How a genre lost its footing: Larry Niven and Jerry Purnelle’s Footfall
Black Hole Books medium.com
One of the most interesting courses I took while at university was history through film. The lecturers encouraged us to consider what films could tell us about the period in which they were created…
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Medium
One of the most interesting courses I took while at university was history through film. The lecturers encouraged us to consider what films could tell us about the period in which they were created, taking films not as historical records, but as historical relics. How a film was made can tell an observer as much, if not more, than what it is about. I recalled this within the first few minutes of starting Larry Niven and Jerry Purnelle’s Footfall,because it so clearly typifies a point in the history of popular science fiction; in this case the troubled years of the mid-1980s.

The invasion of earth has become such a trope in science fiction that it can almost be considered its own sub-genre. Footfall has it all: unknown aliens emerging from the depth of space, mass destruction of earth, and plucky American heroes. The threat of earth’s destruction, enslavement, or subjugation, is supposed to drive the drama as Niven and Purnelle’s host of human characters seek to survive the onslaught of the elephant-like aliens.

Footfall has it all: unknown aliens emerging from the depth of space, mass destruction of earth, and plucky American heroes.

There are good examples of this sub-genre of course, not the least the progenitor War of the Worlds, but Footfall is not one. The writing is at best lacklustre, at worse clumsy and insulting. At times Niven and Purnelle seem to twist themselves unnecessarily trying to fit their Cold War divided world into their vision of the near future, by, for example, projecting their 1980s American fears of the Soviet Union into creating a narratively pointless Soviet base on the moon contrasted by a lackluster US space programme. Elsewhere in the book any sense of momentum is snagged on yet another invented word, the meaning of which the reader has already forgotten. There is nothing wrong with inventing words. In particular, it can help illustrate the complete otherness of an idea held by an alien species, Heinlein’s ‘grok’ is central to A Stranger in a Strange Land but only because it is alien. Here though, such invented words are used with reckless abandon, and are introduced too frequently to allow their absorption, the net effect being confusion.

Footfall should be an easy read. The writing is simple, the narrative arc is readily grasped, and the invasion of earth should be exciting. This should be a classic ‘airport novel’, but having tried it on a longhaul flight I can’t say I recommend it. It simply is not compelling, and the only reason I kept turning the pages is that I suffer terribly from the need to know how any story turns out, no matter how badly told. I also struggled to get through because I kept running into passages that pushed me from the story. These would often be the simplest thing, such as the early description of a taxi driver speaking ‘Pakistani’: Even in 1985 a quick glance at an encyclopaedia would have told Niven and Purnelle that there is no such language, and that people in Pakistan speak Urdu, amongst other languages. These frustrations mount as the pages turn, and towards the end I was ready to throw the book across the room, or in that case, the aircraft cabin.

This should be a classic ‘airport novel’, but having tried it on a longhaul flight I can’t say I recommend it.

I should not have been so surprised by the writing. A character list at the beginning of any book -and there is one here — should warn the reader that the following pages contain characters that are both overly numerous and uninspiring. This might be personal bias of course, but Kim Stanley Robinson managed without such a list for his sprawling Mars trilogy, and I can still, years after meeting them, describe the different personalities of his first hundred and their descendants. I’ve just finished Footfall and I could not tell you a single feature of any character’s personality, in part because they don’t seem to have them.

Actually, there is one personality feature found in almost all Niven and Purnelle’s characters: misogyny. This book may be a relic of the 1980s, but the attitudes would have grated even then. The authors describe the appearance of each female character; an approach the is for the most part not replicated for male characters. Worse still, the authors have their male characters express opinions on the attractiveness of female characters, frequently without purpose. Upon meeting a woman hiding in a building amidst an attack, one male character takes the time to consider that she is “not quite ugly, but she could work on it”. What kind of person thinks critically of how someone looks amidst violence? More troubling, what kind of person writes that sort of character without a narrative need? Is the attractiveness of a woman, of any character, really the most important thing about them? Especially in a life threatening situation? It gets worse too, on another occasion a male character considers a woman he encounters “attractive, if a bit used”? I’m sorry, what? “Used”? “Used” is not an adjective for people. Such statements are insulting, misogynistic, and unneeded here, or frankly anywhere else. Niven and Purnelle are not doing this for effect, as far as I can tell, they are not making a point, and they are not writing a misogynistic character for the narrative because in Footfall all the human males behave and think this way.

What kind of person thinks critically of how someone looks amidst violence? More troubling, what kind of person writes that sort of character without a narrative need?

Regretfully, any attempts at finding refuge in the company of Footfall’s handful of female characters will disappoint. Early suggestions of independence and power are swept away as they seek the support and safety of a male character, in some cases explicitly. It is a strange thing to read a novel so overflowing with named characters and yet find yourself liking or empathising with none of them.

Why then am I giving time to this book if I can do nothing but point out its grievous flaws? Because this book reminds us of just how lost science fiction became. A genre where anything is possible should be the most inclusive, yet with books like Footfall countless readers were driven away, finding that science fiction was apparently not for them. Writers such as Niven and Purnelle took science fiction to a sad and lonely place. Where Asimov, Bradbury, and Atwood used the genre to explore fundamental ideas of society, and what it meant to be human, Niven and Purnelle present instead a power fantasy of unlikable and isolated men. They even write themselves into the book in the former of science fiction writers being called on to help defeat the alien threat. That is perhaps the greatest indicator that this book wasn’t written for me, it wasn’t written for you, it wasn’t written for anyone else. Niven and Purnelle wrote Footfall for themselves.