Footfall

I spent the last week slogging through Niven/Pournelle Footfall. So here is my review: it was bad.

What, you want more? Um. Aliens attack the Solar System, olifant style. (Everyone in the book calls them snouts or fithp but I like the Afrikaans version best.) Their tech is Hard SF Tech so they got here by ramjet. We have to fight back, with the Atomic Rockets arsenal which Pournelle had mooted to Congress over the 1960s and 1970s. Including ol' Boom Boom - called "Bang Bang" here but punctuated by WHAM WHAM.

The main review to read is Nicoll's; whom I'll disclose, isn't one of my favourites either. The SIGMA reference was cheap.

Then there's this: I regret that I did not reread this long enough ago to ask Fred Pohl how he felt about how the book divides the SF writers into military veterans or liberals. I would also have liked to ask Theodore Cogswell what he thought. I don't believe we are missing anything by skipping Pohl. Cogswell, I don't know. Dallas "Mack" Reynolds is the best Left author I've yet read in hard SF but he'd died by 1983, likely why Nicoll didn't count him.

The book although lacking in merit as literature has some use as a snapshot into Pournelle's thought over the SDI / Ronnie Raygun era. Niven cared about aliens; Pournelle really didn't. Pournelle instead was arguing for a robust presence in space lest the Soviets, or any other adversary, take space first. From space, an adversary can rain down all manner of horrid things upon us like the "flying crowbar". If the adversary were evil enough it might pull a big rock upon an ocean. I actually like that Pournelle had constructed this argument via aliens; the Soviets might not be the most-dangerous adversary to take space. Nowadays we gotta worry about Xi's China. India gotta worry more.

Nicoll is likely right that this authorial duo's initial intent was to drop the rock upon us first, in Lucifer's Hammer; and then, in this book, reveal that aliens had dun it. Kind of reminds me of Stargate on its way to Not Independence Day.

On THAT topic, Independence Day owes much to Footfall. There's a massive cast of characters who band together against a common threat; they even catch an alien and interrogate him (male in both). Both start as in-part a political thriller and, indeed, Tom Clancy blurbed Footfall. This book precedes Red Storm Rising by a year. As to Emmerich and Devlin, 'tis clear they lacked Clue One about what Niven and (more so) Pournelle were trying to do. Admittedly the ID4 characters were more likeable; I hear, because the directors let Smith and Goldblum ad-lib.

Anyway since these aliens aren't stealth-attacking with a big dumb rock, and since even in 1985 observers were running out of likely rocks, Lucifer's Hammer wouldn't do as a first act anymore. No dino-killers here; just something that "only" hits five times worse than Tambora, the best the olifants can scrounge.

As to the winks to other SF authors like Heinlein (as "Anson") and - I am told - Cherryh: Nicoll noticed; I hadn't. I wouldn't have minded if I had noticed, like in Deep Space Nine's famous "it is reeeal" ep. I did roll my eyes at Niven-Pournelle murdering a journalist, by means of an environmentalist who now - OH THE IRONY - is supporting the Orion. Talk about cheap.