The alien’s arrival in the Solar System went overlooked because nobody happened to be looking in the right direction at the right time but there’s no such thing as stealth in space and in 1995 enough people are looking at Saturn when the alien mother-ship sets out for Earth that humanity has months of warning to prepare their responses. We are denied the chance to see if internal rot eats the US from the inside out before or after the imperial might of the glorious and eternal Soviet Union crushes poor, doomed America because before things can come to a boil an external event renders most terrestrial politics moot: aliens have been hiding out by Saturn for the better part of a generation and now they are ready to act. In a 1995 as imagined by a ex-Red turned right-wing ideologue, America has surrendered supremacy in space to the Soviets, whose command of space out to the Moon is unquestioned. The original idea was still bouncing out in their heads and almost a decade later the pair finally got back to it in this novel. What emerged was a conventional disaster novel written in the matter of the 1970s best seller novel, thick and with a cast of thousands. Their late ’ 70s disaster novel Lucifer’s Hammer started off as an alien invasion story that featured a deliberate asteroid impact their editor apparently liked the asteroid but was cool on the aliens. Over the years, to borrow from Alan Moore, Niven grew more like Pournelle Pournelle too became more like Pournelle.
Having enjoyed success once, Niven and Pournelle continued the partnership, rewriting Dante’s Inferno, smashing the planet with a comet, creating a portrait of the world’s largest gated community and so on. In the long long ago of the early Disco Era, Niven had a sense of joy, Pournelle was a Campbell-Award winning author and together they wrote The Mote in God’s Eye, a long novel about managing a fraught First Contact with as low a megadeath count as possible.
It’s still better than a lot of the competition.
When I put the book back down eight long hours later, I was still surprised that Footfall was only 582 pages because the authors managed cram in the mediocrity and tedium of a much longer novel. I remembered Footfall as one of those excessively long science fiction novels of the pre-Aught Three and when I picked it up I was surprised to see that my May 1986 Del Rey mass market paperback was only 582 pages (including the authors’ bios at the end), barely an evening’s read.
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