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The Mote in God's Eye

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The Mote in God's Eye

By: Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle
Narrated by: L J Ganser
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About this listen

 Writing separately, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle are responsible for a number of science fiction classics, such as the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning Ringworld, Debt of Honor, and The Integral Trees. Together they have written the critically acclaimed best-sellers Inferno, Footfall, and The Legacy of Heorot, among others.

The Mote In God's Eye is their acknowledged masterpiece, an epic novel of mankind's first encounter with alien life that transcends the genre. No lesser an authority than Robert A. Heinlein called it "possibly the finest science fiction novel I have ever read".

©1991 Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle (P)2009 Audible, Inc. Fantasy Fiction Science Fiction

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Critic reviews

  • All-Time Best Science Fiction Novels (Locus Magazine)
All stars
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ok first off, I loved the story , it's been over 25 years since I've read it and it holds up remarkably well, my only gripe is with the narrator, who thought it was a good idea to get a narrator who clearly has never heard a Scottish accent in his life narrate a story mostly based around a planet named "new Scotland" utterly abysmal attempts that never got better ruined what would otherwise been an excellent book.

great story poor narrator

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A well thought out story of first contact with an alien species and what that would mean to humankind. An easy listen.

Well thought out SciFi

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Strong story
Narration ok overall. There a couple of Scottish characters and the narrator's efforts are gratingly bad (Mel Gibson's Scottish accent sounds like a native in comparison)

Good sci-fi, average narration

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The scores here are based on the first few hours - I didn't make it to the end of the book unfortunately (a decision I might revisit).

For me the main problem is that a lot of science fiction has been written since this was first published, so many of the themes of the book that were novel on publishing aren't anymore. That doesn't detract from the level of detail and imagination, but although I can acknowledge and admire it, I can't unread what I've read in the meantime.

Dialog is dated and off in odd ways - "Rape the passengers!" as an exclamation of dismissal may well be idiomatic for the naval period on which the working command structure described might be based, but it can't help but jar.

Ganser's performance follows the slightly dated and clipped feel of the prose. 3* feels a bit unfair written down as I couldn't fault it technically, he has a good voice for this sort of thing (as you'd expect), but in matching his style to that of the prose and basing it on that, 3* is where I get.

So in summary, a lot of ideas squeezed into a small space (despite the length of the book), but either too dated or not dated enough to make it worth persisting with for me at the moment.

Fizzing With Ideas - But Showing it's Age

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Thoroughly enjoyed this book, you would never guess it was written so long ago. Well worth the credit

A Timeless SciFi Classic

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