Footfall

The literary equivalent of an alien invasion blockbuster movie from the 80's/90's. I'm not sure to what extent Footfall created the tropes found in those movies, but it certainly contains a whole lot of them.

Footfall is a first-contact invasion novel following too many human characters to count, and an interesting elephant look-alike race of aliens known as the 'Fithp'. The Fithp traveled to our solar system from Alpha Centauri over the course of 75 years in a generation ship, with over half of their population in some sort of stasis. The Fithp see Earth as a good approximation for their own ruined planet, and wish to take it for their own, by force if necessary.

The strengths of Footfall lie mostly in the aliens themselves, much like in The Mote In God's Eye, another novel written by the Niven/Pournelle team a decade earlier. The Fithp are extremely detailed and well planned. Niven and Pournelle must have spent many hours fleshing out their politics, class structure, religion, history, ideals/ethics, and physiology to the point where they sometimes feel more rooted in reality than some of the human characterization. I especially enjoyed the sometimes eluded too but never fully explained 'predecessor' species, that left the Fithp with stone tablets inscribed with many technological and scientific advancements. This leads to the notion that the Fithp are ahead of the curve in some areas, but are still relatively young or naive as a space-faring species goes. The obfuscation inherent in myth and legend allowed me to come to my own conclusions as the the origin of the Fithp in a pleasing way.

The book can be gripping and has moments of well-paced, seriously big actions sequences and twists that kept me coming back for more. The authors do a good job of building tension, especially towards the conclusion of the novel, though the actual concluding page is a bit of a let down. It's certainly entertaining, in an 80's sort of way. I chuckled out loud at how over the top and ridiculous some of the twists were, but mostly in a positive way. I mentioned that Footfall contains a lot of the tropes associated with the alien invasion genre, but I'm downright surprised that nobody has adapted the novel wholesale for the screen. It seems almost purpose built for that exact purpose.

A decidedly conservative undertone is consistent throughout the book, but not in a way that breeds nuanced discussion. Niven and Pournelle take the time to insert cracks at their own personal bugaboos. For example, the lack of federal spending on a space program, in comparison to it's spending on 'welfare checks', or lack of creative military spending, specifically when it comes to space. They also make their opinion on communism and the USSR in general known, to the point that the Russian characters are complete caricatures of themselves. I do understand the context in which the novel was written but these things do make the novel feel dated for it's age.

The novel feels it's age in other ways too, though. There are some generally seedy portrayals of the relationship between men and women, and a gross fixation with sex and appearance that seemingly all male characters have, things that by the 80's I feel less forgiving about. In the novel, the US government brings in a group of retired SF writers to be a sort of think-tank for problem solving surrounding the aliens. Several of these writers are transparent representation of the authors of the novel. I personally didn't find this whole sub-plot nearly as funny or cute as it feels that Niven and Pournelle did. It felt self aggrandizing in a major way, and seriously tacky. Finally I'll say that the book simply has too many characters to keep track of. The sheer breadth of character work here means that none of the characters are deep enough to be noteworthy. There's hardly any character development over nearly 500 pages.

I feel about Footfall much the same I do about The Mote In God's Eye. Both are entertaining and have world class aliens, but are critically flawed in ways that make them hard to read at times. Footfall specifically I think could've used a major edit to trim the fat and make things more sleek. Making the pacing even faster I think would've only helped, and the lack of character work would've been more excusable. I have a few more of this team's work, but now I think I know what I'll be getting when I choose to dive into them.