The Governor of Glave

The revolution on Glave has ended, the new government is scrambling to consolidate power, and the diplomatic corps is absolutely terrified. Enter Retief, a junior diplomat who seems to have missed the memo about behaving like a proper diplomatic technician. While his superiors agonize over protocol and proper channels, Retief simply... acts. He insults the right people, makes impossible promises, and somehow, improbably, keeps turning catastrophe into something resembling victory. Laumer's novel is a gleeful subversion of the earnest space opera, a book that knows exactly how absurd the whole notion of 'proper diplomatic procedure' is when planets are falling apart. Each chapter delivers sharp satirical jabs at bureaucratic thinking while serving up genuine adventure. It's SF that refuses to take itself seriously, and that's precisely why it works.