Earthman's Burden

[marycatelli]

Earthman's Burden by Poul Anderson and Gordon R. Dickson

Ah, Hoka!  A race of teddy-bear-like aliens, charming, friendly -- a serious danger to your sanity.

Hokas, you see, love fiction so much that they will adopt the roles and start playing it out.  The series opens with Alexander Jones, crash landed on Toka, their planet, realizing that the first explorers had introduced new concepts to them by use of the Wild West.  The Hokas have cheerfully adopted them whole cloth.  Well, not entirely.  Ten gallon hats, longhorns albeit reptilian, and even men's names, no matter how annoying it is to have so many Texs or Lone Rangers, but the women kept to the old names rather than all be Jane.

And this is a fix-up of such stories.  Sherlock Holmes!  The Space Patrol!  Pirates!  Don Giovanni!  The French Foreign Legion!  The Hokas have a lot of fun as Alexander Jones tries to keep on top of things.

Comments

[eric-hinkle.livejournal.com]

I so love the Hoka stories. Some of the best funny SF ever written.

[marycatelli]

Oh, yes -- hilarious.

[eric-hinkle.livejournal.com]

I probably shouldn't say this here, but I actually considered doing a fanfic crossing the Hokas with the current MLP. I decided against it a second later when I realized that I simply could not even pretend that I have an nth of the comic talent that Messers Anderson and Dickson had. That it didn't make a lick of sense.

[marycatelli]

Yeah, that's one definite advantage to original fiction; the comparisons are less direct.

That was one problem I had with Silverlock -- all the derivative characters were pale shadows of the originals.

Better to scrub the serial numbers and obtain some freedom.

[mythusmage.livejournal.com]

Hoka, where keelhauling is a participatory sport (no barnacles).

[marycatelli]

Especially in the tropics, because everyone knows the British sailor can't swim so they can't just jump in.