Life imitating art imitating life imitating ..."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.
3 comments:
I was a little put off reading a book about alien teddy bears! But you make it sound pretty good! I picked it up cheap at Amazon, so I'll have to start it soon!
I'm certain I would never have picked it up by myself. But it got nominated when we went on that jag about nominating only authors the group had never read before. So I tried it on a lark and it was pretty good fun.
Backcountry Muse, I like your name. And you review some interesting books here!
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