The Mote in God's Eye

I did not like either the story or the writing style. Too much military jargon and sci-fi talk relating to spaceships and interstellar travel that has put me off continuing to read the book.

The plot seemed to revolve around the first contact of mankind with alien life. There was this spaceship that came out of an area in space known of god's face. The area received this name because due to the way some astral objects are positioned, when viewed from a distance, it looks lake a face.

This unknown spaceship attacked the spaceship of the protagonist for no apparent reason. He retaliates and succeeds in killing the aggressor. When the remainings of the spaceship are collected, they found out the body of the pilot is of an anatomy completely different from humans.

After Ringworld, I liked Nivens Sci-fi concepts, but not so much his characters. The same could be said for Mote, which lacks any strong women characters, but makes up for it with a gripping tale of first contact. After seeing this one on NPRs top 100 SciFi list, and always being interested in first encounters, I knew I had to check this out. The story kept me interested – keeping things a mystery at times, and at other times giving you the information and watching to see if the correct decisions were made. I wouldn't recommend this one for everyone, but if you like entertaining sci fi and an interesting alien race, it's worth a read.

In short: achingly poor writing sustaining a sometimes exciting plot. However the Moties (despite being utterly humanoid, which, for a work of speculative fiction should really be considered a faux pas, or at least a tut-tut) were often a joy to listen to chatter, especially the three ambassadors at the draw of the novel, who provided more insight into the Motie psyche than the however-many-snippets of dialogue that came before. Definitely a side-eye thrown at the expressive interjectional use of “rape” though.