Roughly twenty years ago I stumbled across, to my everlasting gratitude, a copy of H. Beam Piper's Little Fuzzy.  To this day Piper is an author I will unhesitatingly read without question.

Less than twenty days ago, for reasons I will not explain here, I bought an E-reader against my better judgement (serious... I will no longer own the books I bought? fuck you!) and while perusing the 'stacks' for a little additional reading material I found 'Fuzzy Nation'... but its not by Piper, but by some guy I had never heard of, John Scalzi.

Not one to waste money casually (except on game books or overpriced coffee flavored milk... state law, sorry guys!), I turned to the internets. To my surprise, I found a brief 'interview', apparently conducted by himself, on the very book.  

This then is the high.  It seems that the author is very much a man after my own heart, a fan of Piper's, and willing to write a book for the joy of writing it... and, as it happens, lucky enough to sell it with the blessing of Piper's estate, even though the book its based on is, in fact, in the public domain (who knew?!!!!).  

So, I shelled out the twelve bucks (seriously?! Its a fucking digital file, the 'publishing costs' are fucking non-existant!!! ARGGHHH!!!!) and bought it... partly as a show of support, and mostly because I love me some fucking Fuzzies.

Then comes the low.

In the original book, our hero (Jack Holloway, if memory serves) is a rugged outdoors man and a proper sci-fi miner in the old western mold. More to the point, he blows up cliff faces to retrieve petrified jellyfish that glow when warmed, the major export of Zarathrustra. He has to deal with space cockroaches, and eventually meets the fuzzies who eat the space cockroaches, and are in turn preyed upon by bigger, dumber and meaner beasts (who Jack, obligingly, shoots when they get too close to his house...)

That's too long. Jack Holloway blows up a fucking cliff to mine pretty rocks on an alien world in the first pages of Little Fuzzy.  Jack Holloway is cool.


Cue Fuzzy Nation.

In the first three pages of Fuzzy Nation we barely meet Jack (he's talking to his dog, whom he has trained to press the detonator in violation of company rules... wait?! I thought Jack was an independent?! Contractor is not independent! Gah!), which is not really that rugged and a little too cute, but whatever.

Oops!!!

Wait, what's this on page three?  He ACCIDENTALLY blows up the cliff? Zarathustra Corp will be mad because they aren't environmental despoilers like that???

This is the same Zarathustra corp that in the original planned to exterminate a possible sentient species of cute, hairy mini-human primatives to avoid losing their exploitiation license?


Oh, sweet fucking ceaser's ghost.  I bought it, I'll fucking read it.
But seriously?

If piper hadn't shot himself in 1964 he'd be stalking you right fucking now, mr Sclazi with Jack Holloway's elephant gun, and you'd be shitting your idiotic facial hair.

I may not survive to reach the arrival of the Fuzzies and their, I'm guessing, 'civilizing' by way of teaching them to husband the natural world they live in while simultaniously teaching the humans on Zarathustra to be more in tune with their primative selves, and how to survive on a diet of fucking space cockroaches.

That's right, I am so fucking outraged that I took myself straight to the internet to bitch about shitty remakes of beloved memories by uncaring, uncreative assholes without bothering to learn the whole story.

And yes, I did just get fucking offended that modern, earth-centric environmental weenie-ism crept into my sci-fi reading. And yes, I am, in fact, mocking you openly, without bothering to explain why (because, as I learned in college, once a fact become openly accepted enough, you no longer need to site sources just because some little bitch believes otherwise bitches about it, as bitches do).

And, because I can, I'm waiving my e-cock around.

Because that's just how I roll.

Before you and your e-penis get all riled up over John Scalzi, go read his novel Old Man's War.

Hell, if you like, I'll even mail you a copy. That you can own.

Quote from: Spike;467474In the first three pages of Fuzzy Nation we barely meet Jack (he's talking to his dog, whom he has trained to press the detonator in violation of company rules... wait?! I thought Jack was an independent?! Contractor is not independent! Gah!), which is not really that rugged and a little too cute, but whatever.

Well, in the original, when you found SunStones, you could only sell them to the Chartered Zarathrusta Company, by law.

In the new one, when he finds SunStones, he makes a deal to sell them to the CZC again.

It's not that much of a difference, I think.

I'm fond of John Scalzi's work in general, and really _wanted_ to like this book, but on the whole I found it lacking and not as good as his other work.  I dunno.  But, on the other hand, it does mean that Piper's name is getting out there a good bit, and folks are likely to rediscover him, as Scalzi has not been shy to point out the original in every interview he's done on the book.

