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A review by arn_thor
The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven
1.0
This book has simply not aged well.
The characters aren't as fleshed-out as one would expect in a modern space opera, it's quite gung-ho militaristic in its jargon and character selection, and the casual sexism reeks of the 70s. But the main problem is that it's lazy. Everything about it, from the plot to the world-building, just comes across as half-assed. The author takes shortcuts in the plot; creates convenient and brief setup-payback structures of the simplest kind; resorts to stereotypes rather than characters; and the one "twist" that is revealed to the characters toward the end of the book by way of a chapter's worth of conversation and literal recalls to previous parts in the book is infuriatingly banal. It's clear the author imagined he had set up a fantastically clever corner-piece in the plot, but it just isn't so.
Skip this one and pick up something of higher quality. It shouldn't be hard to find.
The characters aren't as fleshed-out as one would expect in a modern space opera, it's quite gung-ho militaristic in its jargon and character selection, and the casual sexism reeks of the 70s. But the main problem is that it's lazy. Everything about it, from the plot to the world-building, just comes across as half-assed. The author takes shortcuts in the plot; creates convenient and brief setup-payback structures of the simplest kind; resorts to stereotypes rather than characters; and the one "twist" that is revealed to the characters toward the end of the book by way of a chapter's worth of conversation and literal recalls to previous parts in the book is infuriatingly banal. It's clear the author imagined he had set up a fantastically clever corner-piece in the plot, but it just isn't so.
Skip this one and pick up something of higher quality. It shouldn't be hard to find.