Earthmans Burden (R)

Too bad this is out of print, it is such a great book, one of the books that made me love reading from a young age. The stories are all in Hoka! Hoka! Hoka!, so I guess a good thing never goes away...

"Earthman's Burden" is simply hilarious. When Ensign Alexander Braithwaite Jones crash landed on the planet Toka, 500 light years from earth, he encountered the Hokas, a cuddly race of aliens that (would you believe it?) resembled oversized, overstuffed teddy bears. The Hokas had the ability to absorb any trace of Earth culture they encountered, whether it be film, radio, television, music or books and reproduce it with devastatingly unpredictable and laugh-out-loud funny results. You'll see an entire world converted into the rootin', tootin' wild west, boffo grand opera in the Italian style starring Don Giovanni, a gaslit, atmospheric Victorian England featuring Sherlock Holmes stalking Grimpen Mire on the lookout for the Baskerville teddy bear, space patrollers, pirates and French legionnaires. As I read the opening chapters, my initial reaction was to shake my head, blink twice and ponder whether Poul Anderson and Gordon Dickson had taken leave of their senses. Surely, this couldn't be serious science fiction! But sure enough, there it was ... the pearl - that serious message of biting satire buried under the flesh of a mountainous oyster of vaudeville and slapstick! Jones was appointed ambassador plenipotentiary to Toka and saddled with what an arrogant government top heavy with self indulgent bureaucratic stuffed shirts labeled "Earthman's Burden" - the responsibility "to raise the primitive". Earth's Chief Cultural Commissioner, referring to himself with the ever pompous royal "we", advised Jones: "to be patient with the innocent sub-civilized being. We shall often find his attitude uncosmic, his mind naively fumbling in its attempts to grasp the nuances of that which we teach him. He gazes at us with clear, unknowing eyes that plead with us to show him the right way - the civilized way." How delicious - a double-barreled satire! Two targets for the price of one. Anderson and Dickson impales the arrogance of humanity in its estimation of our importance in the universe while, at the same time, lustily lampooning the idiocies of government bureaucracy. Enjoy! You couldn't possibly read this without feeling uplifted and entertained. Paul Weiss

In a distant time, spaceman Alexander Jones crashes his ship on a planet...which just happens to be inhabited by a population of sentient...well...Teddy Bears. These creatures call themselves Hoka, and they have a rather peculiar culture. These Hokans possess an unparalleled imagination, and they evolve their culture around what they observe and learn. For example, this book is actually a collection of short stories, and each story revolves around a cultural theme: In one, the Hokas act like American cowboys in the Old West, after reading Western paperbacks left by previous human visitors. In another, they create an English culture, complete with a Hokan Sherlock Holmes. Our intrepid spaceman, Alexander Jones, becomes enamored with these creatures (although quite exasperated at times) and takes the highly regarded position of plenipotentiary to the Hokan race, where has to overcome the challenges of a race that can completely change it's culture and lifestyle at a whim.All in all, an engaging and heartwarming scifi book.

It makes you laugh when you are alone in your room to read it. Does that happen often in your reading life? There's only another writer who is able to make me laugh that way and it's Robert Sheckley. If you like comedy in SF, buy this! You'll love the Hokas and their totally unbridled imagination. Or better, their total inability to make a difference between fact and fiction. Which is something that happens more and more often in our world, so it could be argued that we're all more or less Hokas, after all. It is a funny a clever book, and tells you a lot about life in a media-saturated world.

A race of teddy-bear aliens with a strange feature: Whenever they read a book or watch a movie, the whole planet starts imitating that scenario. This (obviously silly) premise leads to a pretty funny SF book in the hands of two very good writers.