalent of "just like us but with bumps on their head" (the logical race, the warrior race, the greedy merchant race...), or alternatively is just a nasty monster to be killed, Niven's aliens are uncommonly original — in the big picture, in the details, and most of all in the cohesive whole that makes sense of all of it.

Niven has had some great ideas (and a few bad ones) strung throughout his short stories, but the Motie civilization is his greatest creation. The thoroughness of that creation is what makes the story of us making contact with it, and how that contact must ultimately play out, such a great story.

For nearly as long as I can remember, I've thought that Mote, unlike so many science-fiction novels, would make an excellent film. (By contrast, Dune is a terrible fit for cinematization, though that hasn't stopped several from trying and failing. I'm not convinced on Tolkien either, which I still believe is all about the words, not the scenery and action.) For most of my life, I lamented the fact that a satisfactory visual recreation of Mote just wasn't technically feasible.

But today pretty much anything is feasible in cinema. The technology exists to do Mote in God's Eye justice. Will someone take it on? I'm usually not a fan of seeing favorite books go onto the screen, but this one I'd welcome. It would be nice to see film technology put to work not for fast whizz, noisy kaboom, and budget-busting spectacle, but to actually better tell a story that can't be told without it. We need to see the Moties as their human discoverers see them — their disturbing asymmetry (when was the last time you saw an asymmetrical alien on screen?); their deceptive cuddliness; their eerie ability to mimic human voices; their other-worldly expert agility in everyday life; their alien unconcern for things we take for granted (such as aligning themselves with one direction as "up" when in free fall).

A major reason why I think Mote lends itself so well to the film medium is that the narrative direction is uncomplicated. The story is almost entirely from the point of view of the humans. There is very little that the reader discovers before the protagonists do, and there is very little revelation of any character's thoughts beyond what is plain from what he says or does (in stark contrast to Dune which overflows with such mind-reading). Communications between humans and Moties is done entirely in English, not just for narrative convenience, but because it is a fact of this particular contact that the Moties (well, some of them) were able to learn our language quickly, and we were never able to decipher theirs. I would hope that a film version would refrain from using subtitles. When we hear the Moties talk, in their alien chirps and whistles, the audience would be as much in the dark as the humans in the story. Like them, we would only know what the Moties chose to tell us. The novel does have some small sections of narrative in which the reader can "hear" a Motie's thoughts or words, but until the end they are the sort of thing a film rendition would probably dispose of anyway, and even at the end I think it can be worked around.

A few minor problems: The book was written in the 1970s. The imagined future history of the human world involves a Russian-American co-dominion, which is awkward now. More troubling for a would-be filmmaker, there is only one female (human) character in the entire novel. One could imagine changing some other characters to be female, but it wouldn't be an easy transition. It is a meaningful aspect of the story that the human culture is such that only men travel around in spaceships. To change that would weaken the story, but could a contemporary large-scale Hollywood project tolerate an overwhelmingly male cast (with the only love interest feeble and old-fashioned)? Even in Tolkien, they felt obliged to play up the few existing female characters, giving them roles that the author didn't.

... And that's the last of the books from 2005. Hooray. Of course, now I've got five more finished in 2006, plus a sixth where I'm in the last chapter.

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