Rating: 
Summary: Standard sequel fare...
Review: Look, this is a sequel folks, and like nearly all sequels, it loses some of the magical mystery of First Contact. The sequel further explores the question of, do we (can we) blow up the Moties, or do we (can we) negotiate. It's a question that keeps getting repeated over and over again in real life, between warring societies...Just look at Israel now, and the people they consider "aliens" -- the Palestinians. Only the Moties, with their stratospheric evolutionary and reproductive rates, present the greatest possible risk. Besides that single question, this is more of a flat-out adventure book, with lots more hard SF stuff thrown in... As with the first book, the writing is not literature, or even about the future human society -- it's about the cool aliens...
Rating: 
Summary: UN-Gripping Novel
Review: Mote in Gods Eye was one of the most interesting first contact novels I had read for a long time - with some truly alien aliens. So it was with a great sense of anticipation that i read the gripping hand.Words fail me. This book is nothing compared to Mote - and if you have'nt read Mote it is extremely confusing. All in all I wish I hadn't read it as it spoiled some of my 'internal' vision of how the Motie Society would progress.
Rating: 
Summary: 3 Motie hands, none gripping too tightly
Review: Niven and Pournelle are, in my opinion, the greatest science fiction writing partnership since Frederick Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth. On a good day, they are even better. The audiotape version of The Gripping Hand was not their best day. The Niven/Pournelle partnership seems to work best when Niven kicks in the futuristic afterburners and Pournelle fills out military details. This combination made The Legacy of Heorot one of the greatest action science fiction novels of all time and had non-SF readers turning the pages of Footfall. The Mote in God's Eye was also a nail-biting winner. The sequel should have been a worthy successor. However, the guys missed it or perhaps the people who trimmed it down for the audiotape version missed it. The Gripping Hand is the sequel to The Mote in God's Eye. After a blockade that has lasted for 25 years, the Moties are ready to break out. Such a break out would lead to chaos as the Moties, with their high reproductive rates and species specialization, would inevitably conflict with humans and be formidable, perhaps unbeatable, foes. Commander Blaine from the first novel, his wife and children and helped develop a method of birth control that would eliminate the major concern of the Moties' aggressive expansion. However, the Moties are at war with themselves and might break out before appropriate alliances can be made and necessary persuasion applied. Can an uncontrolled Motie breakout be stopped and humanity saved from a massive war? Read on and see. The abridged version of the novel is read reasonably well. The reader picked up on the allusions to the British Empire reading appropriate parts with a passable English accent. However, while using the English accent he still used the American pronunciation for lieutenant. If he was going to follow the allegory, he should have gone the distance. There is an underlying subtext in the two books about sexuality and the impossibility of controlling it. Birth control is the proposed solution although, as we have discovered, it has not solved humanity's social ills. In my opinion, the guys should not have returned to the Mote. The conclusion of the first novel implied the solution that is presented in the second. In this day and age can writers not leave something to the imagination? Or is writing a sequel too lucrative.
Rating:
Summary: Not quite as good as the original, but good none the less
Review: Oh come on, of course it's not as good as TMiGE... but few books are!! If you don't like this book, you've got rocks in your head.
Rating:
Summary: Don't bother
Review: One of the poorest examples of science fiction I've ever come across. It's hard to believe that it was turned out by Niven and Pournelle. Must have been ghost written by a couple of seventh graders- no, make that fourth graders.
Rating: 
Summary: Not so much a completion as an abandonment of "The Mote"
Review: Perhaps, had I not read this book's predecessor ("The Mote in God's Eye,"), I might rate it more highly. This book involves the same characters, but they seem to be running in neutral; there are no new science toys, no new cosmology, no new species, little in the way of new culture, nothing to surprise or invite thought. What is here is a trivial resolution of that supposedly-irresolvable conundrum which was the "Mote" in God's eye, a casual and thorough disregard for the "beam" it disclosed in our own; and the intriguing new philosophical construct of the title, shrunken down to a simple faith that such trivializing solutions are always possible.
Rating:
Summary: Worth waiting 18 years for? NOT!!
