Customer Reviews

Complete Fuzzy

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"Little Fuzzy" is possibly Piper's most famous novel. The follow on books, "Fuzzy Sapiens" and "Fuzzies And Other People", are worthy successors to the original. "Little Fuzzy" was the first Piper book I ever read, and I have been a fan ever since. Piper blends solid characters, action, sentimentality, humor and a rich fictional future world to tell solid stories with a bit of a twist. The Fuzzies are warm and cute without being maudlin. The human characters are people you wish you could know in real life. I don't know how many authors could successfully combine gunplay and Fuzzies, but H. Beam Piper does it. Piper's stories are great fun in their own right, and for the reader who likes large complex future societies, reading his other stories opens up a whole new wide world.

Capsule Description: A dispute over whether a small creature native to the planet Zarathustra is actually intelligent becomes a gripping drama in and out of the frontier planet's courtroom, in a trial whose outcome could mean life or death for an entire species. Written in a way that's suitable for virtually all audiences aside from very young children, with likeable characters, and starring the title character Little Fuzzy, who makes all of Lucas' attempts at cute sidekick characters look lame. A wonderful feel-good book.

Review: Take a good-hearted, crusty miner-type from any good Old West story -- especially the old miner who used to be a gunslinger -- and you've got Jack Holloway, prospecting for "sunstones" on the planet Zarathustra. Zarathustra's owned by the Chartered Zarathustra Company, so whatever you find there you sell to the Company, at the price the Company sets... but sunstones are valuable enough that even what the Company pays is well worth your while. But one day the independent loner comes home to find an odd, cute little creature has wandered into his house. It isn't long before he decides that "Little Fuzzy" is more than just an animal. What he doesn't think about, at least not at first, is this simple fact: a planet-wide Charter is awarded to a company only for planets which do NOT have a native sentient race. But when word of Jack's discovery reaches one of the Company's executives, they most certainly DO think about it... and get ready to do something about it, as well.

"Little Fuzzy" is one of the SF books that I can read to my kids. It has a warm, engaging prose style, and while there are one or two scenes that are scary or shocking, for the most part it's a story where people deal with each other as people. Even the opposition, in the person of the Zarathustra Company's executives, isn't painted in shades of black and white. It still remains an exciting book, with a number of unexpected twists, and very re-readable as well. I recommend buying "The Complete Fuzzy", which contains three Fuzzy novels in one, showing the evolution of the relationships that are started in the first, "Little Fuzzy".

H. Beam Piper (1904-64) was one of the premier science-fiction authors of the 1960s, and should rightly be considered one of the all-time greats in that field. Among the wonderful books that Mr. Piper published during his all-too-short career were a series of three books set on the future world of Zarathustra. This book is a compilation of those three books.

In Little Fuzzy (originally published in 1962), an aging prospector discovers that the planet is actually populated by a race of small, furry humanoids, which he names fuzzies. Little does he know that the discovery of *intelligent* humanoids on Zarathustra would void the charter of the company that owns it outright, and the Chartered Zarathustra Company is too powerful to be threatened with impunity.

In Fuzzy Sapiens (1964), the head of the now Charterless Zarathustra Company is shocked to find a fuzzy in his high-security apartment. Someone is kidnapping fuzzies, but why? This is going to get complicated.

In Fuzzies and Other People (written in 1964, but then lost after Piper's tragic suicide; found and published in 1984), the trial of the Fuzzy kidnappers is coming up, and all the friends of this newly discovered sentient race are hoping for a decisive conviction. However, the kidnappers' lawyer, Hugo Ingermann, has a few aces up his sleeve, the biggest ace being that a standard lie detected will now show when a Fuzzy is lying, making their testimony inadmissible. The biggest problem seems to be that Fuzzies do not understand the concept of lying, so now the race is on to find a Fuzzy that can lie.

I must admit that I was hoping for a little something extra in buying this book, a new introduction perhaps. But, I was disappointed. Even so, my copies of the original books were becoming worn-out, and it is nice to be able to get a new copy of these books.

H. Beam Piper was an excellent author, who was expert at creating new worlds with unique problems, that are nonetheless familiar seeming and realistically drawn. I have loved the Fuzzy stories for many years now, and keep rereading them over and over again. If you are a fan of excellent sci-fi from the 1950s and 60s, then I can guarantee that you will love this book!

