Christopher Anvil (1925–2009)

This is an agreeable adventure, somewhat more serious than Pandora's Planet. A spaceship captain of the Interplanetary Patrol responds to a damsel in distress who turns out to be a princess, the sister of the almost-adult heir to the warlord's world of the title. Her brother has fallen under the control of his ambitious regent Duke Marius, who hoes to discredit him and take the throne himself. To prevent this, the patrol captain's mind is switched with the prince's, and for a while the new 'prince' does very well at foiling the duke's plots. But when the tie comes for the prince to claim te throne by the traditional drawing a sword from a stone, he is unexpectedly declared unworthy, and has to start over as the lowest of the nobility, a plot twist I admit I had not expected.… (more)

I originally read a shorter version of this when I was young, and enjoyed it immensely. I still think it I fun but if I took it seriously I would say it was not credible. The concept is that an aggressive interspace empire conquers --or thinks it has conquered --earth and then finds the natives are waging a very clever guerrilla warfare against them. They find that earthlings actually are smarter than they are, or at least more clever at inventing things, though perhaps also too prone to argument for their own good. The empire solves the problem (or thinks it solves the problem) by taking the earthlings into partnership. That was about as far as the original story got. The novel expands on the consequences. The extent to which the earthlings are smarter than the aliens is not really credible (how likely is it that a militaristic empire would not have even invented a socket bayonet?) but it is funny in a rather heavy-handed way, mostly poking fun at the alien intellectuals who are supposed to integrate earthlings into the empire. When I was young, it did teach me one useful expression "exaggeration for conversational effect." I suppose I and people around me had been using it all my life, but I had not thought of it as a specific concept until it was used here (by a supercilious alien intellectual who cannot believe a soldier is serious about the accuracy of earth weapons.)… (more)