Rating: 
Summary: Wonderful pacing
Review: The story is wonderfully well-paced, with three distinct "action"
sections, and a final court-room style showdown. Each action section
grips you to the climax, and then you take a breather and start
building up to the next. I'd love to see a film based on this! The
science fiction elements are good, but it'd still make a decent story
without it. However, the romance is rather poorly done. - Rujith.
Rating: 
Summary: Most alien book about aliens?
Review: This book is already well-summarized in the editorial reviews and the other customer reviews, so I'll move right to my opinions about it.There are many human-alien contact stories out there, but authors have a tough challenge designing aliens and alien cultures that are truly alien, instead of just a mix-and-match of Terran species and Human cultures. Niven succeeded more here than do most authors in describing creatures that truly come off as alien in appearance, physiology, and culture. The difficulties encountered in this first human-alien contact also seem very realistic. While the book has a few slow spots, I think that the process of successfully encountering an alien species/culture would be slow, arduous, and complex, thus unlikely to zip right along with lots of action. Steven Spielberg gave us a fun first-contact story in "E.T." and a wondrous, magical, and optimistic one in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind". Niven here gives us a gritty, complicated, first contact story full of hard work, misunderstandings, and near disasters. In essence, it seems to be a very realistic story about a very unreal situation.
Rating: 
Summary: What's all the fuss about?
Review: I didn't think that the beginning was all that great. Though, oddly enough, once I finished the book I actually liked the beginning. The middle of this book is where you begin to see how amazing it is. The aliens are extremely cool and I loved the whole multi-species and "intelligence through instinct" ideas. I gave Mote four stars because of the ending; it was a bit of a let down, though I don't know how they could have ended it better. In general, the characters were great. I thought that the authors did a really good job of portraying people in power. I often find that authors seem to think that merely telling the reader that a character is in a position of power is enough to BELIEVE the character in that position. Niven and Pournell really make you understand why the characters are where they are. I would recommend Mote for the characters and the kick *ss aliens.
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