Footfall

By: Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle

Narrated by: MacLeod Andrews

Length: 24 hrs and 34 mins

Publisher's summary

They first appear as a series of dots on astronomical plates, heading from Saturn directly toward Earth. Since the ringed planet carries no life, scientists deduce the mysterious ship to be a visitor from another star. The world's frantic efforts to signal the aliens go unanswered. The first contact is hostile: the invaders blast a Soviet space station, seize the survivors, and then destroy every dam and installation on Earth with a hail of asteriods. Now the conquerors are descending on the American heartland, demanding servile surrender - or death for all humans.

©1986 Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle (P)2010 Audible, Inc.

Critic reviews

“Nobody does it better than Niven and Pournelle. I loved it!” (Tom Clancy)

"Rousing – the best of the genre.” ( The New York Times Book Review)

Great concepts, awesome performance, mediocre story.

I *loved* the science fiction concepts. The alien culture was so gosh dang engaging. But before you get to that you have to slog through 5+ hours of horny assholes and sex and banal nonsense.

Oh and the misogyny is just offensive. Almost every single time a female character is introduced their description is mostly about how attractive they are. If we’re currently in the perspective of a male character, it’s usually described as how much they want to have sex with said female character.

The ending leaves so many loose threads. It’s like the authors just forgot about all the awful character threads they had spent 75% of the book setting up.

By god the narrator is awesome! He really put his all into this book. I loved the otomotopia he puts in, and the energy. If the narrator wasn’t so good I would have quit the book about halfway through.

Childhood memories

Loved this story as a young adult and loved the audio version. Masterful audio version with the alien language. Highly recommend story telling.

This is my all time favorite book.

Niven and Pournelle are a dream team. They should really work together more. And Footfall should be made into a four part miniseries.

A masterful work from 1986 now on audio!

In 1986, or a year or two later, I read this book. I loved it then. But life goes on and even the title escaped my memory. I started listening to it, and low and behold some parts were familiar and other parts forgotten.

The story is timeless, even though it was written in the time of the USSR. I enjoyed it so much I must admit I stayed up WAY too late listening to the book. It is a long book (three parts of 8+ hours, or 24 hours of listening) and it can be hard to just quit listening.

The ending is dramatic and satisfactory. It must be hard for two Sci-Fi greats as Niven and Pournelle to cooperate on such a project, but is was a grand project very well done.

And it is a BARGAIN. 24hrs of listening for one credit! If you like Sci-Fi, this is one you should not miss. 35 years old and still a fantastic read - an ultimate classic.

More stupid aliens

I really liked "The Mote in God's Eye"; but I didn't like this book. In fact, it's like the authors are continuing a theme that, "no matter how capable, aliens just aint got no common sense". Also, there are sub-themes that seem to come rigt out of the RNC: 1) if left to it own devices, the liberal press would kill us all; and 2) the military industrial complex will save us all if we can just keep the environmentalist out of the way.
These two writers make a good team, but maybe they need to elvate their message.

Footfall

I've been waiting for this one to come home to Audible. It was not available until recently. I loved this one when it came out and still do. Great story.

The Fun Side of Alien Invasion

This is a novel that I had read and enjoyed thirty years ago while vacationing in the Pacific Northwest. I knew that parts of the story took place in my home town of Colorado Springs so I was excited to read it, but I didn’t know that other parts took place in Bellingham Washington the very site of my holiday. This strange synchronicity heightened my interest. As a result I read this over the space of just a few days and remember thinking at the time that this was a very fun book and that Niven and Pournelle were pretty good together. I still wax nostalgic whenever I see an old Niven book on the shelf.

Fast forward to a few months ago—I had just listened to the first two Expanse novels from James S. A. Corey; another two man writing team. Those books rekindled in me the same sense of wonder and sense of fun that I used to get from Niven and Pournelle. So that prompted me to revisit some of their old titles. I listened to this immediately after Niven and Pournelle’s LUCIFER’S HAMMER. The similarities between these two books is remarkable. They both feature Colorado Springs prominently as the last bastion of government after a world-wide disaster. This difference is that in the earlier novel the disaster is natural, a comet strike, and the latter novel features an alien invasion. The parallels were fun to relate. And, in fact, the element of fun is central in both books. That is the best way to enjoy this book: look for the light-hearted fun element and you will have found the key principle of FOOTFALL.

Macleod Andrews puts a lot of effort into creating interesting voices for the various characters; some of them border of \n the melodramatic. I encourage this type of performance and so give him extra marks for that. He even gives an Yeoman’s effort into pronouncing some of the unpronounceable alien names. On the printed page your eye can just skip over these alien names but hearing Andrews say them is always a little unsettling. Without being too critical it must be said that Andrews pitch is higher than my preference in a narrator’s voice would normally be. Because of that I never really warmed up to his narration.

Rated but still very good.

Read this when it first came out and loved it then. The narration is not very good. Can't tell characters apart and most of them sound ridiculous. Despite narration I still had to give Foot Fall 4 stars because of great characters and story. . ......... Spoiler alert. They should have found a way to blast those sociopathic, aliens out of space. They killed millions and should not be given a chance to attack other worlds. Revenge would have been .sweet

Performance

Might have been better if no accent was used for the alien speech. Some alien dialogue was difficult to understand. Still was good performance.

Even better than I remember

Even better than I remember I read this when it originally published and to my surprise enjoyed it even more