Recent Reads:

Footfall, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
I avoided this book for years because of the silly cover, which features what looks like an angry elephant waving a gun. Well, you know what they say about judging books that way.

It turns out to be a reasonably engaging alien-invasion novel, although not quite up to either co-author's best work. There's some moderately interesting alien-culture-building, although it's handicapped by the unfortunate decision to make the aliens resemble "baby elephants". The communications failures that result from vast cultural differences between the aliens and the humans are believable. But for the most part, the book is a good old fashioned Earth-versus-the-alien-invaders adventure, with lots of emphasis on the military and political means by which the Americans fight back against the would-be planet-grabbers. It's science fiction for the Tom Clancy set, only slightly handicapped by its Cold War setting.

One entertaining sidelight: science-fiction writers save the world! Or at least help to do so. I can't help but think that many of the writers portrayed must be thinly-disguised versions of actual writers of Niven & Pournelle's acquaintance. "Robert Anson", a balding, ex-Navy man with a wife named Virginia, isn't too hard to identify, but I don't know enough about the SF writer and fan convention culture of the 1970s to identify the others. If anyone can do better, let me know.

Edit, 7/20: Wikipedia's entry on Footfall identifies some of the SF writers pseudonymously portrayed -- "Nat Reynolds" (Niven), "Wade Curtis" (Pournelle), and "Bob Anson" (Robert Anson Heinlein). It also supplies a link to a detailed artistic representation of one of the spaceships described in the book. But spoilers abound, so beware.