FOOTFALL by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle

Narrated by MacLeod Andrews

     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.