Customer Reviews

Their Majesties' Bucketeers

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

"Their Majesties' Bucketeers" is a remarkable creation: Science fiction meets Sherlock Holmes, with a fascinating alien psychology thrown in. Beautiful! It's Smith's second best book, after "The Probability Broach." And it is the best book I have ever read of a totally alien culture. Wonderful! I think L. Neil Smith had a lot of fun writing this, and I know I really enjoyed reading it, every time I have read it. Highly recommended. Needs to be republished immediately!

Smith makes a good attempt at picturing aliens. His aliens are different enough from anything found on earth to be believeable.
The alien society is a bit too much like human society. But it`s a better effort than most make in doing this sort of novel.
And since there are no human characters in the story, the human reader needs to be able to identify in some way to make it a good
novel. If he made their culture too alien it would be more of an academic speculation than a novel.
Overall it`s a good book that you will enjoy reading.

"Their Majesties' Bucketeers" is a remarkable invention: Science fiction meets Sherlock Holmes, with a fascinating alien psychology thrown in. Beautiful! It's Smith's second best book, after "The Probability Broach." And it is the best book I have ever read of a totally alien culture. Wonderful! I think L. Neil had a lot of fun writing this, and I know I enjoyed reading it, every time I have read it. Highly recommended. Needs to be republished immediately!

L. Neil Smith is well-known as one of science fiction's more notorious libertarians (he's run for office on that ticket more than once), and his books, especially the later ones, tend to include a lot of propaganda for his cause. This one doesn't, and may therefore be the best with which to begin reading him. The planet Sodde Lydfe is inhabited by a species known as the lamviin--trilaterally symmetrical (three brains, three hearts, three eyes, and three sexes, plus three legs each of which divides into three arm/legs with three digits per) and currently in an early-Industrial-Age era, with telephones, steamships, railroads, typewriters, revolvers, airships, and even crude automobiles. The island continent of Great Foddu is the scene of the story, which follows the efforts of Agot Edvoot Mav (known to his friends by the latter name), Extraordinary Inquirer for Their Majesties' Bucketeers (a sort of combination police-and-firefighting force), to discover who murdered (literally explosively) the scholar who was his species' equivalent of Charles Darwin. The narrator is a "paracauterist," or doctor (shades, obviously, of John Watson, even though it's Mav who has a bad leg)--and a surmale, a member of the lamviin's third sex--named Mymysir Offe Woom (familiarly known as Mymy), and the tale is told in rher ("yes, that's the pronoun") own words, with more than a hint of Victorian flavor about them. Smith has come up with a wonderful, fascinating alien race that is at the same time comprehensible and sympathetic, and he strews information about their planet, physiology, history, society, and attitudes throughout the story with consummate skill and perfect pace, never letting up on the suspense and often throwing in some rib-tickling humor. (It's true he never quite specifies whatpart Mymy's gender has in the procreative process--Mymy refers to rherself as rher parents' "surdaughter," but rher counterpart in their marriage is rher "surfather"--but he does make it pretty plain that all three genders must be present in order for all to enjoy sexual pleasure.) If you've enjoyed C. J. Cherryh's hani or K. D. Wentworth's hrinn, you'll love the lamviin.