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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!
Rereading Little Fuzzy back in 2009 to write my Yuletide fic, I did find the datedness a little jarring and sometimes downright offputting. It definitely has all the flaws that 1950s sci-fi suffers in modern eyes -- the peculiar gender politics (men are manly, women are womanly...); the characters' incessant smoking and drinking; the attitude that nature mainly exists to be conquered; the jarringly outdated technology such as room-sized computers. And Piper's general ideal of gun-toting, self-reliant manhood is very much on display in this book. (Piper's protagonist Jack Holloway has decorated his cabin with the skins of local creatures he's personally shot, and he's darn proud of it. It's very 1950s. *g*)
If you haven't read either one of these, both novels (the Scalzi one and the Piper one) are about a prospector, Jack Holloway, who lives and works on a planet called Zarathustra that is owned and mined by the Zarathustra Company -- the whole planet is a company town, in other words. Living alone in the Zarathustran wilderness, Holloway discovers a little furry creature (the new book compares them to cats; the original describes them as being about two feet high and covered with golden fur) that he nicknames a Fuzzy. It soon becomes evident that Fuzzies are much too smart to be considered mere animals, but if they are proven possess human-level sapience, ownership of the planet will revert to them and Zarathustra Company will lose its ability to mine on this world -- and its access to a priceless local resource called sunstones which are found nowhere else in the galaxy. So Zarathustra Company (the bad guys, naturally), or ZaraCorp in Scalzi's version, have a vested interest in making sure that the Fuzzies are not proven sapient.
(On a random side note, it was Piper's original novel that taught me the difference between sentience -- self-awareness, the ability to feel, such as both animals and humans possess -- and sapience, or human-level ability to reason. As such, it was really disconcerting for me to find sentience and sapience used as synonyms throughout Scalzi's novel, since Piper was so careful to distinguish between them. I'll go ahead and use them as Piper did, since it makes it a lot easier to distinguish which kind of intelligence I'm talking about at any given point. *g*)
So that's what the novels have in common: the basic plot, the setup, the names of some of the characters.
The differences are all in the way it plays out. And here, I have to say -- even though I appreciate a lot of the things that Scalzi is doing in his book (giving women more agency, taking into account ZaraCorp's impact on the environment, presenting the Fuzzies as alien adults rather than golden furry children) -- I definitely prefer the original.
H. Beam Piper's Jack Holloway loves the wilderness, and he loves his friends, and this love is carried through to the reader. Holloway is also a careful observer of the ecosystem around him, and he tells the reader about it -- the first sign that Fuzzies are around, for example, is that Jack notices the remains of a particular local animal they feed on. The first half of Piper's book is basically Jack meeting a Fuzzy, observing it and getting to know it, and almost immediately catching on that they're much more intelligent than the mere animals they resemble. Over the course of the first half of Piper's book, Jack interacts with the Fuzzies, makes observations about their culture (they use tools; they bury their dead), and gets his friends involved as well. The characters are a shifting constellation of people who mostly like each other and get along well, hanging around Jack's wilderness cabin, getting to know the Fuzzies and having a number of (to me quite interesting) discussions about what makes a creature sapient vs. merely sentient.
Scalzi's Jack Holloway, in contrast, is Jeff Winger in space. He's a disbarred lawyer who has ended up trying to make ends meet working for Zarathustra Company on what he views as a backwater planet in the ass-end of nowhere. He's mostly out to strike it rich, and at the very start of the novel, he does. Piper's Holloway is a skilled prospector, but not a wildly rich one. Scalzi's Holloway, in the first three pages, becomes the richest man on the planet, and this influences everything else that happens in the book, because the central struggle of the novel is not so much Holloway trying to prove the Fuzzies sapient (though it's in there), but Holloway fighting the Zarathustra Comany for his fortune, which results in umpty-zillion scenes of Holloway arguing legal precedent with Zarathustra's lawyers over the fate of his sunstone mine.
Whereas Piper's Holloway is the Fuzzies' first and most ardent defender, Scalzi's Holloway refuses to believe that the Fuzzies are sapient for most of the book, because if they are, the planet would be handed over to them as its rightful owners, which would cost him the sunstone strike that he's discovered. There is next to no interaction between Jack and the Fuzzies. Most of the novel is Jack bantering with his ex-girlfriend and having long discussions with the Zarathustra Company bigwigs and lawyers regarding the legal status of his own sunstone mine (and later, the Fuzzies). I'm pretty sure Jack's dog spends more time with the Fuzzies than Jack himself does.
