"Footfall" by Niven/Pournelle

This book is touted as the best 'alien invasion' book ever written (apparently NYT says so), and is also one of the best books the dynamic duo Niven/Pournelle have written.  That doesn't make it an amazing book.  It is a good book, but not amazing.  "Contact" is amazing, "Footfall" is merely good. 

The book is definitely too big.  I dabble in writing myself and was caught off guard when one publisher stated that he would not publish a novel under 60,000 words.  Another said 100,000 words is the minimum. Why?  Why pad the book with 'words' and 'pages' if it doesn't make sense for the story.  If a story can be told in 40,000 words, why add more as a filler just to satisfy some imaginary (and unfounded) artificial 'lower limits'. ? For "Footfall", the first 100 pages can be comfortable skipped - they add nothing to the story.  Further, most of the chapter where there's no Fithp can be skipped without missing anything of the main story.  All those pages (dozens and dozens) where the authors tried to be 'modern' by exploring adulteries, cheating, sex thoughts and motivations are completely useless for the main story.  I got this book to see baby elephant aliens and that's all I want!

So, yes, the Fithp are baby elephant-looking aliens from Alpha Centauri, who used to be pets to an older race, the "Predecessors", who destroyed themselves and most of the environment aeons ago.  Since, the Fithp have discovered 'knowledge cubes' which taught them science, from basic fire and tools, to Bussard Ramjets and orbital transport spaceships.  The Fithp are always at war on their home planet, so the "Traveller Herd" left for our Solar System, to conquer it and settle there, calling it "Winterhome".

In the beginning the Fithp are winning because of their advanced technology.  They bomb most of the developed nations, especially the USA and the Soviet Union, and later drop an asteroid, "The Foot", into the Indian Ocean and kill all of India and most of the coastal cities around.  However the Fithp are herd animals, and cannot understand individualism, which they consider 'roguishness' to be cleansed out of the DNA pool.

Eventually, the humans get viscious and inventive and nuke or otherwise destroy all Fithp installations on Earth and go after the Fithp mother ship "The Message Bearer" almost destroying it before the Fithp offer complete surrender to the humans and seal their fate as the dominant race.  The book is well done, especially the habits of the herd-bound Fithp and the resulting psychology, but the length is really a problem.  The most interesting part of the book are the last 30 pages.