1962; 174 pages. Genre : 50's Sci-Fi. Laurels : nominated for the Hugo Award in 1963. New Author? : Yes. Overall Rating : 7½*/10.
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Q. : If you landed on another planet, and encountered something that, say, looked like a Wookie or an Ewok, how would you know whether to make friends with it or shoot it for its meat and fur? A. : By determining whether it's a sapient being.
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Fair enough. But how would you define "sapient"? Well, the Zarathustra Company uses the guideline of whether it can talk and build a fire. And they have a charter to develop and exploit the natural resources on one particular planet, provided it has no sapient beings. That's an important clause, because if sentient creatures are found, they are the rightful owners of the planet, and Zarathustra Company's charter instantly becomes null and void. And wouldn't you know it, Jack Holloway has just crossed paths with a family of Hoka-looking "Fuzzies".
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What's To Like...
Little Fuzzy is a short, cute, easy-to-read, Sci-Fi story from the early 60's. Its target audience is young boys, yet it addresses some serious issues. Is it okay to do environmental damage to an ecosystem, as long as the creatures in it are non-sapient? How is sapience determined, and who makes that decision? What if a species is "almost" sapient? Are there any consequences if you kill a native creature prior to its sapience being determined? If something is good for the company that employs you, but unethical, can you still do it?
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For adults, the storyline might be a bit unbelievable and simplistic. Faced with a suit-&-countersuit, a judge decides to simply hold both trials simultaneously. And there's no need to determine whether a witness is telling the truth, we have a handy-dandy, infallible, lie-detector-type thingy called a Veridicator. How convenient.
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All characters are either black or white, and the story shows its age by the fact that drinking and smoking cigarettes are portrayed as normal daily activities for all adults, good or bad. Not the sort of thing you want influencing a kid reading this.
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Kewlest Word...
Colloquy : a formal conversation or conference.
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Excerpts...
"They don't talk, and they don't build fires," Ahmed Khadra said, as though that settled it.
"Ahmed, you knw better than that. That talk-and-build-a-fire rule isn't any scientific test at all."
"It's a legal test," Lunt supported his subordinate.
"It's a rule-of-thumb that was set up so that settlers on new planets couldn't get away with murdering and enslaving the natives by claiming they thought they were only hunting and domesticating wild animals," he said. "Anything that talks and builds a fire is a sapient being, yes. That's the law. But that doesn't mean that anything that doesn't isn't." (pg. 36)
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"They will have a nice, neat, pedantic definition of sapience, tailored especially to exclude the Fuzzies, and they will present it in court and try to get it accepted, and it's up to us to guess in advance what that will be, and have a refutation of it ready, and also a definition of our own."
"Their definition will have to include Khooghras. Gerd, do the Khooghras bury their dead?"
"Hell, no; they eat them. But you have to give them this, they cook them first." (pgs. 97-98)
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If you don't like the facts, you ignore them, and if you need facts, dream up some you do like. (pg. 15)
Little Fuzzy's straightforward plotline won't challenge an adult reader, but that wasn't the target audience. OTOH, at the end of the book, H. Beam Piper launches into a 5-page diatribe giving his own definition of sapience (it was a subject near and dear to his heart), which will probably be over the heads of young readers.
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So what? This was a delightful, light story that will nevertheless leave readers of all ages pondering issues such as corporate greed, destructive environmental practices (even when they're NIMBY), animal rights (sapient and otherwise), gun rights, and capital punishment.
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Little Fuzzy is one of those rare books that I thought should have been twice as long as it is. 7½ Stars.
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