Honestly, I think Scalzi's novel would have stood up much better for me as a novel if I didn't have Piper's to compare it to. Piper's novel is flawed and dated, but it's also brimming over with warmth and humanity and careful observation of nature and people. Scalzi's novel is cynical and a little bit dark; it's very early-2000s in its general emotional gestalt.
Scalzi's Jack Holloway is a morally ambiguous character right up until the end; even at the end of the novel, Holloway himself admits that there was as much self-interest as altruism in his eventual defence of the Fuzzies in court. I know I keep saying this, but "Jeff Winger in space" is such a perfect analogy -- a self-centered, abrasive showboat who does have a decent side, but mostly hides it. Scalzi's Holloway has driven away most of his friends; the one person who can still stand him, kinda, is his ex-girlfriend Isabel, who plays a role in Scalzi's novel that is basically a combination of Ben Rainsford (biologist) and Ruth Ortheris (psychologist) in the original -- she's the person who studies the Fuzzies scientifically and attempts to prove their sapience based on their behavior. Since Scalzi's Jack Holloway doesn't believe in the Fuzzies' sapience himself, Isabel is the person who first concludes that they are sapient and attempts to argue this to Jack.
Scalzi's novel, taken by itself, is fun. It really is. Most of the characters are abrasive and not very likable, but the banter is fun, and it's entertaining to watch Jack and the ZaraCorp lawyers pursue their own twisting and turning legal games, one-upping each other only to be outsmarted at the next turn. The big twist at the end -- SPOILER ALERT! -- is that the Fuzzies themselves are playing their own game, pretending to be simple and childlike while in reality they're sneakily spying on the humans. One of the flaws of Piper's novel to a modern reader's eyes is that the Fuzzies, though sapient, are childlike and simple; they are portrayed very much in the noble savage mold, the simple people living in harmony with nature who teach the humans to be better people. In Scalzi's novel, the "noble savages" are just as twisty, Macchiavellian and complicated as the humans.
But in order to achieve this and still have it be a surprise at the end, the Fuzzies have to remain total mysteries until then. In the Piper novels, observation of the Fuzzies and their interactions with the humans is the core of the novel. You get a really strong sense for how they behave and, to some extent, how they think. Scalzi's Fuzzies are a lot more alien. In fact, they're pretty much entirely alien -- by the end of the novel, we still know nothing about them. They seem to have no material culture at all (you never see them make anything, whereas Piper spends a lot of time describing the Fuzzies' tools and the way that they figure out human items like screw-on jar lids). There is no indication in Scalzi's book as to what Fuzzies in the wild eat -- like Piper's Fuzzies, they have humanlike, omnivore teeth, but otherwise, there is not even a hint. Piper's Fuzzies are shown killing wild animals, digging trenches to dispose of waste, and otherwise going about their lives. Scalzi's Fuzzies really aren't shown at all; even when Isabel is filming them to prove their sapience, we're just told that she took some film of the Fuzzies going about their day, but not what they were actually doing. And mostly, we hear about human-Fuzzy interaction secondhand. Isabel mentions to Jack that he was wrong in his initial assumptions of the Fuzzies's gender, for example, so we know that Isabel examined them closely enough to determine their sex, but we didn't see her do it, so there's no indication of how they might have reacted to this. (Are they modest? Immodest? Did it bother them? No clue.)
And I suppose that my preference for the original in this area is largely a matter of reader taste. I love anthropological stuff, and on top of that, one of the biggest appeals of science fiction for me is watching characters working through thought problems, such as "what is the difference between sentience and sapience?" -- or, to take examples from other SF books I enjoyed: "How do you kill a telepath?" or "How do you build X to do Y?" I can read that sort of thing ALL DAY, whereas I have next to no interest in legal maneuvering.
Piper's book is focused heavily on the characters being amateur Fuzzy anthropologists, and, through their conversations, hashing out the central thought problem of separating sapient creatures from sentient creatures. Scalzi's novel is more focused on the legal side of the Zarathustra Corporation's ownership of the planet and how it affects Jack's livelihood. That's not necessarily bad. I'm sure there are readers who find the slowly unfolding pace of Piper's novel absolutely glacial, and prefer the snappier, quicker, more contemporary and banter-filled Scalzi pacing style.
