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

1957; 189 pages.  Genre : 50's Science Fiction; Humor.  New Author(s)? : No.  Overall Rating : 5*/10.

    Earthman's Burden consists of six short stories (each about 30 pages long) about the Hokas, a race of Teddy Bear-like creatures on an alien planet.  You also meet their human plenipotentiary, Alexander Jones, and his wife, Tanni.  All but one of the stories originally appeared in various Sci-Fi magazines in between 1951 and 1955.  A couple "interplanetary memos" were later inserted to try to give some cohesion to the tales, but frankly, it wasn't necessary.

What's To Like...
      Hokas love everything about earth - our movies, our books, our history, our radio transmissions.  They take everything as absolute truth, so if they see a movie, say, about ancient Rome, they immediately try to build a settlement on their planet Toka to mimic it.

   Each of the stories in Earthman's Burden is set in one of these mimicries.  Specifically, the settings are (in order) : (1) the Wild West; (2) Don Juan; (3) Space Travel; (4) Sherlock Holmes; (5) Pirates; and (6) the French Foreign Legion.

    The stories all have a similar template.  Alex awakes to find the Hokas embracing a new bit of terra-culture; he gets embroiled in their antics; some sort of crisis arises; mayhem ensues, Alex devises an ingenious solution by going "in character", and all turns out well because of (or in spite of) the best-laid plans of the Hokas/Alex.

Kewlest New Word...
Tussock : an area of raised solid ground in a marsh or bog that is bound together by roots of low vegetation.

Excerpts...
    "Great jumping rockets!" exclaimed the other Hoka.  "Don't tell me the Coordinator didn't recognize you?"
    "It's the moonlight, probably," said the first Hoka.  "All clear and on green now, Coordinator?"
    "I- I-," stammered Alex.
    "Aye, aye!" repeated Jax Bennison crisply.  (pg. 68)

    Alex discovered the consensus among them was that the captain was becoming too obsessed with his navigation to pay proper attention to the running of the ship.  No one had been hanged for several weeks, and there hadn't been a keelhauling for over a month.  Many a Hoka standing on the sun-blistered deck cast longing glances at the cool water overside and wished he would be keelhauled (which was merely fun on a planet without barnacles).  There was much fo'c'sle talk about what act could be committed dastardly enough to rate the punishment.  (pg. 135)

"Damn the tiddlywinks!  Full speed ahead!"  (pg. 186)
    The stories are cute but formulaic and shallow.  This was my second Hoka book, and chronologically precedes the other one, which is reviewed here.  Frankly, I didn't find Earthman's Burden as entertaining as Hoka!.

    Maybe it was because Poul Anderson and Gordon R. Dickson were still feeling their way around in the series.  Maybe it was because the attempt to string these six stories into a coherent overall novel was ill-advised.  Maybe it was because of the horrid printing job - each page was set on about a 10-degree angle.

    In any event, all six tales are still amusing to read, and a pleasant break if you're plodding through a 1200-page Space Opera like I am.  It's uninspiring fluff, but that's okay at times.  Anderson and Dickson would subsequently  tweak and refine their style, and their efforts would pay off when Hoka! came out.  And I do appreciate it when authors evolve and improve with each work they put out.  5 Stars (out of 10).

Hoka - Poul Anderson and Gordon Dickson

1984 (but three of the stories are actually from 1955-57); 253 pages. Genre : 50's Sci-Fi. Overall Rating : C+.

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What if the initial humanoid contact for those cute furry Ewoks in the Star Wars series, instead of being Darth and Luke and Death Stars; had been terran Movies, Books, TV, and History? This book explores that, save that the living, breathing teddy bears here are called Hokas. The book is a compilation of four stand-alone stories (There's a fifth one, but it's a 10-page exercise in self-promotion and is eminently skippable) starring these ursine creatures, who love everything about our culture, and who completely immerse themselves in role-playing, including uniforms, earthly accents, and literary/cinematic dialogue.

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What's To Like...

Three of the stories are take-offs of (literary) Casey At The Bat, Sherlock Holmesian mysteries, and Kipling's The Jungle Book. The fourth one draws upon (historical) Napoleonic Europe, as seen in the cover art. The compilation is a fun read, and a quick one. The stories have neat drawings in them done by one Phil Foglio. The Hokas can drink all other creatures in the universe under the table, and in one story (written in the 1950's) a curiously stimulating herb of some sort is smoked.

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There's not much depth here, but that's typical for the genre. There are two instances of cussing, albeit mild ("H*ll and d*mnation" and "a h*ll of a request"). Which seemed needless to me, since the salty-mouthed alien spouting these phrases had just engaged in about 10 pages of ersatz swearing. For example, "Go sputz yourself" and "Sput Meowr. Meourl spss rowul rhnrrr!"

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Cool/New Words...

Encardined : reddened. Ineluctable : unavoidable. Aquiline : with the characteristic of an eagle or the beak of one. Sui Generis : in a class of its own. Mangel Wurzel : a large beet used for cattle feed (although here it was a term of endearment). Brobdingnag : a land where everything is huge (taken from Gulliver's Travels, and definitely one bodacious word). Autochthones : indigenous people.

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Excerpts...

"It may be sheer accident," Brob suggested. "Mortal fallibility. There is a great deal of wisdom in the universe; unfortunately, it is divided up among individuals." (pg. 178)

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The Hoka France had never had a revolution, merely an annual Bastille Day fête. At the most recent of these, Napoleon had taken advantage of the chaos to depose the king, who cooperated because it would be more fun being a field marshal. The excitement delighted the whole nation and charged it with enthusiasm. Only in Africa was this ignored, the Foreign Legion preferring to stay in its romantic, if desolate, outposts. (pg. 201)

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"I was born with a dull, sickening thud..." (Hoka-penned literature)

Hoka was a nostalgic visit to the sort of book I used to read in my early teens. A lot of Poul Anderson's books reportedly deal with time- and dimension-travel; similar to my favorite writer from those years - Andre Norton. The Hoka series seems to be a comedic side-project by Anderson and Dickson.

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I liked the clever and subtle introducing of higher lit to young readers. Unfortunately, science fiction has come a long way in the past half-century, so this book came off a bit dated. It was a pleasurable read, but there wasn't much substance to it. We'll give it a "C+" and resolve to read at least one of Anderson's mainstream sci-fi books, to see how it compares to Norton.