Science Fiction & Fantasy Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for science fiction and fantasy enthusiasts. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
Tau and Moties seem to share a suspiciously large amount of similarities, from their specialisation into 'careers' to the origin of being a technologically advanced civilisation isolated due to stellar phenomenon.
I'm curious if Games Workshop have ever mentioned Niven and Pournelle's work as inspiration or if there are further similarities?
I know of no direct connection between the two and it seems to me that any similarities between them are quite superficial. The traits you mention are fairly generic sci-fi traits.
The primary differences of extreme Motie fecundity and ability to nearly instantly understand any technological device and ability to quickly reverse engineer it given even a minimal amount of investigation. These would seem to be traits that may almost be "anti-Tau".
