Nach wie vor die einzige komische SciFi, die dem Anhalter das Wasser reichen kann. Auch (oder erst recht) im englischen O-Ton. ( )

Aliens who look like sentient teddy bears mimic Victorian England as seen through the Sherlock Holmes stories. The cover depicts a Sherlock Bear riding a dragon/lizard thing. God I love nerds ( )

This is a series of short stories about the teddy-bear like (but immensely strong and incredibly imitative) Hokas, an alien people on an earth-like planet who adopt with great enthusiasm any culture derived from the popular fiction (and films) of visiting earthlings. The first human visit led them to adapt a wild west culture derived from their misunderstanding of western fiction, which worked well until their native enemies, the reptilian Slissi, also obtained humanstyle firearms. At this point a junior human space force ensign , Alexander Jones (in a rather British Empire style culture, supposedly derived from an earth culturally dominated by Australia and New Zealand) crashes his patrol vessel and finds himself in the midst of the Hoka-Slissi War, which the Hokas win with his rather clumsy help. Thereafter, he is accepted by both humans and Hokas as the official intermediary, and has t deal with Hoka interpretations of Napoleonic era naval war, Sherlock Holmes, space opera etc. ( )

The Hoka live on Toka. The Hoka are short, incredibly strong bear-like creatures who delight in re-enacting works of fiction. This volume contains five short stories wherein the Hoka take on the roles of: Cowboys, Space Patrolers, The French Foreign Legion, Renaissance-era Dons, and Sherlock Holmes era Londoners.

Some of the misadventures are pretty funny and there are definitely a couple of lines that I thought were quite clever, but more often than not, I would simply smile bemusedly at the situation. ( )

Reactions upon reading this book in 1990.

This is a fix-up of a rather funny set of stories (I don't know if I would say hilarious) that I strongly suspect were the basis for Star Trek's "A Piece of the Action". The cute, teddy bear Hokas are irrepressible and fun as they set out to harmlessly imitate -- to often humorously extreme lengths -- Earth cultures.

Dickson and Anderson use the series to parody the conventions of a variety of literary genres as well as opera. I particularly liked the pirate and French Foreign Legion stories. The series' only flaw -- and I did chuckle aloud at several points -- is that the stories are all a bit formulic: Alexander Jones gets involved with Hokas, gets drunk or knocked out, things get way out of control with the Hokas, and Jones lucks into or cleverly exploits the situation to accomplish his ends. ( )