Link of possible interest

synecdochic has an interesting post on how people in Manhattan shop for food and other necessities that is aimed at Avengers fandom, but is probably quite useful to those of you who write White Collar and other NYC-based fandoms as well! Er, those of you who don't already live there, you know.

(As a lifelong resident of tiny to medium-sized American towns, I find big cities disconcerting to shop in, precisely because of the issue synecdochic talks about -- the lack of the sort of one-stop-shopping centers where most American suburbanites and small-town residents are used to buying EVERYTHING. It is definitely a different shopping culture!)

Fuzzy Nation vs. Little Fuzzy

I read John Scalzi's Fuzzy Nation this week, which is a reboot of H. Beam Piper's Little Fuzzy novels. (Even Scalzi admits that Fuzzy Nation is basically Little Fuzzy fanfic; he wrote it for his own fun, then realized that since Piper's novels are mostly in the public domain, he could publish it, so he got the permission of the Piper estate and did so.)

I have enjoyed the Scalzi novels I've read (Old Man's War in particular), and I like reading his blog; he seems smart and fun and thoughtful. Little Fuzzy, meanwhile, was one of those books that I adored to pieces when I was young, and I re-read the series a couple of years ago when I wrote fanfic for it for Yuletide and found that I still loved it as an adult. Having been written in the early 1960s, it is very dated in some ways, and, like most else that Piper wrote, clearly displays his politics (but so do Scalzi's novels, of course).

So my reaction to Scalzi's reboot was very mixed. In most cases, I can see why Scalzi updated the aspects of the novel that he did, and he has a brisk, snappy style that is fun to read -- but at the same time, I felt that he sacrificed most of the charm and optimism of the original in order to tell a different story with the same general premise. Or maybe I should say that the aspects of Fuzzy Nation that make it a fun, entertaining read are entirely different from the aspects of Piper's Little Fuzzy that made it a fun, entertaining read. Even more disconcerting is the way that, just like Little Fuzzy read as if 1950s people had been transported into the future, Fuzzy Nation feels very much like circa-2010 people transported into the future; it's a snapshot of now just as much as Little Fuzzy was a snapshot of the late 1950s/early 1960s.

I think it frankly says all that you need to know about the difference between the two books if I mention that Scalzi's version of Jack Holloway is basically Jeff Winger (from Community) IN SPAAAAACE. (And, er, that isn't really a compliment.)

I want to talk quite a bit more about these books, so under the cut, this gets quite long and spoilery!

( Major spoilers for Fuzzy Nation and the first two Little Fuzzy novels )

... and I just wrote 4000 words about these books, so this is probably a good place to stop. :D

ETA: Okay, adding one more thing -- I had never read the third book, which was published after Piper's death, until last night (yay Kindle and public domain fiction!), and I have to say that while the general Fuzzy = childlike subtext in the first two books is both dated and slightly creepy, the way that the third book constantly hammers on it is CREEPY AS HELL.