And it’s another look — and the last — look at this series about cute, imitative aliens.
Raw Feed (1990): Hoka!, Poul Anderson and Gordon R. Dickson, 1983.
An ok continuation of the Hoka series started in Earthman’s Burden. I didn’t, with the exception of “Joy in Mudville“, find the stories as funny as in the earlier volume. (I did like the legal and physical intricacies — and humor — of multi-species baseball.) Perhaps the joke was wearing a bit fun.
I didn’t find “Full Pack (Hokas Wild)” (a Kipling takeoff) very fun at all.
One of the best pieces in the book is an oddity (and I’d like to know the circumstances surrounding its composition) not even by Anderson and Dickson. It’s called “‘The Bear that Walks Like a Man’: Ursinaid Stereotype in Early Interbeing Era Popular Culture” by Sandra Miesel. It’s an hilarious parody of leftist, Marxist intellectual thought that draws all sorts of wrong conclusions from scant evidence, erroneous assumptions, and the belief that imperialist ambitions are afoot.
Reading up on Gordon R. Dickson, I came across an enlightening entry on him by Miesel in The New Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.
MarzAat 