But when the two novels are put side by side, I find myself gravitating much more strongly towards Piper's warmer, more optimistic view of human nature. Isabel is one of the only people in Scalzi's novel who is even likable (Jack has his moments, but I couln't help comparing him with Piper's prickly, brave, thoroughly decent Jack, and finding him wanting). And most of Scalzi's characters don't emerge as characters at all -- even those who are in the novel from the early chapters to the end, such as the ZaraCorp legal counsel Meyer, are so flat that I kept forgetting who they were, and never did get the slightest sense of them as people. Piper's characters are mostly "types" -- there's the rumpled naturalist Ben, the gruff man-mountain of a lawyer Gus Brannhard, Ruth Ortheris who is basically "the girl", and so forth -- but most of them stand out as individuals. And I really liked them, and they liked each other. (Well, except for the ones who don't get along, but that's an individual character trait.) And given how little space he had to work with -- both the Little Fuzzy books are quite short -- Piper had a really keen sense for distinguishing his characters from each other, not just in terms of describing them, but the way they acted and spoke and even how their narrative POV reflected their outlook.
For example, from Piper's books, here is a description of the exact same character (Juan Jimenez, one of the minor sciency types in the series), first in the viewpoint of Jack Holloway, crotchety old individualist prospector:
And here is Jimenez as described from the viewpoint of Victor Grego, head of Zarathustra Company:
The characters in Piper's books, no matter how stereotypical, are individuals. They don't notice the same things. They don't have the same values. The books are not so much about good guys fighting bad guys, as a conflict between different people hashing out their different beliefs and eventually finding common ground.
And, going hand in hand with that, Piper's novel has a very strong sense of community. Most of the characters are already friends or acquaintances; there is a strong feeling of Zarathustra as a frontier with a smallish population where almost everybody knows everybody else. Scalzi's Zarathustra is constructed in a completely different, much more sterile way. In Scalzi's novel, the company rotates employees onto the planet for relatively brief shifts, and then rotates them out again. There are no permanent residents. I can't find the exact quote, but there's a part of the novel that says something along the lines of "20,000 residents, but not one child". Which made me immediately go "Seriously? And how is that enforced, exactly?" And why aren't people bringing their families with them, anyhow? And where is the black market, where are the smugglers and the squatters? Piper's Zarathustra is very plainly patterned after the American frontier, which isn't a perfect analogy to another planet. But I feel as if Piper has a better handle on the messiness of human nature and the way that people drag their emotional ties with them wherever they go than Scalzi does.
There's a strong thread of humanity running through Piper's series that is virtually absent in the Scalzi reworking. One example is how much more evil Scalzi's villains are. In both novels, there is a Zarathustra Company employee who kills a Fuzzy in a particularly brutal way, by stomping it to death, which (in both novels) triggers the court case that ends with the Fuzzies being proven sapient. However, in Scalzi's novel, the guy who does this is a bully and thug, whose only reaction to learning that he may have murdered a person is fury that he might go to jail over it. In Piper's novel, the murderer initially tries to deny that he's done anything other than kill an animal, but later is so overcome with remorse that he commits suicide.
Similarly, the guy running Zarathustra Company in Scalzi's novel is an evil, incompetent blowhard -- nothing but a bad guy to be thwarted. In Piper's novel, however, the guy in charge of the company, Victor Grego, was actually one of my favorite characters, particularly in the sequel -- he's smart, competent, and fair, and while he is flawed, mercenary, and very plainly out to win, he eventually comes around to realizing that the Fuzzies are in fact people and learning to work with them and with the newly created planetary government. Grego is a redeemable bad guy; so are all of the "villains" in Piper's first book, most of whom end up working in some capacity for the newly created planetary government in the second book.
I think it's quite telling that the character in Scalzi's novel who reminds me the most of Victor Grego is Jack Holloway himself -- smart, competent, but lonely and obsessed with money to the exclusion of personal relationships, slowly coming around to realize that there's more to life than pursuit of profit. In Scalzi's version, in other words, the hero is a pretty close analogue for Piper's villain.
