Does anyone else find this book a bit campy?

[Justin]

I'm a couple hundred pages in. I seem to recall having the same feeling when I read Ringworld... maybe it was the big talking cats.

[Dan]

I didn't feel that way about Ring World. I thought RingWorld was fantastic, but I get what you say about the MIGE. I enjoyed the book but the Motie's sometimes felt very contrived. They aren't a very "realistic" race of creatures if that makes any sense within the context of a work of fiction but yeah the book felt a little campy. I think campy is the perfect way to describe it.

[Justin]

Thanks Dan... so it's not just me then. Camp aside, I think what it is I've taken issue with is all the acclaim this book has for creating a race of believable aliens that are completely different from us. If anything they seem like LSD Care Bears that are all too human.

To me, believable aliens would be extremely difficult to communicate with and understand, assuming that's even possible. An example would be the Amnion from Donaldson's Gap Series, or the Martians from Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land.

Oh, regarding Ringworld, I did enjoy it. There were some pretty interesting concepts described in the book; things I hadn't thought of before.

[Dan]

Oh absolutely.......I read it because of the acclaim as well. I think it was nominated for all the big sci-fi awards although, not sure if it actually won. Maybe it's just a story that didn't date well? It was written in 1975. It wasn't bad. The ending was kind of, ok. It left some things unresolved but I didn't care enough to read the follow up. Did you read the sequel - The Gripping Hand? The Moties are like idiot-savants, sometimes genius and other times conveniently oblivious to the most obvious things they should be able to at least grasp even if its alien to them and it felt their naivety was all in service to the story line and not at all likely for a space faring race. It is hard to find good sci-fi once you read allot of the best of it. Which is how I came upon the Mote, I found it on some sci-fi must read list.

If you have any recommendations, especially of good, recent sci-fi let me know.

Dan

[Justin]

I'm just now reading the first book. I'm on page 305 out of 475. I don't think I'll read the second one. I came upon it from some list as well. Every now and then I crave a good sci-fi novel and I find myself looking through "best sci-fi novels of all time" types of lists.

I think you're right, it's easy to look down on a story that is decades old and was most likely innovative for its time. I agree with your point about the Moties serving the story line, in a way that undermines how believable they are as an advanced race.

I wouldn't consider most of the good sci-fi I've read over the years to be recent, but that is probably because there are still many classics out there that I haven't read yet. But, there are a couple of recent ones that come to mind that won't require much of a time obligation on your part:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1... - 2011 translation, first published in 1961 - Ok, maybe it's not really recent, but it's a recent translation and a brilliant example of what a believable alien might be.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1... - 2013 - Pretty funny, and it pokes a lot of fun at humans. You can't go wrong with that.

https://www.goodreads.com/series/4056... - 1990's - This semi-recent series does require a time obligation. It's very dark and the characters are mostly bad people who do bad things; I enjoyed it mostly because the aliens were genuinely creepy and posed an existential threat to humanity without really realizing it, and because their mindsets and motivations were very non-human and unpredictable. I also found the majority of the characters to be interesting, deranged, and original. The first novel is something of a series-killer for many, because it focuses mainly on a single character and his repeated acts of rape on the female protagonist. The story line really picks up in the second novel, because that is when the Amnion are introduced.

Any recommendations on your end?

-Justin

[Dan]

Hey Justin,

Thanks for the recommendations. They all look like they would be right up my alley too so thanks very much.

I can't really recommend much because you are pretty well covered on the sci-fi I am familiar with.

You have Hyperion on your to-read list and I can't recommend that book enough. Fantastic character development. Good ending. Follow up book is garbage though. - (Edit - Book #2, "Fall of Hyperion", is excellent as well and you will want to read it because the first book ends on a kind of cliffhangar. It is the 3rd book that is very different from the first two and I didn't enjoy as much. Garbage was a strong word though, I would say that the first 2 set such an incredibly high bar that book 3 never hit those heights for me. ; )

Arthur C. Clarke's, "Rama" series is a classic first contact series but its storyline may not be as good to read in 2017 as when I first read it in the 80's when I was like 13. lol

You have good taste in sci-fi.

- Dan

[M.E.]

The Motie's rise and fall civilization was the key to how they exist. For me that element still rings true. In human history we have periods of forgetting, entire societies forgotten. Some of those societies thrived for large expanses of time but still somehow disappeared with little record. The read does feel dated at times, much like many of the works from the time period or even up to the 90's. Most of that can be written off as a difference in anachronism.

The variances of the species and how they worked together with a ticking period of spontaneous de-evolution around every corner was the best part of the story! Again the language of the time didn't reflect an informed public with the internet and a thousand and one ways to fact check genome or language. The BS factor was higher in those days.

I was reading a collection of short stories from Frank Herbert recently that were pretty terrible in how they flowed. Most of which read like the beginning of a dialogue from the black and white Twilight Zone. The sequel tried the integration thing but I too felt the camp that you have referred too. But Liven and Pournelle, even when with Barnes, were purely entertainment value writers. Juxtaposed with Asimov or Clarke, who pursued some existential question, they are of the same genre but categorically of different systems of thought. I find both The Mote in God's Eye and the Gripping Hand guilty pleasures. Recently the Planetary Society with Bill Nye sponsoring funded a ton of successful work on solar sails, featured prominently in Mote, I grinned at the memories that I recalled when I saw the news.

I would offer my own novel Tales of Reign for consideration. Or even my Witness Series if you are into quick reads built around a canon less characters. Thanks for bringing up a classic too! Props to the thread starter!

[Glenn]

Makes sense. "Forgetting" is a very real phenomena that in recent centuries we've been lucky to avoid. After events like the Thera eruption, or the fall of Rome, people seem to have to struggle so much to just stay alive that education vanishes (or hibernates in monasteries.) We simply forget how to read and write. Niven and Pournelle tell us a cautionary tale, reminding us that such things can happen.

In 1974 we would listen to tales like these. Although Vietnam was winding down, bombing and body bags were still on people's minds. Morality tales were back -- movies like Soylent Green and Zardoz; books like Silent Spring.

Ray Kurzweil had a great quote that I only half remember about the time between salient events compressing at a rate similar to Moore's law. 43 years is a now a very long time.