I had been excited about Fuzzy Nation (FN) ever since author John Scalzi first blurbed about it on his blog. He is one of the most funny authors around. Who else writes about aliens passing gas?
Anyway, FN is a remake of an earlier novel I had never even heard of before called Little Fuzzy (LF) by H Beam Piper. Movies get remade all the time, but not novels. I suppose it helped that LF has fallen into public domain, so there wasn’t much legal hoops to jump over the rights issue. According the Scalzi, he only wrote FN for fun before showing it to his agent. The rest, as they say, is history.
The book, or rather both books, are about a mining prospector named Jack Halloway who discovers a super-cute intelligent species—the Fuzzies—right after stumbling into a huge deposit of a highly valuable mineral on a faraway planet. Thus a moral dilemma. The mineral find means Halloway stands to become so rich that he and his descendants will never have to work again. Discovering the Fuzzies, however, if proven sentient means the planet cannot be mined.
At the outset it is a gone conclusion that the Fuzzies will win in the end. The smart thing about FN, however is that Halloway, a disbarred lawyer, doesn’t just suddenly grow a conscience and do the right thing. The bad guy in the novel is ZaraCorp, a mega mining corporation which, sans Fuzzies, practically owns the planet. The climax of the story is a courtroom drama, which is rare in science fiction.
The original Little Fuzzy is available as a free download, among others at Project Gutenberg. I have downloaded it, hoping to get around to reading it later.
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LINKS:
Review of Fuzzy Nation at SF Reviews.net
Cory Doctorow’s review of Fuzzy Nation at Boing Boing
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