And yet, despite the almost cartoonish villainny of Scalzi's villains, he never manages (at least for me) to achieve the same sense of menace as Piper does, because Scalzi's Zarathustra Company is under so much more scrutiny than Piper's less fettered version. In Scalzi's book, every time ZaraCorp threatens the main characters, they are able to point out that just about everything on the planet is monitored and the information is being sent to the colonial authority back home, so the company -- despite nominally controlling the planet -- can't do anything without going through legal channels. On top of that, the one time (early in the book) that someone from Zarathustra Company does try to kill Jack, Jack's lawyer convinces ZaraCorp that Jack is far too important to kill (he's the richest guy on the planet, after all!) and therefore untouchable. Way to defang your bad guys, for pete's sake.
In contrast, there is one bit in Piper's novel that still chills me, when the main characters, at Jack's camp out in the wilderness, are working through the legal ramifications of the Fuzzies' sapience and it suddenly hits them, like a ton of bricks, that the Zarathustra Company is going to try to hush this up, and it can. Zarathustra Company runs the planet. They're light-years from anyone who can help. They are on their own and facing people who could disappear them into the wilderness without making a ripple. All they can do is start brainstorming contingency plans to try to spread the information and make sure that they can't all be taken out with a single strike. There is nothing in Scalzi's book, despite the mustache-twirling evil of his villains, that gave me an equivalent sense of menace, because Scalzi's characters live in a world that is simply too networked and controlled for those kinds of threats. Even out here in the middle of nowhere, the homeworld legal authority is still looking over everyone's shoulders, and they're perfectly safe as long as they can prove their case legally.
Piper's novel was a very 1950s view of space -- a Wild West sort of frontier, with guns and cowboys, that feels completely outdated to us now. But speaking as someone who grew up on a frontier of sorts (in rural Alaska) I felt like Piper really got the general feeling of the sort of place I'd grown up in -- the danger and sense of community and the ever-present need for vigilance. Scalzi's feels like a very, for lack of a better way to put it, Midwest sort of frontier, very sterile and controlled and regulated. The law (incorruptable and helpful) is always looking over your shoulder.
And for all that Scalzi has updated the gender and environmental datedness of the original, the odd thing is that he's updated it to 2010 and then stopped. In fact, the general feel of the whole thing reminds me a lot of Piper's original tokenistic 1960 version of diversity, except for the 2010s. Look, our biologist/psychologist is a black woman now! And the judge is a woman too! But there is absolutely nothing cultural in Scalzi's novel that feels any more futurey than 2010 -- and not just 2010, but 2010-on-TV, a homogenous mainstream America with the occasional touch of diversity. There's not the slightest hint that social mores, gender dynamics, etc. have changed a bit in the future from prevailing standards in 2010 America. There's no technology that's significantly different from anything that we have now, or that's used in different ways, either. (The flying vehicles may as well be cars for all the difference in how they're used; the "infoscreens" may as well be laptops.) Rather than the future being Piper's 1950s, it's Scalzi's 2010s, but it's still not the future -- it's the now.
... 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.
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!
Rereading Little Fuzzy back in 2009 to write my Yuletide fic, I did find the datedness a little jarring and sometimes downright offputting. It definitely has all the flaws that 1950s sci-fi suffers in modern eyes -- the peculiar gender politics (men are manly, women are womanly...); the characters' incessant smoking and drinking; the attitude that nature mainly exists to be conquered; the jarringly outdated technology such as room-sized computers. And Piper's general ideal of gun-toting, self-reliant manhood is very much on display in this book. (Piper's protagonist Jack Holloway has decorated his cabin with the skins of local creatures he's personally shot, and he's darn proud of it. It's very 1950s. *g*)
If you haven't read either one of these, both novels (the Scalzi one and the Piper one) are about a prospector, Jack Holloway, who lives and works on a planet called Zarathustra that is owned and mined by the Zarathustra Company -- the whole planet is a company town, in other words. Living alone in the Zarathustran wilderness, Holloway discovers a little furry creature (the new book compares them to cats; the original describes them as being about two feet high and covered with golden fur) that he nicknames a Fuzzy. It soon becomes evident that Fuzzies are much too smart to be considered mere animals, but if they are proven possess human-level sapience, ownership of the planet will revert to them and Zarathustra Company will lose its ability to mine on this world -- and its access to a priceless local resource called sunstones which are found nowhere else in the galaxy. So Zarathustra Company (the bad guys, naturally), or ZaraCorp in Scalzi's version, have a vested interest in making sure that the Fuzzies are not proven sapient.
