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Summary: How do you know if a Fuzzy is intelligent?
Review: "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.
Rating: 
Summary: Great Introductory Piper
Review: "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.
Rating:
Summary: Classic SF... for the whole family.
Review: 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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Summary: This is a master of the form at the height of his powers
Review: Credible, plausible, realistic, and convincing. For my money, the most compelling author in SF. Piper crafts believable stories that *move* and unforgettable characters that live and breathe. To quote Jerry Pournelle from his preface to another of Piper's novels, Federation, "He knew the grand sweep of history, but he also knew the small tales; the intrigues and petty jealousies, heroism and cowardice, honor and betrayals. This, I think, is why his stories have such a ring of truth... He was a story teller; a man who could keep you up all night with his books and tales... He was a cavalier." If you never read any other works by H. Beam Piper, do yourself a *huge* favor and read the Fuzzy trilogy. You'll thank yourself again and again!
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Summary: It makes you wonder
Review: 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.
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Summary: Terrific young adult and up yarn, in the Heinlein style!
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: How do you know if a Fuzzy is intelligent?
Review: H. Beam Piper's Fuzzy novels, Little Fuzzy (first published in 1962), Fuzzy Sapiens (first published 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 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), 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.
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Summary: Our fathers' science fiction hasn't aged well.
Review: H. Beam Piper's implicit worldview invites comparisons with that of his contempories, Ayn Rand and Robert Heinlein, in that his stories present a simplistic morality in the service of a individualist and libertarian agenda. I don't have a problem with that, as such. Many SF writers write that way to appeal to an adolescent male readership chafing against adult authority. I do object that Piper's novels have really dated since their publication. In a universe where Piper's human characters engage in interstellar travel, fly around in antigravity vehicles, employ special machines in court to detect lying and so forth, Piper has them still using typewriters, slide rules, film cameras, firearms and other inventions dating from late Victorian times. On almost every page a character is either smoking or drinking hard liquor. The characters' medical technology still isn't capable of treating aging and obesity. And they seem to reflect Piper's real-world gun obsession and are way too willing to use bullets to resolve disputes. (Any criminal profiler will tell you that an obsession with firearms indicates a disturbed and potentially violent personality. Piper's neighbors were probably fortunate that Piper killed only himself with a gun instead of "going postal" beforehand.) It's almost as if Piper's human characters had in the 1950's somehow hitched a ride from advanced extraterrestrials to the Fuzzies' planet and brought along their primitive tools and habits with them. This clearly won't do. Science fiction writers produce better stories when they show that technologies usually don't advance in isolation, but often influence developments in other areas, as well change people's social behavior.
Rating:
Summary: A magnificient work of true art
Review: how wonderful! i read this story when i was nine or ten years old, and through the years it has been one of my lasting favorites. its such a sweet little story. i HIGHLY recommend it to young adults and older readers alike- you will enjoy it!
Rating:
Summary: one of my favorites
Review: how wonderful! i read this story when i was nine or ten years old, and through the years it has been one of my lasting favorites. its such a sweet little story. i HIGHLY recommend it to young adults and older readers alike- you will enjoy it!
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