Play Book Tag discussion

Back in high school I was browsing Powell's Books (if you've never heard of it, it's basically heaven: a bookstore an entire city block wide and four or five stories tall. And I grew up within half an hour of it) and I came across a book called The Complete Fuzzy by H. Beam Piper. It's actually an omnibus comprising the first three books in the Fuzzy series. I bought it entirely for the cover, and the premise, which is simple: a prospector on an alien world discovers a cute little furry animal that he starts to believe is actually sentient, which kicks off a big legal drama, since mining operations will grind to a screeching halt if the world is found to hold sentient life.

And it captivated me. Especially one of the sequels, in which a fuzzy is called to testify in court and they discover that this will be impossible since the legal system uses lie detectors and Fuzzies don't lie. You can't calibrate a machine if you never teach it what a negative result looks like. The entire book is spent searching for a Fuzzy that can tell a lie in order to prove that Fuzzies don't tell lies.

A few years ago, though, an author I had never heard of at the time 'rebooted’ the first Fuzzy book. And I was furious. The marketing made it sound like it was a gritty reboot, complete with a morally grey protagonist and emphasizing how all the period typical sexism was being taken out. (It really wasn't that bad. Yes, the lady scientist does end up married at the end of the book, but, well, she was a lady scientist. Not bad for the 60s.) Piper's main character Holloway was an old country lawyer living out a semi-retirement as a prospector. Scalzi's Holloway looks like a grungy cyberpunk hipster. I did not read Fuzzy Nation when it came out in 2012.

Fast forward to last month, when I realized we had this book in my library. It had been some years since I read the original Little Fuzzy, and I'd heard several glowing reviews of Fuzzy Nation since then and loved the crap out of Redshirts, so I thought it might be time to give it a try. At the very least I could write a scathing review of it here.

Nope. I loved it. It was great. I learned that Scalzi's intention was actually to honor Piper's work and draw attention to it, as well as, yes, making the story accessible for a modern audience. But his tone was only ever respectful.

It's probably a good thing I haven't read Little Fuzzy in quite a while. The details on that one are, ha, fuzzy, so I didn't spend the book making one-to-one comparisons. I'm still not sure the reboot would have come out on top since the original holds a nostalgia for me this one never will. But if you're not interested in tracking down something that's out of print, then Fuzzy Nation is certainly a good way to get introduced to the Fuzzy world. Chances are after reading it you'll be motivated to track down the original anyway.

Thanks for this review. I have been working my way through Scalzi's books and I was holding off on this one because I was worried that I would miss something since I did not read the original. I am definitely looking forward to this one more now.