Giant mutant elephants invade earth after travelling in coldsleep all the way from Alpha Centauri. They're not really hyper-intelligent green men or clever interstellar traders out for a buck; these are H.G. Well's-style invaders who want the peoples of the Earth to roll over and submit to their domination.
It sounds good. It has a neat cover. It even has a satisfyingly large number of words to back it up.
Reading it, though, was like eating junk food---sure, it felt good while I was doing it, but I felt vaguely sick afterwards. Or like watching the entire run of "Married...with children" at once: you can't believe you spent all the time and effort for. . .this.
Don't get me wrong; it wasn't like I didn't enjoy reading it. But I was never able to really worry about anything in the story. Were the good guys going to win? Could the Earth really crawl out from beneath the clawed, grey foot of the Travelling Herd? Oh, please. Nothing beats good, old-fashioned Yankee knowhow. Not ever. I called that from early on, though exactly *how* they were going to do that was beyond me. And I managed to be surprised at the end.
Some of the ideas were interesting---how would primitive herd animals react to human individuality and spirit? In the wild, when an animal submits to the alpha male, it gives up all power to the victor and end of conflict until the next mating season. But here, the alien mindset of these animals can't contain these higher-order thoughts of life without the herd and without this reflex domination/submission idea.
Interesting, as was INTEGRAL TREES. Niven and Pournelle have at least grabbed hold of some neat SF ideas drawn from the wild.
But then, we get to the story.
I work in AI, and we often characterize the world in warped ways. Some of my favorite examples are programs that characterize humans as wanting nothing more than money, sex, power over others, and food (in that order). I write them myself, programs with rules of thumb like "if something bad happens to somebody you don't like, you become happier and like the person who did it in proportion to how much you hated the guy you didn't like."
The characters in FOOTFALL fall into this simple definition very well, and in that way, this book resembles a Stephen King novel: lots of pointless sex, talking about sex, adultery, and other such basal matters while DEATH DESCENDS FROM THE SKY! You'd think that there'd be more to talk about than human mating rituals when the planet is being taken over by elephants with an attitude.
You get some fun scenes, though, like the Kansas division of weekend warriors going off to battle against sky-based weapons, Hoover Dam being shelled from orbit, Zulu warriors hurling spears at bumbling monsters, an alien spitting out its last warning about "thumbs! They have thumbs!" before keeling over from a (assumably) thumb-caused wound, and more from the vast storehouse of guilty pleasures afforded by FOOTFALL.
I, too, was a little disappointed by the lack of general mayhem as civilization collapses---it seems like it should collapse, everyone agrees that "Wow, society is such a thin veneer over instinctual needs of food and territory", yet everyone just goes on with business as usual even though there are no phone communications, roadways, or bridges across major waterways. We don't get to hear about bands of looters and other such spoilage of war; I mean, if looting happens after a single evening of riots in L.A., why don't the people rebel when the elephants disrupt the entire continent?
And even worse is the idea that the military would find a bunch of sci-fi writers, lock them in NORAD, give them everything they could ask for, and then actually *listen* to them is asking too much. This is the hardest to swallow.
All the way through the book, I kept saying, "Oh, get off it," as the President of the United States walks around in awe of these great brains of hard sci-fi who always seem to know the right answer at the right time. Niven's own ego springs off the page and thrashes you senseless, with even a useless fan character who mourns the death of the SF convention (since you can't have a convention without transportation since how can all the neat-cool authors get there?). Sorry, guys; I think that, say, loss of drinking water from all the burst dams would be a slightly larger problem than no more filksongs.
Still, parts of it are a good read. I love stories that have evil beings raining death down from orbiting assault platforms and I'm a sucker for human ingenuity getting the better of space-faring races (that's why I still watch "Trek"). A little less sex (and I can't believe I'm saying that!), a little more realism, and less "pat SF on the back" stuff and this would have been a really cool book. As it is, it's just OK.
On a rising scale of 0 to 10 prehensile elephant trunks, this gets a solid 3.8. (Sort of 3 trunks and one that was injured in an industrial accident.)
Wolff Dobson
wolff@cs.nwu.edu