Etiquette and protocol 'droid - and friend
Jaime Retief — 1963 — Laumer based the exploits of Retief on his personal experiences working in the United States Foreign Service where he witnessed enough incompetence and corruption to fill out forty short stories and seven novels and probably would have produced more had it not been for an unfortunate stroke that impaired his writing in the later decades of his life. His experiences infuse the Retief stories with considerable cynicism toward the diplomatic corps, an attitude that would doubtless be unchanged if he were to work in the field today, and one that might well have adequate cause in the far future twenty-ninth century of Retief’s time. — By David Kilman July 22, 2015 for AmazingStories.com
This is the result of an extended riff I started doing on Foreign Policy topics and what somebody might want to try writing — so, of course, bouncing from one pairing to another …
One of my own personal favorites is Gordon Dickson’s short story “Who Dares a Bulber Eat (1962),” from a series about two humans and their telepathic Great Dane who become alien species diplomats, and which were finally collected in The Magnificent Wilf.
The culminating scene, at a banquet where the title character is supposed to sing before he becomes the dessert, is an outrageous mashup of pure space opera with the famous scene from Casablanca in Rick’s Cafe that begins: “Play the Marseilles!”
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Poul Anderson’s character, Sir Dominick Flandry, is a close cousin of Jaime Retief, but slightly more into battleship diplomacy and skulduggery, since he is supporting an empire towards the end of its dominion. 10 books, from 1959 to 1985, ending with an Anderson retelling of Kim with Flandry’s granddaughter playing at The Great Game
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An even odder couple happened when Dickson and Poul Anderson got together to tell tall tales — about diplomats trying to remain diplomatic while trying to civilize the Hoka, a race of superintelligent teddy bears, over a 5 book romp that begins with Earthman’s Burden (1957)
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H. Beam Piper’s contribution to this potpourri of diplomatic types comes in a book originally published as Lone Star Planet, and retitled A Planet for Texans (1958) for its publication as an Ace Double. Classic tongue-in-cheek ambassadorial descriptions.
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Robert Heinlein was not a great one for diplomats, though they have a walk-on role in The Star Beast, trying to preserve humanity in the wake of the accidental kidnapping of the ruler of a Galactic Federation, known to her adoptive family as The Lummox…
And then there was David Gerrold’s CHESS WITH A DRAGON (1988). When ambassadors from Earth found that the so-called Galactic Federation was a giant pyramidal con game, it was necessary for them to develop sneakiness to new levels, or be eaten.
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It’s easy to get involved in the various parings and neglect the greatest marriage of science fiction and diplomacy; Cordwainer Smith, aka Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger (July 11, 1913 – August 6, 1966): Asian scholar, psychological warfare expert and consultant to the US, and author of the Rediscovery of Man series, which includes a paean to cat partnerships in The Game of Rat and Dragon, and an interesting take or two on religion, including The Ballad of Lost C’mell. There are no diplomats in his writing, unless one includes the Lords of the Instrumentality, and they have no particular reason to be diplomatic, since they hold near-ultimate power. Still, without one, we would never have had the other.
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