I read this in 2001 and gave it 3 out of 5 stars on amazon.com, along with the following review:
First, ignore the title and the cover art, however clever and amusing they may be. None of the three stories in this volume has much to do with providing weapons to the ursinoid Dilbians, whose culture shuns the use of weapons (for that matter, they're not so hot with tools either). Second, fans of Dickson should be advised this book is an omnibus edition of three previously released works, "Spacial Delivery", "Spacepaw", and "The Law-Twister Shorty".
I found these stories to be rather entertaining as something of a guilty pleasure, but overall I wasn't terribly impressed with the storytelling or the world-building. The Dilbians were amusing in their backward-thinking, but at times they tended to be a bit too, how should I say it?, "folksey". The manner in which the human characters were identified and thrust into the situations in these stories was too counterintuitive and far-fetched to be believable; nevertheless it did provide for some interesting problems for the human characters to puzzle over as they interacted with the Dilbians. Overall, not a great read but not too bad either.
I might give it a more favorable review if I were to reread it now, especially since I seem to have been rather pedantic at the time about scientific plausibility of the setting, where now I could just let go and rate it based on whether the stories are entertaining.
Your discussion of the cover art reminds me of something Lisanne Norman said about the covers of her books. She had complained that the covers of the first several books, all by Romas Kukalis, portrayed the Sholans as looking too much like earth felines and not alien enough. Then her publisher got Jim Burns to do one of the covers, and Norman was much more impressed with his portrayal of the Sholans, so much so that when they once again had Kukalis do the cover for a subsequent volume, he incorporated elements of Burns's version of Sholans into the artwork.
I read this in 2001 and gave it 3 out of 5 stars on amazon.com, along with the following review:
I might give it a more favorable review if I were to reread it now, especially since I seem to have been rather pedantic at the time about scientific plausibility of the setting, where now I could just let go and rate it based on whether the stories are entertaining.
Your discussion of the cover art reminds me of something Lisanne Norman said about the covers of her books. She had complained that the covers of the first several books, all by Romas Kukalis, portrayed the Sholans as looking too much like earth felines and not alien enough. Then her publisher got Jim Burns to do one of the covers, and Norman was much more impressed with his portrayal of the Sholans, so much so that when they once again had Kukalis do the cover for a subsequent volume, he incorporated elements of Burns's version of Sholans into the artwork.