james_nicoll

Context?

Is for the weak?

Is a three edged sword.

Ah, thank you.

Mote in God's Eye?

Three-armed, due to fusing two arms into a stronger one, bipedal IIRC.

Three-legged aliens I know: Niven's Puppeteers, and whatever the crabs were called in L. Neil Smith's _Tom Paine Maru_.

And Their Majesties Bucketeers, which I read long before I learned that Libertarians Make Everything Worse.

Banks has the Idirans; their three-leggedness is only slightly related to their villainy.

Mike Resnick's "Three Legged Hooch Dancer"?

Although if memory serves, their three-genderedness is the very point of their villainy.

I don't remember that at all. OTOH, the immortal Idirans thought it ridiculous to think a mortal body could house an immortal soul.

That was the empire of Azad, not the Idirians.

So it was! My excuse is that I classified the Azadians as straw-beings, and thus didn't pay as much attention to their distinctive features as I could have.

Don't know about that, but in you've got a Homomdan in _Look to Windward_, Ambassador Kabe, who is tripedal.

Although I've read all the Culture novels I can get my hands on, I haven't gotten the ones that directly involve the Idirans.

"Dinosaurs" by Walter John Williams has three-legged aliens.

But I do not think James meant those, or Niven's puppeeteers either. Really, that was a very cryptic post.

When you have to invent a planet of three-legged aliens to make your politics make sense, maybe you are learning something about your starting assumptions concerning humanity; or maybe you didn't have to do that at all, but invented the exotica solely for fun, with a side-order of demonstrating the obvious universality of your beliefs and their superiority to most accidents of form and function. Some speculative fiction need not demand bullishness on the part of your reader!

When those politics still don't make sense, you may have graduated into writing the same sort of bullshit about alien-shaped aliens called Kh'sxhtra as most of us are occasionally guilty of writing about human-shaped aliens called Trevor.

I have not read this book and have no notion of its bullshit density, though I've enjoyed other L Neil Smith books as grimy high-adrenaline space operas, and evidently found their libertarian content whizzing past me faster than Dick Seaton can yell, "Great Cat, I guess Einstein was wrong after all!"

Tripodia is the key insight.

Or half of it, anyway.

--Dave, waiting for another inspiron to hit

I dunno; that's essentially what papersky did with Tooth and Claw. She took historical politics and mores (as described by Trollope), and invented a breed of three-legged aliens (okay, dragons) where they actually made sense.