My Review of Scalzi's Fuzzy Nation

[scribblerworks]

I put a bit of thought into comparing Scalzi's "rebooting" of the Fuzzy stories and H. Beam Piper's original.

YOU CAN READ THE REVIEW HERE.

Because I actually do like both versions of the creation, I spend a bit of time considering the points I felt to be the main differences between the two. If you haven't read Piper's original tales, I do have

Comments

[kalimac]

There is one thing that bothered me about Little Fuzzy, and I wonder how Scalzi deals with it. That is, that the humans who were trying to prove the fuzzies sapient treated the fuzzies as pets.

[scribblerworks]

I think that comes from the point Piper was making over the three books that we treat innocence, in spite of our best intentions, as something that lessens sentience. And I always regarded the way the humans treated the Fuzzies as a step above pets. I seem to recall that one of them likens the Fuzzies to permanent children. But Piper didn't quite show them to be that from the Fuzzies' own point of view.

When we get the stories from the points of view of Little Fuzzy or Diamond, they are shown to be fairly sophisticated thinkers, in spite of their lack of conceptualizing of deceit.

Much of Fuzzies and Other People is from Little Fuzzy's point of view when he gets lost far from home, and his endeavors to bring another tribe (who had not yet met humans) into the "safe zone

[kalimac]

I saw nothing in the first book - I didn't read the others - to show that either Piper or his characters were aware of the irony here.

I disliked the cuteness, but then I don't eat rich desserts either.

[scribblerworks]

Fair enough.

I like occasional cuteness, as long as it doesn't drown me in sugar.

As for Piper's other Fuzzy titles, Fuzzy Sapiens deals further with the specifics of the sapience trial and with issues of the Fuzzy biology (why they might be dying off).

Fuzzies and Other People has to deal with the murder of one of the Fuzzies - and Little Fuzzy himself being lost out in the wilderness and trying to get back to Jack. In that story, since most of the witnesses to the murder trial were to be Fuzzies, they had to figure out how to verify the truthfulness of the witnesses. The human technology for that proof was based on the presumption that a witness could (and would) lie. Since the Fuzzies didn't understand deception (or "not-so" statements), there wasn't a way to verify their truthfulness. Until Little Fuzzy learned the survival usefulness of being able to speak of "not-so things