Author Pournelle's Book
Reviews
Footfall
A large alien spaceship arrives at Earth after stopping (unknown to the Earth) at Saturn for several years. The aliens do not negotiate - they attack and quickly conquer the Earth. They are herd creatures with their own ethics, and they have as much trouble understanding humans as humans do them.
They demand only that humans all live in peace, and use force to make sure this happens. Meanwhile they are trying to decide whether to stay in this syste...
Lucifer's Hammer
A comet strikes the Earth, causing enough damage and disruption that civilization collapses overnight worldwide. The novel follows the struggles of various people to survive.
The luckiest ones are those who either live in the same reasonably isolated valley as U.S. Senator Arthur Jellison or who are able to get there and persuade him to let them stay. Among the latter are TV producer/director Harvey Randall and wealthy amateur astronomer Timothy Hamn...
Oath of Fealty
Todos Santos: A huge one-building city where in exchange for giving up your privacy you can have economic freedom and total security. Almost total security, anyway. Envioronmental terorists are obsessed with destroying Todos Santos, and unlike most residents, the Todos Santos executives must worry constantly about enemies from without- and within....
The Gripping Hand
The sequel to The Mote in God's Eye, The Gripping Hand takes place 25 years later. Horace Bury and Kevin Renner uncover evidence that the Moties, who have been blockaded in their own solar system, might soon have a way to break out. Fortunately, a "cure" for the Motie breeding problems might make that irrelavent. When humans arrive in the Mote system, they find a fractured society full of factions vying for supremacy....
Pournelle booklist
The Legacy Of Heorot
They are 200 of Earth's best and smartest, send to colonize a distant world. The colony is perfect, self-sufficient, an ideal place to raise their children and expand humanity into the stars . . . They only have two problems. First, the secret no one talks about. Being in a frozen sleep for twenty years had left them with brain damage, some mild, some very bad. Second - there are monsters on their new world, and they won't believe the one man who h...
The Moat Around Murchison's Eye
Thirty years ago the Empire of humans found, investigated and decided to use a blockade of space ships to prevent the spread of an alien culture called the Moties, who inhabited a single star system and were only just discovering faster-than-light travel. This was the subject of the novel "The Mote in God's Eye" by the same authors.
Now because of a change in the stellar neighbourhood the Moties will be able to leave their home system and spread acro...
The Mote in God's Eye
The Mote In God's eye is about humanity's first encounter with an alien race; the Moties. As the two races explore each other, the human ambassadors begin to suspect that that the moties are hiding something. As Captain Roderick Blaine deals with his own problems, ranging from the paranoia of his superior, Admiral Kutuzov, to an unexpected infestation, the Moties also have their own problems to deal with; namely that the humans not discover the secret th...
