IIRC it was a humorous story where the setup is that the Earth has become a member of a larger galactic community but is considered a poor, ignorant backwater with nothing of any importance to trade. Earth is desperate for hard galactic currency to be able to progress and acquire advanced technology, but the the only things the galactic community is interested in from Earth is one specific model of vintage car, and a (intended to be serious) travel guide written by one of the first human space explorers about his experiences and impressions in visiting other planets and cultures, and which the larger galactic community thinks is just the funniest thing ever produced, and gobbles it up.
His fellow citizens do not like the travel guide writer as they feel (rightly) that they are being made sport of by the universe.
Also, if anyone has read a novel, written in the last decade, female writer along the lines of Margaret Atwood <but it’s not one of hers that I can figure out> that starts out with an older woman in an American society where social status isn’t so much determined by wealth as by health. You take care of yourself, eat right, live up to the government’s dictums regarding such, and you are taken care of. Refuse to be ‘healthy’, and you are essentially outside the law. It was very well-done but I cannot for the life of me find what it was. >.<
I don’t agree – I think adams has his own style and voice. This was driven home to me when I once heard an excerpt from a work of his I was unfamiliar with, and I was struck both by the quality of the writing, and my inability to place it. I think I’d have nailed it if Vonnegut had written it.
That said, I was struck by the influence of Robert Sheckley on his work, especially the way Hitchiker’s Guide seems to owe an awful lot to Sheckley’s Dimension of Miracles. The two share a comic outlook and ironic attitude, but they writing styles are very different.
As for the OP – I can’t place the story. It reminds me of a Joe Haldeman story from the late 1970s/early 1980s about a lion-like alien who comes to earth and indicates to us that we’re a backwater, but he and the others in the Galactic Confederation really like our Moonshine. But I don’t recall any vintage cars or anything.
Dang, I read that story! Loved it, too. C’mon brain cells…
All I can add is:
The authorities kept mispronouncing the protagonist’s name…can’t remember it now.
He is ostracized by the Terran community until they discover his book is a best seller, as you mentioned above, because of the galactic community’s loving it as a hilarious account of their civilization as naively interpreted by a “backwater” native.
Earth loves him because of the hard currency his book is bringing in. But the galactics won’t let the Terran authorities confiscate his money, they keep it for his use alone. He doesn’t want the gummint to have it, the aliens sure aren’t handing it over to them.
He gets his own back, gives earth the rasberry, so to speak.
Now, who wrote it? What was its title? Where did I read it? If I recall a ny more, I’ll re-post. Maybe the above will give you some clues.
If it’s not hijacking, does anybody know the title/author of a sf short-story in which a gay private detective investigates… I think it’s some sort of industrial theft. I know there a street party or parade in which gay people use J. Edgar Hoover masks and there is also a scene in which the protagonist gets his gun out a safe and has to answer questions in order to show the machine he’s neither drunk nor angry. This was probably published in the 90’s and in the end it turns out the thing he was investigating was a sort of drug or machine that affected babies in utero in such a way as to effectively stop gay babies from being born.