There are four known forces in modern physics: two sub-nuclear forces responsible respectively for alpha and beta decay; electromagnetism, which includes light; and gravity. The Alderson force, then, is the fifth, and it is generated by thermonuclear reactions.
The force has little effect in our universe; in fact, it is barely detectable. Simultaneously with the discovery of the fifth force, however, we postulate the discovery of a second universe in point-to-point congruence with our own. The “continuum universe” differs from the one we’re used to in that there are no known quantum effects there.
Within that universe particles may travel as fast as they can be accelerated; and the fifth force exists to accelerate them.
There’s a lot more, including a page or so of differential equations, but that’s the general idea.
You can get from one universe to another. For every construct in our universe there can be created a “correspondence particle” in the continuum universe. In order for your construct to go into and emerge from the continuum universe without change you must have some complex machinery to hold everything together and prevent your ship—and crew—from being disorganized into elementary particles.
Correspondence particles can be boosted to speeds faster than light: in fact, to speeds nearly infinite as we measure them. Of course they cannot emerge into our universe at such speeds: they have to lose their energy to emerge at all. More on that in a moment.
There are severe conditions to entering and leaving the continuum universe. To emerge from the continuum universe you must exit with precisely the same potential energy (measured in terms of the fifth force, not gravity) as you entered. You must also have zero kinetic energy relative to a complex set of coordinates that we won’t discuss here.
The fifth force is created by thermonuclear reactions: generally, that is, in stars. You may travel by using it, but only along precisely defined lines of equipotential flux: tramways or tramlines.
Imagine the universe as a thin rubber sheet, very flat. Now drop heavy rocks of different weights onto it. The rocks will distort the sheet, making little cone-shaped (more or less) dimples. Now put two rocks reasonably close together: the dimples will intersect in a valley. The intersection will have a “pass,” a region higher than the low points where the rocks (stars) lie, but lower than the general level of the rubber sheet.
The route from one star to another through that “pass” is the tramline. Possible tramlines lie between each two stars, but they don’t always exist, because when you add third and fourth stars to the system they may interfere, so there is no unique gradient line. If this seems confusing, don’t spend a lot of time worrying about it; we’ll get to the effects of all this in a moment.
You may also imagine stars to be like hills; move another star close and the hills will intersect. Again, from summit to summit there will be one and only one line that preserves the maximum potential energy for that level. Release a marble on one hill and it will roll down, across the saddle, and up the side of the other. That too is a tramline effect. It’s generally easier to think of the system as valleys rather than hills, because to travel from star to star you have to get over that “hump” between the two. The fifth force provides the energy for that.
You enter from the quantum universe. When you travel in the continuum universe you continually lose kinetic energy; it “leaks.” This can be detected in our universe as photons. The effect can be important during a space battle. We cut such a space battle from MOTE, but it still exists, and we may yet publish it as a novella.
To get from the quantum to the continuum universe you must supply power, and this is available only in quantum terms. When you do this you turn yourself into a correspondence particle; go across the tramline; and come out at the point on the other side where your potential energy is equal to what you entered with, plus zero kinetic energy (in terms of the fifth force and complex reference axes).
For those bored by the last few paragraphs, take heart: we’ll leave the technical details and get on with what it all means.
Travel by Alderson Drive consists of getting to the proper Alderson Point and turning on the Drive. Energy is used. You vanish, to reappear in an immeasurably short time at the Alderson Point in another star system some several light-years away. If you haven’t done everything right, or aren’t at the Alderson Point, you turn on your drive and a lot of energy vanishes. You don’t move. (In fact you do move, but you instantaneously reappear in the spot where you started.)
That’s all there is to the Drive, but it dictates the structure of an interstellar civilization.
To begin with, the Drive works only from point to point across inter-stellar distances. Once in a star system you must rely on reaction drives to get around. There’s no magic way from, say, Saturn to Earth: you’ve got to slog across.
Thus space battles are possible, and you can’t escape battle by vanishing into hyperspace, as you could in future history series such as Beam Piper’s and Gordon Dickson’s. To reach a given planet you must travel across its stellar system, and you must enter that system at one of the Alderson Points. There won’t be more than five or six possible points of entry, and there may only be one.
Star systems and planets can be thought of as continents and islands, then, and Alderson Points as narrow sea gates such as Suez, Gibraltar, Panama, Malay Straits, etc. To carry the analogy further, there’s tele-graph but no radio: the fastest message between star systems is one carried by a ship, but within star systems messages go much faster than the ships…
Hmm. This sounds a bit like the early days of steam. Not sail; the ships require fuel and sophisticated repair facilities. They won’t pull into some deserted star system and rebuild themselves unless they’ve carried the spare parts along. However, if you think of naval actions in the period between the Crimean War and World War One, you’ll have a fair picture of conditions as implied by the Alderson Drive.
The Drive’s limits mean that uninteresting stellar systems won’t be explored. There are too many of them. They may be used as crossing-points if the stars are conveniently placed, but stars not along a travel route may never be visited.
