After blazing through the Foundation Series I am finding it excruciatingly slow going reading The Mote In God’s Eye. Not that it isn’t a good read, because it certainly is, but for some reason I’m lacking the motivation to tackle a narrative arc that is longer than 500 words. With my mind cluttered as it is at the moment with ideas and concepts it should be no surprise that my thirst is lacking.

So far, I have chewed my way through 250+ pages of The Mote In God’s Eye and it has been a fairly entertaining read. Niven and Pournelle crafted a book that reads much like a tale of naval high adventure from the late Victorian period replete with the tension between sexes and the long simmering competition between the scientific establishment and the military. I cannot help but hum passages from Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore while reading. Don’t get me wrong, though, it a solid read and the blending of archaic customs and language feels natural and appropriate to a novel about the exploration of uncharted territories.

As an aside, I learned this week that the setting of the novel is actually a real location named the Helix Nebula and is some 450 light years away from Earth. Here’s a particularly nice photo of it from the Hubble Site:

Contrary to what Kansas might think, science is cool.