Fuzzy Nation

Fuzzy Nation by John Scalzi (2011)

Reader's Annotation

The little "fuzzys" are cute and clever, but if they're people, ZaraCorp loses a planet-load of money.

Summary

Back on Earth, Jack Holloway used to be a corporate lawyer. Now Jack lives alone in the outback of the planet Zarathustra—178 light years from Earth—where he prospects for precious sunstones under contract to ZaraCorp. As the company with the exclusive charter to exploit the resources of Zarathustra, ZaraCorp runs nearly everything on the planet.

As a contractor, Jack makes only a tiny percentage of what his finds are worth, but one day he gets lucky. Not only does Jack find the mother of all sunstone deposits, but, thanks to a legal error by ZaraCorp, he is able to negotiate a much larger share for himself—enough to make him a very wealthy man. 

That very evening, a small furry biped—trusting and ridiculously cute—shows up at Jack's outback compound, followed shortly thereafter by its entire family. As it dawns on Jack that these little "fuzzys" may actually be people, he recalls that ZaraCorp's legal right to exploit Zarathustra will remain in effect only so long as no native sentient life is discovered. With a planet-load of money at stake, Jack fears that ZaraCorp will choose to hunt his new friends to extinction before anyone can prove they're more than animals. It's happened before on other planets. That's something Jack can't live with, even if it costs him a fortune in sunstones.

Jack soon realizes that his fears are well founded. His only hope to save the fuzzys is to return to the courtroom for the first time since he was disbarred.

Evaluation

This was an enjoyable old-school science fiction novel. And that's not too surprising as this is a "re-boot" of the 1962 classic Little Fuzzy by H. Beam Piper. It's nice to see the story gain a new readership. The original novel is a little dated but still very enjoyable and is readily available as a public domain ebook if you'd like to compare it with Fuzzy Nation. John Scalzi was a good choice to update the original story. He is among the best of the new science fiction writers but still has something of an old-school style and choice of subject matter. His Hugo-nominated Old Man's War was clearly inspired by two classics of science fiction: Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers and Joe Haldeman's Forever War.

Fuzzy Nation deals with a common trope of science fiction: first contact with a intelligent alien species. In this case the theme is: How do you decide whether an alien species is sentient? What criteria do you use? The fuzzys are small and furry like an animal and don't speak an obvious language, but they use tools and seem to behave intelligently. How sentient are they? Are there degrees of sentience? How do you assign rights to a species and who will protect those rights? These are some of the big questions that science fiction can be used to explore, the sort of questions that are seldom addressed in modern science fiction.

If you enjoyed Fuzzy Nation, you may enjoy other novels that explore first contact with an alien species: The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle and A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge are two classics in that subgenre.

Genres: Science Fiction
Subgenres: First Contact