Reaching the Mote, or leaving it, would be damned inconvenient. Its only tramline reaches to a star only a third of a light-year away—Murcheson’s Eye, the red supergiant—and ends deep inside the red-hot outer envelope. The aliens’ only access to the Empire is across thirty-five light-years of interstellar space—which no Empire ship would ever see. The gaps between the stars are as mysterious to the Empire as they are to you.
LANGSTON FIELD
Our second key technological building block was the Langston Field, which absorbs and stores energy in proportion to the fourth power of incoming particle energy: that is, a slow-moving object can penetrate it, but the faster it’s moving (or hotter it is) the more readily it is absorbed.
(In fact it’s not a simple fourth-power equation; but our readers surely don’t need third-order differential equations for amusement.)
The Field can be used for protection against lasers, thermonuclear weapons, and nearly anything else. It isn’t a perfect defense, however. The natural shape of the Field is a solid. Thus it wants to collapse and vaporize everything inside it. It takes energy to maintain a hole inside the Field, and more energy to open a control in it so that you can cause it selectively to radiate away stored energy. You don’t get something for nothing.
This means that if a Field is overloaded, the ship inside vanishes into vapor. In addition, parts of the Field can be momentarily overloaded: a sufficiently high energy impacting a small enough area will cause a temporary Field collapse, and a burst of energy penetrates to the inside. This can damage a ship without destroying it.
COSMOGRAPHY
We’ve got to invent a term. What is a good word to mean the equivalent of “geography” as projected into interstellar space? True, planetologists have now adopted “geology” to mean geophysical sciences applied to any planet,
not merely Earth; and one might reasonably expect “geography” to be applied to the study of physical features of other planets—but we’re concerned here with the relationship of star systems to each other.
We suggest cosmography, but perhaps that’s too broad? Should that term be used for relationships of galaxies, and mere star system patterns be studied as “astrography”? After all, “astrogator” is a widely used term meaning “navigator” for interstellar flight.
Some of the astrography of MOTE was given because it had been previously published. In particular, the New Caledonia system, and the red supergiant known as Murcheson’s Eye, had already been worked out. There were also published references to the history of New Caledonia.
We needed a red supergiant in the Empire. There’s only one logical place for that, and previously published stories had placed one there: Murcheson’s Eye, behind the Coal Sack. It has to be behind the Coal Sack: if there were a supergiant that close anywhere else, we’d see it now.
Since we had to use Murcheson’s Eye, we had to use New Caledonia. Not that this was any great imposition: New Scotland and New Ireland are interesting places, terraformed planets, with interesting features and interesting cultures.
There was one problem, though: New Scotland is inhabited by New Scots, a people who have preserved their subculture for a long time and defend it proudly. Thus, since much of the action takes place on New Scotland, some of the characters, including at least one major character, had to be New Scot. For structural reasons we had only two choices: the First Officer or the Chief Engineer.
We chose the Chief Engineer, largely because in the contemporary world it is a fact that a vastly disproportionate number of ship’s engineers are Scots, and that seemed a reasonable thing to project into the future.
Alas, some critics have resented that, and a few have accused us of stealing Mr. Sinclair from Star Trek. We didn’t. Mr. Sinclair is what he is for perfectly sound astrographical reasons.
The astrography eventually dictated the title of the book. Since most of the action takes place very near the Coal Sack, we needed to know how the Coal Sack would look close up from the back side. Eventually we put swirls of interplanetary dust in it, and evolving proto-stars, and all manner of marvels; but those came after we got very close. The first problem was the Coal Sack seen from ten parsecs.
Larry Niven hit on the happy image of a hooded man, with the supergiant where one eye might be. The supergiant has a small companion, a yellow dwarf not very different from our Sun. If the supergiant is an eye—Murcheson’s Eye—then the dwarf is, of course, a mote in that eye.
But if the Hooded Man is seen by backward and superstitious peoples as the Face of God…then the name for the Mote becomes inevitable…and once suggested, “The Mote In God’s Eye” is a near irresistible title. (Although in fact Larry Niven did resist it, and wanted “The Mote In Murcheson’s Eye” up to the moment when the publisher argued strongly for the present title.)
THE SHIPS
Long ago we acquired a commercial model called “The Explorer Ship Leif Ericsson,” a plastic spaceship of intriguing design. It is shaped something like a flattened pint whiskey bottle with a long neck. The “Leif Ericsson,” alas, was killed by general lack of interest in spacecraft by model buyers; a ghost of it is still marketed in hideous glow-in-the-dark color as some kind of flying saucer.
It’s often easier to take a detailed construct and work within its limits than it is to have too much flexibility. For fun we tried to make the Leif Ericsson work as a model for an Empire naval vessel. The exercise proved instructive.
First, the model is of a big ship, and is of the wrong shape ever to be carried aboard another vessel. Second, it had fins, only useful for atmosphere flight: what purpose would be served in having atmosphere capabilities on a large ship?
This dictated the class of ship: it must be a cruiser or battlecruiser. Battleships and dreadnaughts wouldn’t ever land, and would be cylindrical or spherical to reduce surface area. Our ship was too large to be a destroyer (an expendable ship almost never employed on missions except as part of a flotilla). Cruisers and battlecruisers can be sent on independent missions.