Quote from: jcfiala;468051I'm fond of John Scalzi's work in general, and really _wanted_ to like this book, but on the whole I found it lacking and not as good as his other work.  I dunno.  But, on the other hand, it does mean that Piper's name is getting out there a good bit, and folks are likely to rediscover him, as Scalzi has not been shy to point out the original in every interview he's done on the book.

I respect him for this, but I felt similarly bothered by someone rewriting a book I enjoyed from the ground up. I can't blame him for trying, I guess its better "alternate world" take on the subject matter and likely better than trying to build new material following the methods others have tried.

I finished the book the day after I posted this.  In general it is  not as bad as the first three pages made me worry it was going to be, and as a stand alone book I might even be tempted to give it a lukewarm recommendation, as its not a bad read... though his tendency to put his foreshadowing in the chapter before the event he's shadowing is... sad. Its not without some cleverness at times.

However, by way of analogy, its a bit like rewriting the Man in the Iron Mask and not killing off the Musketeers. A lot of the things he changed seemed to be 'missing the point' of the original.

Two.... no, three... examples that stand out:

1: The lack of the sci-fi lie detector in the trials. This sounds pretty minor, and as far as thematic elements go it is. However: the presence of a machine that will detect any lie, even to oneself, not only makes the legal trickery in the case much more challenging, but more importantly it acts as a device to force the characters to confront things they'd rather not.  This leads into point two, actually...

2: The bad guys. In the original Fuzzy Papers, Zarathustra Corp, and its leaders weren't evil men.  Some of them were unlikable men, and some did evil things, but they themselves were not actually Evil.  More to the point, it was the CEO of Zarathustra Corp who helped SAVE the fuzzies in the second book, and Jack had to accept that his opinion of the man was based on their previous conflict rather than there being anything actually wrong with the dude.  
In the new one, the heir to the CEO (as Zarathustra corp is now a major body based on earth rather than chartered entirely to exploit the planet Zarathustra) is, in fact, an evil bastard, with a minder who is duplicitous and there to keep him... not from being evil, but from being stupid about it.  The characters, good and bad, mostly descend into cardboard cutouts arrayed like armies on the field.  Even the bastard that stomped Baby Fuzzy to death had a moment of redemption in his own recognition of what he'd done (due to the lie detector)... which brings me to the third point.

3: Rather than write up half a dozen points I'm gonna keep this to 'The Fuzzies'.  First the death of Baby Fuzzy, in the original was terrible and heartwrenching, not least because it happens 'on screen'. Scalzi punked out. Baby Fuzzy dies along with the unfortunately named Pinto, while Holloway is out and is only related via found corpses and poorly written 'security camera footage'. The murderer is, essentially, a sociopath, who encapsulates all the petty evil of zarathustra corp throughout the book.   The Fuzzies, in the original, are tool using hunters of space cockaroaches who are genuinely innocent of the evils of civilization... a point driven home in the hard to find third book of the series where a 'wild' Fuzzy learns to lie while out in the forest.  In Fuzzy Nation, there are no space cockaroaches (Foul!!!!), the fuzzies don't, apparently, use native tools at all (and in fact their entire culture is planed over to next to nothing), and in fact are manipulative little bastards, seeing as they 'tricked' the humans (Holloway) into serving their purposes.  A case could be made that neither depiction of primative natives is entirely honest, I think the stronger case could be made for Piper's depiction, given the complexity of their social units (small family groups), and the fact that human culture is entirely alien to them as well.


Moving on: Jack Holloway is still a magnificent bastard, but he's moved from the paragon of manhood he used to be to a more modern, soft, maleness. His bastardy comes more in his ability to wrangle the legal system and to set up situations to his advantage.  Zarathustra is a much more dangerous alien world (though sadly lacking in space cockroaches! For shame!!!).  There is the shameful closeness of Earth, and of course the presence of several modern socio-political concerns and trends that jarred it out of 'far future science fiction' to 'I think Zarathustra is just Canada'.  Seriously: Jack Holloway is on an extended vacation/exile from North Carolina. Where do people go to explore the wilderness and relax with money from NC? Canada sounds more likely than 'alien world'.   Rocks falling into a creek on an alien world is NOT an ecological disaster in any meaningful sense.  Turning a mountain into a valley by strip mining is only slightly more so (discounting the replanting vegetation after bit), meaning: Not really.  Landscaping your lawn, while covering less ground, is probably more impactful on the ecology than simply moving dirt around, even lots of dirt.  Bah.

On the other hand I think, from memory, that he hit the notes on the Judge pitch perfectly.  Exasperation, curiosity and balls of steel in perfect combination... that part read true to me.