his book collects six humorous SF stories published in Analog magazine featuring Sam Boone, who begins as a travel agent for alien tourists, but soon finds he is uniquely skilled at negotiating agreements in incomprehensible alien conflicts. This skill is valued throughout the galaxy because agents of the Hegemony court system generally invoke punitive measures devastating to both sides.
Dozens of alien traders and tourists flock to newly discovered Earth. Sam Boone offers his services as a native guide, and is hired by a tree-like alien. He gets caught up in various escapades involving selling old SF pulp magazines and Earth's three major tourist attractions—Hoboken, Disney World and Kawasaki's Sushi 'n' Ribs. Next, Sam arranges a tag-team wrestling match pairing two alien races that are bitter enemies with Earth's two best wrestlers, whom the aliens have seen on TV and believe are great heroes. Then Sam takes ill-tempered group-minded aliens on a tour of "Universeland," where they are driven insane by the saccharine music in the "Tiny Universe" ride. Sam is fired, but gets a new job as an off-world negotiator.
His first assignment is to settle a land dispute between malodorous aliens who talk by sense of smell, and huge sluglike aliens who are even more malodorous, and occasionally eat their leader. A helpful alien, whose mating habits are complicated by not knowing his or her own gender, mediates the dispute. The next dispute is between huge, stomping aliens who constantly seek to kill their leader, and a burrowing antlike race, and also involves a race of flealike aliens who live on their own malodorous oxlike creature, an insecticide alien raconteur and a tiny cockroachlike race. The final dispute is between huge methane-breathing gasbags living in the outer solar system and an alien race that lives very near the sun, two races that seemingly have no possible interests in common.
Incomprehensibly silly aliens
Sparhawk's Sam Boone stories, presented here in the order they occurred for the first time, follow a long tradition of humorous SF, falling into the off-the-wall end of the spectrum. The subject matter bears similarities to Keith Laumer's Retief series, but Laumer's stories were relatively subtle and restrained. Sparhawk's style of humor in these stories bears more similarity to Doug Adam's Hitchhiker's Guide series. Yet while both Adams and Laumer are classic SF humor, the Sparhawk stories are far less successful.
Evaluating humor is very subjective. But one of the key components of most successful humor is unpredictable surprise. In the Boone stories, we see essentially the same few jokes repeatedly. Malodorous alien flatulence can be mildly funny once, but is merely tedious after a while. Ironically, although this series is much easier to understand in chronological order than it was in the order it originally appear, being collected together makes the repetitive nature of the humor far more obvious. These stories are probably best read one at a time, not all at once.
The final three stories in the book, and also the longest, featuring Boone as a negotiator of alien disputes, exhibit admirable complexity at times, even though it's a strain for the reader to keep all of the silly alien races straight. The solutions to the problems faced by Sam are generally clever, except for the final story, where things appeared to have gotten so complicated that Sparhawk just drew a rabbit out of a hat.
At the end of the final story, Sam is told that he is being sent on a short voyage for his new special assignment—to a place called "Andromeda." So maybe we've heard the last of Sam Boone.
