Review at Large

[bluegargantua]

Hey,

So since my flight was delayed a bit, I had plenty of time to finish up Retief at Large by Keith Laumer. This is a collection of short stories centered around Jamie Retief, member of the Terran Diplomatic Corp.

Retief is the only competent member of the bureaucratically hide-bound Diplomatic Corp. (indeed, probably the only intelligent member of the Terran government in general). He gets shuffled from post to post helping alien civilizations survive the bungling "help" offered by the Terran government and the insidious "help" offered by the Groaci -- an oily, five-eyed species that hopes to play fast and loose with the rules to steal a planet. Of course, Retief, though trickery, fast-talking and a few well-placed punches manages to set things right.

It was ok. I like how all the aliens had a different speech irregularity (from reverse sentence order to intense spoonerism). It was a comedy and maybe they'd go down better if not read one after the other. As it was, it was just ok.

later
Tom

Comments

[z-gryphon.livejournal.com]

Is there an alien species in that universe that makes very heavy use of infinitive verbs ("to watch your language, human"), or am I thinking of some other random SF universe I encountered in high school?

[ninjarat.livejournal.com]

You are not mistaken. I forget which species it is, but those are definitely in that universe.

[bluegargantua]

Yeah, that's the Groaci, the bad guys in the books.

later
Tom