FirstContact? situation. Humans have FTL, and meet an STL probe from a race which doesn't (but which has far superior efficiency in manufacturing, having been stuck in a limited resources system for ages)
So off the humans go, and try and make sense of it.
Very very very unsubtle message - which is spelt out perfectly clearly: Use proper birth control or destroy civilisation, and expanding into space is NOT a final answer.
And a superabundance of apparently tacked-on religion.
Oddly, the book is praised for having "truly alien aliens" - it doesn't seem that way to me. The aliens (or at least the two classes which can speak) seem very human. Humans with a couple of unique differences (massive population problem and a strange strange caste system) - but they basically approach these problems in a very human way.
They're kinda defeatist - labelling optimism as madness - but even that resembles some days of the week I've had :)
Still, decent book. Go read it.
Gave a nice explanation for [this] despite being written 34 years beforehand. --SGB
There is a sequel. "The moat around murcheson's eye". This sequel claims to be about "Ok, so what happens when the solution applied at the end of the first book fails?" It is actually "Here is the cast of book one, some twenty five years later. Some are married, some are restless. They visit the scene of book one." This should have been done as a codicil to book one, and then any decent editor would have cut it. The elephant in the first chapter is never addressed, no tension is generated - the first hundred pages are just filler, and so is the rest of the book. --Vitenka (In editor mode, couldn't find anything that didn't warrant cutting.)
Why did we in the UK get the awful alternative title? The book is called 'The Gripping Hand'. --SGB
Oh well, that title fits the first hundred pages of RedHerring?. I'm not sure whether this makes it better or worse, but I guess we can cut the front cover as well as those hundred pages now ;) --Vitenka
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