Gordon R. Dickson

Hoka!

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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. 

Cover by Michael Whelan

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.

Dorsai!

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I read this one for a couple of reasons. First, it’s mentioned as a source for the Traveller role-playing game in Shannon Appelcline’s The Science Fiction in Traveller – the book that initiated my recent burst of H. Beam Piper’s works. Second, it’s listed in “The 5 Parsec Shelf” of 50 significant science fiction novels in A Reader’s Guide to Science Fiction. (After seeing it 40 years ago, I still haven’t read the entire list.)

Essay: Dorsai!, Gordon R. Dickson, 1960, 2013.

It’s an essay this time around because I had enough trouble writing this without the stricter structure of one of my reviews.

The gears of this novel did not easily engage my brain on a first reading.

There was the violation of expectations. For a novel cited, not only in David Drake’s introduction but elsewhere, as being, with Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, the founding text of the military science fiction subgenre, only a very small portion of it has scenes of combat. (I could make an argument for including L. Ron Hubbard’s Final Blackout as an ancestor of the subgenre too.)

There is a lot of talking including in the combat scenes.

The names were, for some reason, hard to remember.

Dickson’s universe is sketched in very broad terms only. Humans have spread to the stars and are undergoing speciation of a sort with “exotics” of a rather ill-defined sort.

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Little Fuzzy

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Review: Little Fuzzy, H. Beam Piper, 1962.

And so we come, at last, to Piper’s by far most famous novel. He started it on March 18, 1958 according to John F. Carr in Typewriter Killer. Damon Knight recommended that Berkley publish it, but they didn’t. Bill McMorris, Putnam’s editor thought it was “too adult for the teenage market” and of no interest to the adult reader. It would be rejected by more than twelve publishers and rejected three times by Avon, the company that eventually published it.  He finished it in March 1959 after several false starts.

Janet Wood, editor at Avon, was enthusiastic about the book and envisioned a series and a movie and toys. (Piper did sell the movie rights, but, of course, nothing came of it.) The novel would finally be published in 1962.

John W. Campbell rejected it for serialization in Analog because its many characters made it confusing in his mind. Carr thinks the problem is that the novel’s has many viewpoint characters, and it’s hard to know, in some scenes, which is the viewpoint character. I’d add that Piper doesn’t always tag characters sufficiently in scenes with dialogue. Carr says Piper is much better in his later Space Viking about keeping characters straight, and I would agree. 

Piper did not consider this one of his better works. I agree and would place all the Fuzzy novels in the bottom tier, along with First Cycle, of Piper’s novels. 

However, a lot of authors have written sequels to it. John Scalzi is one, of course, but there’s also William Tuning, Ardath Mayhar, Wolfgang Dieher, and Carr himself (the last two published by Carr’s Pequod Press). William Barton’s dedication to his Acts of Conscience alludes to it. 

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Uller Uprising

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Review: “Uller Uprising”, H. Beam Piper, 1952.

It’s a science fictional retelling of the Sepoy Rebellion.

Military science fiction is often said to start with Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers and Gordon R. Dickson’s The Genetic General aka Dorsai!. Even the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction’s entry on Military SF doesn’t mention this short novel by Piper, but I’d argue it should be considered as military science fiction.

Our hero is General Carlos von Schlichten, formerly of the Second Federation Army and now commander of the Uller Company’s troops on Uller. The company has a charter to administer the planet and its sentient aliens, the Uller.

But the story opens on another planet in the same system, Niflheim. It’s the planet the Uller Company is really interested in. It may have a poisonous atmosphere of fluorine, but it’s mineral rich. Ruling Uller was just a requirement of the charter from the Federation.

Mining is being done there using atomic explosives, a process of great interest to one of the Uller laborers there.

And then we go to Uller where things are not tranquil.

As with his model of India before 1857, Piper’s Uller is composed of many native principalities of various degrees of loyalty to the Uller Company and that often scheme against each other. The natives have many gripes. Human technology has disrupted trade patterns and native manufacturing. One Uller, the Prophet Rakeed, is preaching a straight-out anti-Company crusade and wants humans off the planet.

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Guardian

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I’m ending the weird western series with some borderline cases.
Raw Feed (2004): Guardian, Joe Haldeman, 2002.Guardian
In some ways this is a slight novel; in some ways it’s a typical Joe Haldeman novel; in some ways it’s a disappointing novel.
Haldeman has almost written a weird western here. He gives us a novel mostly set in the 1890s about a woman and her son fleeing the husband who has horribly abused them both. At crucial moments, they meet a talking raven who offers them good advice or ominous warnings. She flees from Philadelphia to Alaska. Her son meets a sudden, violent end when he is murdered in the Klondike gold rush. At the moment of hearing the news and about to commit suicide, the raven is revealed to be a shapeshifting alien who also wears the guise of a Indian shaman who has been teaching her Tlingit in Sitka, Alaska. The raven takes her on a shapeshifting tour of alternate universes and time itself. He is a guardian of life and is worried that not only will the narrator kill herself but that humanity, like many intelligent species, will kill itself.
Ultimately, he moves her to another dimension where her son lives. More importantly, the man killed with her son, who she has promised to marry, does not die, and the two have a son who works on the Manhattan Project and figures out a way of building a third atomic bomb which is demonstrated for the Japanese in Tokyo Bay. In some unexplained way, that saves humanity from annihilation in the 1990s.

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