Review: Seems that I'm a little harder to please than old T. C. The only reason that I gave this weak work a 2 is just because it's Niven. Otherwise, I would never have finished it. The Mote In God's Eye is one of the great works in SF. The best extrapolation of what an alien race trapped in their own solar system would be forced to evolve into in order to survive. Oh, sorry, I got carried away about a piece of GREAT fiction, not this garbage. Reading the phone book is more exciting. A forced sequel that the writers obviously could not have put their hearts into. Read Mote again and dream up your own sequel, you can't do any worse than this
Rating:
Summary: Not as good as I thought it would be
Review: The Mote in God's Eye had a fairly original story that kept me intrigued. The sequel, though, fails to provide the same excitement. Part of it is due to annoying staccato dialogue and sudden jumps in logic that leave the reader behind.
Rating:
Summary: Larry, what have you done?
Review: The Mote in God's Eye is a classic. It flowed flawlessly and kept my attention from start to finish. The Gripping Hand however, did not. If it were not for the winter being in full effect when I recieved this book, it would have never been finished. I found it to be a few pages of riviting action surrounded by hundreds of pages of disjointed boring babble that ultimately had little to do with the overall story. It got so bad that by the end I would not have been surprised if John Wayne himself led the cavalry charge. This book rates a very weak three based on the insight into the moties, and for the talent of the writers, even though it wasn't used here. Rewrite!
Rating:
Summary: a very disappointing sequel
Review: The Mote in God's Eye was one of the best sci-fi stories of the last 30-odd years. In order to stand up to it, Niven and Pournelle had to produce something really good. They didn't make it.
First of all, the story of "The Gripping Hand" makes very little sense unless you have read "The Mote.." Even then, the story of the sequel doesn't hang together very well. For one thing, the first part where the threat of Moties breaking out turns out to be a false alarm doesn't seem like it goes with the rest of the book. It's as if the authors wrote two different stories about the same people and pasted them together. Most of the characters introduced in that first part except for Renner, Bury, and Bury's companion Cynthia disappear.
I think that the authors have taken too many of the interesting sharp edges off of both Renner and Bury. In particular, Bury was much more convincing as the man out to increase his power no matter what (in "The Mote..") rather than the Arab patriot he became in the sequel. As for Rod and Sally Blaine, the walk-on part they have is dull and so are they. A reviewer complained that the authors don't get inside the mind of an 18-year old girl, Glenda Ruth Blaine, very well. Maybe not, but anyone who has ever dealt with teenagers will immediately recognize the "I'm 18, I know absolutely everything, and you're morons" mindset. They may not have a very accurate view from the inside, but their portrait from the outside is dead on. I did think that the motivation for her going to the Mote system with the birth control bug worked. Someone from a culture that believes that every problem must have a solution (the humans of the empire) who had further developed an intense identification with Moties by having a Motie mediator for a nannie would have been hard put to do anything else.
I found it very hard to tell who among the Moties was doing what to/with whom. Perhaps that was deliberate. Given the premise of the plot, I imagine that the Empire representatives who would deal with the Moties would have similar difficulties. I had to go back and reread the last 100 pages or so to see if the Moties are still bottled up. I don't think so. Much of the reason that the original blockade worked for 25 years is that the Moties were coming into a red giant sun having undergone jump shock and didn't know about either the sun or the shock. The function of the blockading fleet was more like finishing off cripples. It's going to take a much larger battle fleet to blockade this new Alderson point. The Moties' first breakthrough shows how easy it would be for their ships to get loose, at least in that system.
I had a hard time believing that the empire would have become so flabby and bureaucratized in just 25 years that their response to a new Motie threat would be that feeble. On the other hand, I found the original (in "The Mote..") description of a society that had collapsed into fragmentation and fedual dark ages but was recovering and reconquering the human race convincing. A society rising from feudalism will have lots of influence from the old feudal nobility. A conquering society will be military and authoritarian. The criticism that the society sounds too 50s (actually, it sounds to me more like the old British Empire) is badly made. As for the position of women, anyone who reads history will know that women's status has varied up and down enormously over the millenia. Anyone who expects women's lib to survive the next collapse of society (assuming there is one) is foolish.
All in all, I'm glad I bought my copy in paperback at the used book store rather than springing for full price in hardback. Now, if I can just get my nephew to return my copy of "The Mote.."
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