The Mote In God's Eye (best alien encounter sci-fi I've read so far)

Let me, first, introduce the book I just read. The Mote in God's Eye is a book co-written by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. It is another one of the books I put on reserve in the local library system that are slowly trickling into my local library on a half-weekly basis. Sadly, I can't read most of them because I have too much other reading to do, but I am really glad I read this one. This book really grabs onto the idea of the alienness of an alien encounter in a way that I don't think I've ever seen before.
Just a quick synopsis before I explain what I mean. Humans seem to be recovering from a civil war that has left many human worlds isolated throughout the galaxy; little by little, the government seems to be finding the worlds and reconsolidating them into the human system. Into this situation arrives an alien probe that has travelled, via normal space (rather than through the jumps that are the equivalent of hyperspace/warp-drive/etc. in this universe), to human territory. Obviously, humans have a desire to figure out what is going on and, in their exploration of the source of the probe, find the Motie civilization.
That is the synopsis. And that is not the coolest part. The coolest part is the civilization humans discover (WARNING: I might spoil the book for you a little in the upcoming paragraphs). The Motie civilization has discovered the jumps in the past but, due to certain circumstances that are explained in the book, have never successfully retrieved a returning jump ship (which is why they send out the normal space probe). Moreover, the Moties live in a feudal, anarcho-capitalist world dominated by a subspecies of Moties that own large regions of the world and do with it as they please. Finally, and this is the coolest bit, Moties are a species that have had their entire history sculpted by one inescapable fact: their inability to control their absurdly high rate of reproduction. This reproductive rate, as explicated by Niven and Pournelle has driven the entire history of Motie Prime and, in fact, the entire Motie system.
I won't say anymore, lest some readers actually want to read this book. I'll just say that reading this book has been one of the most enjoyable bits of sci-fi reading I have done in the past year or so (which is saying quite a bit). If you do read it, I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.