The Mote in God's Eye (Unabridged‪)‬

Very good read. Almost gave up due to trope laden start, Victorian era patriarchy, and only one human female character. However despite that it becomes an excellent read for the most part. One of the best imaginings of an alien species and culture.

I am not going to waste my time with this book's excellence. If you are going to purchase this audiobook, then you likely already read it when you were young or you simply know it is one of the best hard science fiction novels ever written. I wanted to comment about what some other customers wrote regarding the skill of the narrator.

The narrator did an excellent job. You have to consider that this book's cast is enormous. How exactly does one read a story with unique voices for twenty or more characters? While *some* characters sounded the same, it was clear who is speaking based upon the text itself -- if you actually pay attention. What differentiation I did hear was amazing.

Simply put: this audiobook features a very skilled narrator reading one of the most important books in science fiction. This book was written throughout 1973 and it *still* possesses a saliency I doubt will be lost until we do actually build spaceships and kick off colonization. The only places where the story seems definitely dated is communications and computation. The rest is more accurate than most recent science fiction.

Perhaps the best of all "first contact" science fiction novels, "The Mote in God's Eye" succeeds in two areas where most first-contact stories fail. Firstly, the aliens are truely -alien-, not just subsets of human behavior modeled upon some romanticized subculture with the serial numbers filed off... yet their viewpoint is within grasp. Secondly, the lead characters actually come across as believable, well-rounded characters (something that many science fiction authors, particularly "classic" science fiction, have real trouble with)... our heroes are not the mere emotionless square-jawed recruitment-poster stereotypes which tainted so much of the science fiction of the 50's 60's and 70's, but are humans with hopes, fears, strengths and weaknesses. They actually grow and change in response to the happenings of the story. Add to this a well-thought-out setting in which hard science and the laws of physics are respected and in which the science plays a central role, and you have a novel that earned every one of the many awards heaped upon it.

The performance does not disappoint, either. The reader is energetic, enthusiastic, and speaks with a clarity that makes the act of listening enjoyable. While the pace of spoken words is a little faster in the words-per-minute aspect than most fiction readings, the skilled pronounciation and natural rhythm of the reading ensure it's all nice and clear. This pace helps, given the length of the material (unabridged - the ONLY worthwhile way to present fiction!). And hearing the reader dive into the accents of some of the major characters is a joy! The good time the reader had performing "The Mote in God's Eye" is infectious, and will have the listener caught up in it as well.

I absolutely recommend this reading for anyone looking for quality science fiction.