Customer Reviews

Golden Dream - A Fuzzy Odyssey

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_Golden Dream_, the second Fuzzy book to be written by someone other than their creator, H. Beam Piper, was written after Tuning's _Fuzzy Bones_ but two years before the rediscovery of Piper's own _Fuzzies and Other People_. It contains massive spoilers for _Fuzzy Bones_ and for Piper's own _Little Fuzzy_, so bail out of this review now if that matters to you.

This isn't really a novel, covering various episodes in Fuzzy history - the first half is neither fish nor fowl, being not quite a set of linked short stories nor a single flowing narrative. The stories follow the Fuzzies' own point of view, but Mayhar made no effort to use Piper's style. (Piper conveyed the alien viewpoint of the Fuzzies by writing their dialogue, even when speaking among themselves in their own language, in a kind of pidgin English - they just didn't have words in everyday Gashta for complex tools and the like, and it showed.)

"The Valley of the Gashta" would be known in later ages to humans as 'Fuzzy Valley', the area around Mount Fuzzy. This opens with one of the early Stargazers, who with his brother is of the last of the generation to be born in the caverns before the massive cave-in killed so many of their people and wiped away the last of their technology. Mayhar uses Stargazer's confidences with his brother and their despair over how much their people have lost beyond recall to recap the salient points of the catastrophes the archeologists deduced in the grand finale of _Fuzzy Bones_. (Mayhar also makes a point that the Fuzzies survived with such a small genepool by requiring non-monogamous matings, regardless of what permanent pairings might exist, and the subsequent changes to Fuzzy social structure.)

Brief passages change from character to character and generation to generation, illuminating the diet-related fertility problems Fuzzies were doomed to have outside Fuzzy valley, and the social problems brought on by overcrowding when they stayed there.

"The Dry Times Come" The Fuzzies, of course, didn't know about human settlement on Zarathustra at the beginning of the great drought, let alone that humans were causing it courtesy of the Big Blackwater drainage project. The humans later deduced that it had caused the great Fuzzy migration into human-occupied territory; this shows the beginnings of the migration from the Fuzzy point of view.

"The Hagga" (That being the Fuzzies' name for humans.) This is the part I have a problem with, taking up the 2nd half of the book. Mayhar wasn't content to let Piper's history stand; she invented her own mother-and-child team of Fuzzies, and had to have *them* be first to encounter humans. She downplays Little Fuzzy's unique role even further by having Leaf *send* him and his family into human territory rather than even acknowledging him as an independent discoverer of the aliens. At that point, the rest of the book becomes a retelling of the story of _Little Fuzzy_, from the viewpoint mainly of the Gashta known to humans as Little Fuzzy and Superego.

Personally, I recommend Tuning's book and Piper's own works, but not this book - I like Piper's treatment too much to enjoy her revision of his material. Try Mayhar's _How the Gods Wove in Kyrannon_ for a better sample of her own work.

H. Beam Piper (1904-64) enjoyed a brief career as a science-fiction author, which ended with his suicide in 1964. In 1963 he published Little Fuzzy, which revolved around the discovery of a race of small humanoids on a human-colonized world and the battle to get them recognized as a sapient race. In 1964 he published The Other Human Race as a sequel. Though there were reports of a nearly completed third book, it was not found after his death, so in 1981 Ace Books printed a sequel written by William Tuning, Fuzzy Bones. In Fuzzy Bones, we find out that the Fuzzies are actually marooned members of a star-traveling race, whose ship had crashed on the planet generations previous.

In this book, Ardath Mayhar takes the Piper/Tuning story, and presents it from the Fuzzy's perspective. The narrative moves from Fuzzy to Fuzzy (Gashta in their own language), showing the reader their trails, as they try to survive on a hostile and dangerous world, always looking to the stars for rescue.

Overall, I found this to be a very enjoyable work, even though Tuning's story was overturned when Piper's third Fuzzy novel was found and published in 1984. The narrative, though somewhat choppy, was interesting, making me really feel for the Fuzzies. But, what if you haven't read the earlier Fuzzy books? Well, I do believe that you will find the story fragmented and ultimately unsatisfactory.

So, I guess I would say that I highly recommend this book to any fan of H. Beam Piper and his Fuzzies, but do not really recommend it to anyone else.

I just finished this book and really enjoyed it! I'll have to go back and reread mr. Piper's novels, I think ardath ties into them very well.It's my second favorite book by this author, the world ends in hickory hollow is first. Found out she's written about 60 books under various names and so far I have enjoyed those few I've gotten my hands on.

This book was one that I had pick up every night, lest I suffer from withdrawal. It combines the histories of previous books, written by two seperate authors, and fuses them into a future so real that you feel for and understand its characters. I strongly recommend this book to everyone that can get ahold of it.

a delightful fuzzy point of view in the telling of this tale. I actually read this before I read H Beam Pipers Little fuzzy. I've enjoyed both but loved the view from knee high along with the history provided.

I'm a *big* Piper fan. When I got this story I devoured it in a single sitting. It's not Piper's style, at all, but the story of how the Fuzzies survived a thousand years of being stranded was utterly engrossing. Strongly recommended.

I recently re-read all my Piper books, then re-read this one, and came to the same conclusion I had when I bought it new years ago: it was fun to read more about fuzzies, but the author took unacceptable liberties with a world that did not belong to them.

On its own it is an enjoyable and well written story, though not in anything like Piper's style. Think of it as a "television adaptation" of a story in the "real world" of Piper's Fuzzies, with the stretching and massaging that modern day TV types are genetically unable to avoid. The author tried to make this book their own, and in so doing made it an uncomfortable fit in Piper's world. Enjoy it, but don't try to think of it as the definitive extension of the Fuzzy storyline.

This is a wonderful story! I have read the H.piper books, It is the 'Life' of a fuzzy, and I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys the fuzzies and science fiction.