The Sound And The Furry: The Complete Hoka Stories by Poul Anderson & Gordon R. Dickson (book review).
‘The Sound And The Furry’ consists of two novels: ‘Hoka! Hoka! Hoka!’ and ‘Hokas Pokas.’. The Hokas are a sentient teddy bear-looking species on the planet Toka in the Brackney Star III system. They share their planet with the reptiloid Slissii and are invariably at war with them.
The Hokas meet a human and, watching his western collection, adopt the look, albeit in a distorted fashion. The Sheriff is elected for being dumb, and it’s the Gambler who runs the town. When a later human, Alexander Jones, crash-lands, he needs to get back to his mothercraft but gets embroiled in a war between the Hoka and Slissii and comes up with a plan so the Ursines win and he gets his passage. The Slissii, for the most part, decide to leave and look for another world.
Jones gets elevated to ambassador or plenipotentiary (a fancy name for a diplomat) by the Hokas and thrust into their latest changes, as they can’t tell the difference between fact and fiction. Humans try to minimise what they have access to. Even so, you have anything from ‘Tom Bracken of the Space Patrol’ to Sherlock Holmes. The authors take aspects of these realities but not a total parody and play with it as Jones tries to get them to settle down. Surprisingly, the authors don’t do much to remind us that they resemble teddy bears, except for the fact that their neck muscles prevent hanging.
Three-quarters of the way through the first novel, I was wondering what kind of collaboration the two writers were doing until I came to the last two stories. Since both described the Hokas in detail, I assumed Gordon Dickson wrote them. The indicia indicates a shared copyright, but it does not specify which writer takes the lead.
The second book provides more details about how the plenipotentiary prepares a new species to join the Interbeing League. The description of it reminds me a bit of David Brin’s later Uplift stories, but that’s to be expected with intergalactic organisations.
The last third part of this book is devoted to one Hoka, Charlie Edward Stuart, who, having been educated on Earth, becomes a tutor to Charlie, the son of a plenipotentiary on the planet Talyina. Charlie develops an interest in the Scots clans, adopts the alias Sir Hector MacGregor, and ultimately stops a revolution on the planet.
Outside of the Hoka copying things from human history—or at least the bits that they can get access to—I don’t think this is supposed to be a parody, or it didn’t seem that way. Although I write comedy, I’m less proficient at reading other people doing it, so I suspect some of it went over my head. If you are, then you should be able to find copies of this book out there.
GF Willmetts
January 2025
(pub: Baen, 1957, 1983. 399 page hardback. Price: varies. ISBN: 0-7394-1683-9).