(On a random side note, it was Piper's original novel that taught me the difference between sentience -- self-awareness, the ability to feel, such as both animals and humans possess -- and sapience, or human-level ability to reason. As such, it was really disconcerting for me to find sentience and sapience used as synonyms throughout Scalzi's novel, since Piper was so careful to distinguish between them. I'll go ahead and use them as Piper did, since it makes it a lot easier to distinguish which kind of intelligence I'm talking about at any given point. *g*)
So that's what the novels have in common: the basic plot, the setup, the names of some of the characters.
The differences are all in the way it plays out. And here, I have to say -- even though I appreciate a lot of the things that Scalzi is doing in his book (giving women more agency, taking into account ZaraCorp's impact on the environment, presenting the Fuzzies as alien adults rather than golden furry children) -- I definitely prefer the original.
H. Beam Piper's Jack Holloway loves the wilderness, and he loves his friends, and this love is carried through to the reader. Holloway is also a careful observer of the ecosystem around him, and he tells the reader about it -- the first sign that Fuzzies are around, for example, is that Jack notices the remains of a particular local animal they feed on. The first half of Piper's book is basically Jack meeting a Fuzzy, observing it and getting to know it, and almost immediately catching on that they're much more intelligent than the mere animals they resemble. Over the course of the first half of Piper's book, Jack interacts with the Fuzzies, makes observations about their culture (they use tools; they bury their dead), and gets his friends involved as well. The characters are a shifting constellation of people who mostly like each other and get along well, hanging around Jack's wilderness cabin, getting to know the Fuzzies and having a number of (to me quite interesting) discussions about what makes a creature sapient vs. merely sentient.
Scalzi's Jack Holloway, in contrast, is Jeff Winger in space. He's a disbarred lawyer who has ended up trying to make ends meet working for Zarathustra Company on what he views as a backwater planet in the ass-end of nowhere. He's mostly out to strike it rich, and at the very start of the novel, he does. Piper's Holloway is a skilled prospector, but not a wildly rich one. Scalzi's Holloway, in the first three pages, becomes the richest man on the planet, and this influences everything else that happens in the book, because the central struggle of the novel is not so much Holloway trying to prove the Fuzzies sapient (though it's in there), but Holloway fighting the Zarathustra Comany for his fortune, which results in umpty-zillion scenes of Holloway arguing legal precedent with Zarathustra's lawyers over the fate of his sunstone mine.
Whereas Piper's Holloway is the Fuzzies' first and most ardent defender, Scalzi's Holloway refuses to believe that the Fuzzies are sapient for most of the book, because if they are, the planet would be handed over to them as its rightful owners, which would cost him the sunstone strike that he's discovered. There is next to no interaction between Jack and the Fuzzies. Most of the novel is Jack bantering with his ex-girlfriend and having long discussions with the Zarathustra Company bigwigs and lawyers regarding the legal status of his own sunstone mine (and later, the Fuzzies). I'm pretty sure Jack's dog spends more time with the Fuzzies than Jack himself does.
Honestly, I think Scalzi's novel would have stood up much better for me as a novel if I didn't have Piper's to compare it to. Piper's novel is flawed and dated, but it's also brimming over with warmth and humanity and careful observation of nature and people. Scalzi's novel is cynical and a little bit dark; it's very early-2000s in its general emotional gestalt.
Scalzi's Jack Holloway is a morally ambiguous character right up until the end; even at the end of the novel, Holloway himself admits that there was as much self-interest as altruism in his eventual defence of the Fuzzies in court. I know I keep saying this, but "Jeff Winger in space" is such a perfect analogy -- a self-centered, abrasive showboat who does have a decent side, but mostly hides it. Scalzi's Holloway has driven away most of his friends; the one person who can still stand him, kinda, is his ex-girlfriend Isabel, who plays a role in Scalzi's novel that is basically a combination of Ben Rainsford (biologist) and Ruth Ortheris (psychologist) in the original -- she's the person who studies the Fuzzies scientifically and attempts to prove their sapience based on their behavior. Since Scalzi's Jack Holloway doesn't believe in the Fuzzies' sapience himself, Isabel is the person who first concludes that they are sapient and attempts to argue this to Jack.