They called themselves the Gashta, which in their language means "the people". When ol' Jack Holloway 'discovered' them, he gave them a new name - Fuzzies! They stood less than a meter tall had soft silky fur, intelligence and if Jack was right, were the first native life form on the planet Zarathustra to posess true sapience. This would be great news, except that Zarathustra was a company planet, chartered by the Terran Federation as a Class III uninhabited planet. If the Fuzzies were indeed sapient, the planet would be classified as a class IV inhabited planet and the Chartered Zarathustra Corporation would lose all claims to the planet , lock stock and barrel. H. Beam Piper's tale of Holloway's fight to save the Fuzzies was written nearly 40 years ago, yet its' warmth , humor and suspenseful moments will make fun reading for young and old alike. Rumour has it that a screenplay is currently in the works to faithfully bring the Fuzzy adventures to the silver screen. Get your copy now before the pre-screening rush puts it out of print.

The Fuzzy Trilogy is something rare; something like nothing I've read before. I first ran into the fuzzies many years ago, in a school library, but I never finished the first book. Years later, I recalled it, and began my search. I eventually found all of the fuzzy stories, and read them all through. They were wonderful, with good plots, characters that leaped off of the pages, strange animals, all set in a realistic and fairly earthlike world. A frontier world, though, riddled with high-tech machinery and mentionings of other worlds and fictional history, but mostly down-to-earth... or, in this case, the compelling, exiting and mysterious rugged world of Zarathustra. And, of course, there are the Fuzzies. Fuzzies are simple, straighforward characters, complex underneath but understandable. They creatures that have very rounded, symetric personalities that accept whatever comes to them with little complaint. And they never lie- hardly ever. What more can one ask from a book? -VMT

This was my favorite book it had great things that relate to our lives but take place in the future so it is a unbelieveablely exciting an absobing book. I recomend this book to teens as well as abults. It is also funny and makes you laugh. I'll tell you about the first book in the series, Jack Hollaway a miner discovers a small animal one meter high with big cute eyes and soft golden fur. no one has ever seen one of these animls so Jack calls it a fuzzy. But a cute monkey type creature is not all this fuzzy is, Jack thinks this crature might be sapient or self aware. And when more fuzzies show up and one of them is killed by a cruel scientist, Jack has to prove that the fuzzies are sapient so the man will get his just punishment.

H. Beam Piper charming series brought together into one book, at last! Yeah, I kinda think it's very suitable for young people in spite of it's macho moments which keeps the action moving. It's about an emerging sapient species on a colony company planet. It's about their failing ecology and the solitary elderly miner who meets them. The only problem: The company charter and baby fuzzy can't coexist. The good guys are disgustingly good; the bad guys are really bad, and the inbetween, well, you'll have to read to see how they fare. Not great literature but great story telling told with skill.

H. Beam Piper's Fuzzy novels, Little Fuzzy (first published in 1962), Fuzzy Sapiens (originally published as The Other Human Race in 1964), and Fuzzies and Other People (first published in 1984), are perhaps the best treatment ever of the nature of intelligence in science-fiction. The three novels deal with the assorted legal and political challenges which occur in the aftermath of the discovery of the Fuzzies--small, cute, furry humanoids--by human settlers on the planet Zarathustra. Part crime drama, part space opera, Piper's novels remain a joy to read even though many of their early-1960's technological and cultural accouterments are a bit outdated.

Interestingly, the third novel in the Fuzzies series, published posthumously, appeared after the publication of two "authorized" sequels penned by other authors: William Tuning's Fuzzy Bones (1981) and Ardath Mayhar's Golden Dream: A Fuzzy Odyssey (1982). Along with Fuzzies and Other People, these three novels constitute three possible outcomes for the Fuzzy "Trilogy" which is itself only part of a larger Future History portrayed by Piper in four other novels: Four-Day Planet (1961), Uller Uprising (1952), The Cosmic Computer (1958), and Space Viking (1962); and several short stories published between 1957 and 1962 and collected in two anthologies, Federation and Empire, edited by John F. Carr.

I first read the Fuzzy books a VERY long time ago, and enjoyed them greatly. I was overjoyed to find the Complete Fuzzy, and snapped it up. I have since gotten my MOTHER hooked on Little Fuzzy and his friends. She plans to buy a copy of the book for my daughter, as well, so we have 2 going on three generations of Fuzzy fans in THIS household!

From the first reading, the Fuzzy saga has caused me to question something:

What does it mean to be sentient, to be a person, not simply an animal that survives?

It ranks with Heinlein's Friday for cuasing you to wonder what it really means to be human. And if that is a good thing to be?

And even if you can't understand that part, it is still a good read, complete with Piper's self-made, self-reliant Renisiance man as the lead. One could do much worse in life than to look back and realize that you've become Pappy Jack.