To read a spoiler-free review of The Mote in God’s Eye, click here.
For some spoiler-filled thoughts about the book, go ahead and read more…
Another example of this inconsistency are the aliens themselves. They are frequently described as one of the best alien species in the history of science fiction. And they are… for the first half of the book. But as more details reveal themselves, inconsistencies and logical holes begin to develop. Not enough to rob them of their effectiveness and cleverness, but enough to mar what would otherwise have been a flawless creation.
Specifically, I’m thinking of the caste structure here. The caste structure as it is handled in the first half of the book – Mediator, Master, Brown, Miniature, Warrior – makes sense. (At least to a large degree: How the Masters dominate the Warriors is not wholly comprehensible.) But once Niven and Pournelle started adding in things like the Doctors and Farmers, the system stopped making sense: How could castes like that survive during the periods of savagery and barbarism? And, in the case of the Doctors, how do you get a caste who is eminently suited to both primitive and advanced medicine?
On a similar note, a perpetual annoyance for me in Mote was the misuse of the word “evolution”. Characters were constantly talking about how the moties would have “evolved” into these castes. (It was also annoying that they kept wanting to link these periods of evolution to the mutations resulting from their atomic wars. I thought that well-warmed chestnut had been burnt to a crisp long before 1974.) Eventually I just started to substitute “genetically engineered” for “evolved”, and that helped reduce my annoyance.
(This trick is similar to my trick of thinking that Asimov’s references to ‘atomic power’ in the Foundation trilogy really refer to a future technology which involves atomic manipulation, not nuclear power. The reason this annoys me in MOTE, but not in Foundation, is that Niven and Pournelle should have known better. UPDATE: I have since learned that recent reprints of the Foundation Trilogy have replaced “atomic power” with “nuclear power,” thus ruining the hack. C’est la vie.)
For example, despite the fact that the human expedition is trying to keep the Langston Field a secret from the aliens, they leave their fields turned on for the duration of their stay in the alien system: Giving the aliens plenty of time to observe the fields in action.
This doesn’t make sense even before they know the Moties are technical wizkids. They’re explicitly aware from the get-go that the Langston field was discovered by accident, but that it can certainly be discovered once you know what you’re trying to do.
And, speaking of inconsistencies, you’ve also got the Motie embassy ship deliberately splashing the field during their deceleration. Despite the fact that they programmed that deceleration long before knowing that the fields existed. In other words, when they programmed that deceleration they were (apparently) planning to splash the human ships. And nobody cares. Not even the humans who would have been incinerated by this blatantly hostile act.
It probably didn’t help that I’d been wondering since the beginning of the book why they hadn’t immediately adopted the course of action which is supposed to be the major revelation of the book’s conclusion.
I am, of course, speaking of the idea of blockading the Moties. I’d been wondering why they didn’t immediately blockade the system when the expedition left to explore Motie space. I was even more baffled that they didn’t blockade the system immediately after the expedition returned from Motie space. If you’re worried about someone following you into the house, you close the bloody door. Spending several days in committee meetings before concluding that, if you want to secure the house, you should shut the door doesn’t strike me as a brilliant revelation – it just establishes that you’re dumb as wood.
