From the back cover: Why do I sense we've picked up another pathetic life form? Hundreds of thousands of star systems span the vastness of space, and a million million species inhabit the worlds of those systems. Every soldier who has survived a tour of duty in some out-of-the-way place and every smuggler who has hidden her ship on some strange world bumps into the local fauna sooner or later. Most of them wished they had the information this book contains.