"...bowled over His Excellency, the Ambassador of the Epopoian Empire. He cawed his indignation."
-Poul Anderson, Satan's World (January 2009), pp. 235-424 AT IV, p. 259.
The Epopoian is beaked.
In Robert Heinlein's The Star Beast, the Department of Spatial Affairs must cope with problems like:
"...the terrible, hushed-up occasion when a member of the official family of the Ambassador from Llador had been found, dead and stuffed, in a curiosity shop in the Virgin Islands."
-quoted in Alexei Panshin, Heinlein In Dimension, III., p. 70.
(I am rereading The Star Beast but have not reached that part yet.)
Again Anderson's Technic History and a Heinlein Juvenile occupy the same territory, in this case future extraterrestrial ambassadors. I don't believe it. Future interstellar relations will not exactly reproduce Terrestrial international relations. We must expect the unexpected.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
And I do believe it. More precisely I believe it's possible some non-human intelligent races may be enough like Terrestrial life forms, due to parallel evolution, that cases analogous to the ones you cited from RAH/Anderson will be possible. To quote a bit from the second paragraph of Chapter I of A CIRCUS OF HELLS: "A life which included no improbable events would be the real statistical impossibility."
Merry Christmas! Sean
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