• Full Title: Fuzzy Nation
• Author: John Scalzi
• Year: 2011
• Genre: Science Fiction, First Contact
• Publisher: Tor
• ISBN 978-0-7653-2854-0 (Hardcover)
• Wikipedia page
• Author’s Wikipedia Page

 

Summary

The first of its kind that I’ve read, this book is a “reboot” of an older novel by a different author. (If this is common practice, I remain unaware of it.) Fuzzy Nation, author John Scalzi says, was “basically written just for the fun of it and for sort of getting into the habit of actually enjoying writing science fiction again.” As it happens, I read the original novel — Little Fuzzy (1962) by H. Beam Piper while in high school (1980s) and then again in the late 1990s after I found a decent-quality copy on eBay (my first-ever purchase over the internet). It has long been one of my favorite sci-fi stories.

As Scalzi explains in an Author’s Note:

“Specifically, Fuzzy Nation appropriates the general story arc of Little Fuzzy, as well as character names and plot elements, and weds them to entirely new elements, characters, and events. Think of this as a “reboot” of the Fuzzy universe, not unlike the recent J.J. Abrams “reboot” of the Star Trek film series (but hopefully with better science).”

pg. 7

Both the original and the reboot begin with prospector/surveyor Jack Holloway blasting away a cliff face and finding a seam of ‘sunstone” — the very valuable substance that humans are extracting from Zara XXIII (“Zarathustra” in the original). Piper has Holloway alone; Scalzi has added a dog named “Carl”, both to give Holloway someone to talk to and for comedic effect. There are plenty of other differences as well; for one thing Piper simply had too many named characters in the original, while Scalzi trims this list down to around a dozen.

 

What I Liked Least About It

There was almost nothing to dislike about this book. In a few of places I found what I think were editing errors: once or twice I noticed a missing negative (adding a “not” would make more sense), and a few times there was a question without a question mark. This is deep nitpicking, I realize.

 

What I Liked Most About It

Scalzi managed to make a fun and funny story out of the merely interesting original. While somehow retaining the original’s curiosity and intrigue, he adds better dialog and more humorous situations. Also, Scalzi’s Jack Holloway is clearly younger than Piper’s, which I thinks makes him more relatable to general audiences.

The kernel of the story itself — in both stories — is what always fascinated me the most. It’s “first contact” story, but on their planet instead of ours. It begins with humans in the process of exploiting a planet they believe to be uninhabited by sentient natives, but Jack meets the Fuzzys — a species of small mammal-like critters with opposable thumbs. Much of the course of the story is about how to prove whether they’re sentient, something that has always interested me.

 

Conclusion

This was a really fun read, and the book’s 300 pages flew past in just a few days. Whether or not you’ve ever read the original Fuzzy stories by Piper, if you like science fiction you’ll likely enjoy this novel. Readers who enjoy Scalzi in general will like it too; he employs his recognizable flippant tone throughout the book.

 

Note: A shorter version of this review is available on Goodreads, here.

 

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