John Lindal’s Blog

The Gripping Hand

Back when I read the books, I was deeply impressed by The Mote in God’s Eye, but The Gripping Hand was quite a let down. Mote is essentially a horror story which leaves you hanging, terrified that the genie might get out of the bottle. The Moties will clearly reproduce without end and overrun the galaxy if they ever get out of their solar system. The sequel was such a let down because it resolves this terror by invoking birth control.

I believe these two books were written for very different reasons. Mote was good, old fashioned science fiction asking a terrible What if…? The sequel seems to be primarily motivated by politics — it seeks to assure westerners that Arabs really aren’t all that bad. They just have a different way of doing business, and if they can be convinced to accept birth control, they won’t take over the world. (From what little I know, Islam isn’t big on contraception, so they have over population problems.) The book does this by:

• making a big point about how Jews and Muslims used to face the same direction during prayer, and when in orbit around another planet, Mecca and Jerusalem are essentially in the same direction
• showing how the Arab way of doing business (or at least, how it is depicted in the book) saves the day because it is compatible with the Motie way of thinking