Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great Introductory Piper, February 18, 2001
"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.
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Classic SF... for the whole family., October 28, 2003
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".
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Three great books in one!, March 29, 2005
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!
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