MacArthur, a General Class Battlecruiser, began to emerge. She can enter atmosphere, but rarely does so, except when long independent assignments force her to seek fuel on her own. She can do this in either of two ways: go to a supply source, or fly into the hydrogen-rich atmosphere of a gas giant and scoop. There were scoops on the model, as it happens.
She has a large pair of doors in her hull, and a spacious compartment inside: obviously a hangar deck for carrying auxiliary craft. Hangar deck is also the only large compartment in her, and therefore would be the normal place of assembly for the crew when she isn’t under battle conditions.
The tower on the model looked useless, and was almost ignored, until it occurred to us that on long missions not under acceleration it would be useful to have a high-gravity area. The ship is a bit thin to have much gravity in the “neck” without spinning her far more rapidly than you’d like; but with the tower, the forward area gets normal gravity without excessive spin rates.
And on, and so forth. In the novel, Lenin was designed from scratch; and of course we did have to make some modifications in Leif Ericsson before she could become INSS MacArthur; but it’s surprising just how much detail you can work up through having to live with the limits of a model.
SOCIOLOGY
The Alderson Drive and the Langston Field determine what kinds of interstellar organizations will be possible. There will be alternatives, but they have to fit into the limits these technologies impose.
In THE MOTE IN GOD’S EYE we chose Imperial Aristocracy as the main form of human government. We’ve been praised for this: Dick Brass in a New York Post review concludes that we couldn’t have chosen anything else, and other critics have applauded us for showing what such a society might be like.
Fortunately there are no Sacred Cows in science fiction. Maybe we should have stuck to incest? Because other critics have been horrified! Do we, they ask, really believe in imperial government? and monarchy?
That depends on what they mean by “believe in.” Do we think it’s desirable? We don’t have to say. Inevitable? Of course not. Do we think it’s possible? Damn straight.
The political science in MOTE is taken from C. Northcote Parkinson’s Evolution of Political Thought. Parkinson himself echoes Aristotle.
It is fashionable to view history as a linear progression: things get better, never worse, and of course we’ll never go back to the bad old days of (for instance) personal government. Oddly enough, even critics who have complained about the aristocratic pyramid in MOTE—and thus rejected our Empire as absurd—have been heard to complain about “Imperial Presidency” in the USA. How many readers would bet long odds against John-John Kennedy becoming President within our lifetimes?
Any pretended “science” of history is the bunk. That’s the problem with Marxism. Yet Marx wrote a reasonable economic view of history up to his time, and some of his principles may be valid.
Military history is another valid way to view the last several thousand years—but no one in his right mind would pretend that a history of battles and strategies is the whole of the human story. You may write history in terms of medical science, in terms of rats, lice, and plagues, in terms of agricultural development, in terms of strong leadership personalities, and each view will hold some truth.
There are many ways to view history, and Aristotle’s cycles as brought up to date by Parkinson make one of the better ones. For those who don’t accept that proposition, we urge you at least to read Parkinson before making up your minds and closing the door.
The human society in MOTE is colored by technology and historical evolution. In MOTE’s future history the United States and the Soviet Union form an alliance and together dominate the world during the last decades of the 20th Century. The alliance doesn’t end their rivalry, and doesn’t
make the rulers or people of either nation love their partners.
The CoDominium Alliance needs a military force. Military people need something or someone they can give loyalty; few men ever risked their lives for a “standard of living” and there’s little that’s more stupid than dying for one’s standard of living—unless it’s dying for someone else’s standard of living.
Do the attitudes of contemporary police and soldiers lead us to suppose that “democracy” or “the people” inspire loyalty? The proposition is at least open to question. In the future that leads to MOTE, a Russian Admiral named Lermontov becomes leader of CoDominium forces. Although he is not himself interested in founding a dynasty, he transfers the loyalty of the Fleet to leaders who are.
He brings with him the military people at a time of great crisis. Crises have often produced strong loyalties to single leaders: Churchill, Roosevelt, George Washington, John F. Kennedy during the Cuban Crisis, etc. (A year after Kennedy’s death Senator Pastore could address a national convention and get standing ovations with the words “There stood John Kennedy, TEN FEET TALL!!!”)
Thus develops the Empire.
Look at another trend: personal dictatorship. There are as many people ruled by tyrants as by “democracy” in nineteen seventy-five, and even in the democracies charges of tyranny are not lacking. Dictatorships may not be the wave of the future—but is it unreasonable to suppose they might be?
Dictatorship is often tried in times of severe crisis, energy crisis, pollution crisis, agricultural crisis—surely we do not lack for crises? The trouble with dictatorship is that it generates a succession crisis when the old man bows out. Portugal seems to be going through such at this moment. Chile, Uganda, Brazil, name your own examples: anyone want to bet that some of these won’t turn to a new Caudillo with relief?
How to avoid succession crisis? One traditional method is to turn Bonapartist: give the job to a relative or descendant of the dictator. He may not do the job very well, but after enough crises people are often uninterested in whether the land is governed well. They just want things settled so they can get on with everyday life.