Hoka! Hoka! Hoka!

By: Poul Anderson, Gordon R. Dickson

Narrated by: Gabriel Vaughan

The Interbeing League had been formed to make contact with new intelligent races in the galaxy and offer them membership. But when the League encountered the Hokas, furry creatures strongly resembling the teddy bears of Earth, the league's agent, Alexander Jones, could have been excused for wishing he had a simpler assignment than making sense out of the Hokas - such as singlehandedly stopping an interstellar war.

Not that the fuzzy aliens were unfriendly. In fact, they loved everything about humans, and adopted various Terram cultures wholesale and in every little detail - but with a bit of confusion about the differences between fact and fiction. So, if the Hokas suddenly started outing out the parts in a rip-roaring, shoot-em-up Western, or brought to life the London of Sherlock Holmes, complete with a pip-puffing, deerstalker-wearing Hoka, or suddenly decided to fly the Jolly Roger and lead a life of adventure and piracy on the high seas, mate - well, that was to be expected. And as the Hokas threw themselves wholeheartedly into progressively wilder worlds from Terran history and fiction, Jones could be excused for feeling that his grip on reality was hanging by a single, thin, increasingly frayed thread.

©1957, 1983 Poul Anderson and Gordon R. Dickson (P)2021 Tantor

Delightfully antiquated.

To say it’s old School is to put it mildly. But if you can roll with the punches on so far as they think of everything and very 50s ways it’s a lot of fun to get into. Everybody enjoys a main character who gets in over his head. And I enjoy that it is literally this guy’s job to stay that way.