Subject: BOOK REVIEW: Niven and Pournelle's FOOTFALL (very minor spoilers)

From: [email-masked] (Daniel Dobson)
Date: Sat, 8 Oct 1994 01:30:31 GMT

BOOK REVIEW:  FOOTFALL, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
(SPOILERS, though very, very, very few that aren't spoiled by the
front cover.)

Giant mutant elephants invade earth after travelling in coldsleep all
the way from Alpha Centauri.  They're not really hyper-intelligent
green men or clever interstellar traders out for a buck; these are H.G.
Well's-style invaders who want the peoples of the Earth to roll over
and submit to their domination.

It sounds good.  It has a neat cover.  It even has a satisfyingly
large number of words to back it up.  

Reading it, though, was like eating junk food---sure, it felt good
while I was doing it, but I felt vaguely sick afterwards.  Or like
watching the entire run of "Married...with children" at once:  you
can't believe you spent all the time and effort for. . .this.

Don't get me wrong; it wasn't like I didn't enjoy reading it.  But I
was never able to really worry about anything in the story.  Were the
good guys going to win?  Could the Earth really crawl out from beneath
the clawed, grey foot of the Travelling Herd?  Oh, please.  Nothing
beats good, old-fashioned Yankee knowhow.  Not ever.  I called that
from early on, though exactly *how* they were going to do that was
beyond me.  And I managed to be surprised at the end.

Some of the ideas were interesting---how would primitive herd animals
react to human individuality and spirit?  In the wild, when an animal
submits to the alpha male, it gives up all power to the victor and end
of conflict until the next mating season.  But here, the alien mindset
of these animals can't contain these higher-order thoughts of life
without the herd and without this reflex domination/submission idea.

Interesting, as was INTEGRAL TREES.  Niven and Pournelle have at least
grabbed hold of some neat SF ideas drawn from the wild.

But then, we get to the story.

I work in AI, and we often characterize the world in warped ways.  Some
of my favorite examples are programs that characterize humans as
wanting nothing more than money, sex, power over others, and food (in
that order).  I write them myself, programs with rules of thumb like
"if something bad happens to somebody you don't like, you become
happier and like the person who did it in proportion to how much you
hated the guy you didn't like."

The characters in FOOTFALL fall into this simple definition very well,
and in that way, this book resembles a Stephen King novel: lots of
pointless sex, talking about sex, adultery, and other such basal
matters while DEATH DESCENDS FROM THE SKY!  You'd think that there'd
be more to talk about than human mating rituals when the planet is
being taken over by elephants with an attitude.

You get some fun scenes, though, like the Kansas division of weekend
warriors going off to battle against sky-based weapons, Hoover Dam
being shelled from orbit, Zulu warriors hurling spears at bumbling
monsters, an alien spitting out its last warning about "thumbs!  They
have thumbs!" before keeling over from a (assumably) thumb-caused
wound, and more from the vast storehouse of guilty pleasures afforded
by FOOTFALL.

I, too, was a little disappointed by the lack of general mayhem as
civilization collapses---it seems like it should collapse, everyone
agrees that "Wow, society is such a thin veneer over instinctual
needs of food and territory", yet everyone just goes on with business
as usual even though there are no phone communications, roadways, or
bridges across major waterways.  We don't get to hear about bands of
looters and other such spoilage of war; I mean, if looting happens
after a single evening of riots in L.A., why don't the people rebel
when the elephants disrupt the entire continent?

And even worse is the idea that the military would find a bunch of
sci-fi writers, lock them in NORAD, give them everything they could
ask for, and then actually *listen* to them is asking too much.  This is
the hardest to swallow.

All the way through the book, I kept saying, "Oh, get
off it," as the President of the United States walks around in awe of
these great brains of hard sci-fi who always seem to know the right
answer at the right time.  Niven's own ego springs off the page and
thrashes you senseless, with even a useless fan character who mourns the
death of the SF convention (since you can't have a convention without
transportation since how can all the neat-cool authors get there?).
Sorry, guys; I think that, say, loss of drinking water from all the burst dams
would be a slightly larger problem than no more filksongs.

Still, parts of it are a good read.  I love stories that have evil
beings raining death down from orbiting assault platforms and I'm a
sucker for human ingenuity getting the better of space-faring races
(that's why I still watch "Trek").  A little less sex (and I can't
believe I'm saying that!), a little more realism, and less "pat SF on
the back" stuff and this would have been a really cool book.  As it
is, it's just OK. 

On a rising scale of 0 to 10 prehensile elephant trunks, this gets a
solid 3.8.  (Sort of 3 trunks and one that was injured in an
industrial accident.)

Wolff Dobson
---
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"Kirk to Enterprise -- beam down yeoman Rand and a six-pack."