Crazy Eddie Is Climbing A Mountain

As I watched the Star Trek episodes all I could think about was that they both seemed quite familiar. Now that was a little bit strange until I realized that I had read a book which was just both of the concepts combined into a new story. The Mote In God’s Eye was written by Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven in 1974, or roughly 10 years after the original Star Trek series did.

A basic summary of A Mote In God’s Eye is that a basic alien probe, without any form of faster than light travel flies, into a solar system in a now vast human empire. The humans then send a ship into the solar system of the aliens and humanity has to decide whether or not they should give the so-called ‘Moties’ new technology in order to allow them to easily leave their home solar system. The first thing that makes this decision more complicated is that the moties are far better at engineering than the humans and could easily surpass humans given any amount of technology.

One of the first thing that the humans realize in the book is that the moties come in many different shapes, and they have made the mistake of allowing the small ones onto their ship. Just like the tribbles, they are appreciated at the beginning. However, in this case, it is because of the small improvements that they make like fixing a broken coffeemaker. The appreciation ends very quickly when the humans realize that there are thousands of moties on their ship and they realize that they are no longer in control of it.

As you might imagine with such similar works, both Star Trek and A Mote in God’s Eye give a similar message: don’t make decisions if you don’t know what could go wrong. Luckily for the protagonists in this genre things tend to work out well in the end and these are no exception.