Scalzi's novel, taken by itself, is fun. It really is. Most of the characters are abrasive and not very likable, but the banter is fun, and it's entertaining to watch Jack and the ZaraCorp lawyers pursue their own twisting and turning legal games, one-upping each other only to be outsmarted at the next turn. The big twist at the end -- SPOILER ALERT! -- is that the Fuzzies themselves are playing their own game, pretending to be simple and childlike while in reality they're sneakily spying on the humans. One of the flaws of Piper's novel to a modern reader's eyes is that the Fuzzies, though sapient, are childlike and simple; they are portrayed very much in the noble savage mold, the simple people living in harmony with nature who teach the humans to be better people. In Scalzi's novel, the "noble savages" are just as twisty, Macchiavellian and complicated as the humans.
But in order to achieve this and still have it be a surprise at the end, the Fuzzies have to remain total mysteries until then. In the Piper novels, observation of the Fuzzies and their interactions with the humans is the core of the novel. You get a really strong sense for how they behave and, to some extent, how they think. Scalzi's Fuzzies are a lot more alien. In fact, they're pretty much entirely alien -- by the end of the novel, we still know nothing about them. They seem to have no material culture at all (you never see them make anything, whereas Piper spends a lot of time describing the Fuzzies' tools and the way that they figure out human items like screw-on jar lids). There is no indication in Scalzi's book as to what Fuzzies in the wild eat -- like Piper's Fuzzies, they have humanlike, omnivore teeth, but otherwise, there is not even a hint. Piper's Fuzzies are shown killing wild animals, digging trenches to dispose of waste, and otherwise going about their lives. Scalzi's Fuzzies really aren't shown at all; even when Isabel is filming them to prove their sapience, we're just told that she took some film of the Fuzzies going about their day, but not what they were actually doing. And mostly, we hear about human-Fuzzy interaction secondhand. Isabel mentions to Jack that he was wrong in his initial assumptions of the Fuzzies's gender, for example, so we know that Isabel examined them closely enough to determine their sex, but we didn't see her do it, so there's no indication of how they might have reacted to this. (Are they modest? Immodest? Did it bother them? No clue.)
And I suppose that my preference for the original in this area is largely a matter of reader taste. I love anthropological stuff, and on top of that, one of the biggest appeals of science fiction for me is watching characters working through thought problems, such as "what is the difference between sentience and sapience?" -- or, to take examples from other SF books I enjoyed: "How do you kill a telepath?" or "How do you build X to do Y?" I can read that sort of thing ALL DAY, whereas I have next to no interest in legal maneuvering.
Piper's book is focused heavily on the characters being amateur Fuzzy anthropologists, and, through their conversations, hashing out the central thought problem of separating sapient creatures from sentient creatures. Scalzi's novel is more focused on the legal side of the Zarathustra Corporation's ownership of the planet and how it affects Jack's livelihood. That's not necessarily bad. I'm sure there are readers who find the slowly unfolding pace of Piper's novel absolutely glacial, and prefer the snappier, quicker, more contemporary and banter-filled Scalzi pacing style.
But when the two novels are put side by side, I find myself gravitating much more strongly towards Piper's warmer, more optimistic view of human nature. Isabel is one of the only people in Scalzi's novel who is even likable (Jack has his moments, but I couln't help comparing him with Piper's prickly, brave, thoroughly decent Jack, and finding him wanting). And most of Scalzi's characters don't emerge as characters at all -- even those who are in the novel from the early chapters to the end, such as the ZaraCorp legal counsel Meyer, are so flat that I kept forgetting who they were, and never did get the slightest sense of them as people. Piper's characters are mostly "types" -- there's the rumpled naturalist Ben, the gruff man-mountain of a lawyer Gus Brannhard, Ruth Ortheris who is basically "the girl", and so forth -- but most of them stand out as individuals. And I really liked them, and they liked each other. (Well, except for the ones who don't get along, but that's an individual character trait.) And given how little space he had to work with -- both the Little Fuzzy books are quite short -- Piper had a really keen sense for distinguishing his characters from each other, not just in terms of describing them, but the way they acted and spoke and even how their narrative POV reflected their outlook.
For example, from Piper's books, here is a description of the exact same character (Juan Jimenez, one of the minor sciency types in the series), first in the viewpoint of Jack Holloway, crotchety old individualist prospector:
In a moment, the screen flickered and cleared, and a young man looked out of it, with the momentary upward glance of one who wants to make sure his public face is on straight. It was a bland, tranquil, life-adjusted, group-integrated sort of face -- the face turned out in thousands of copies every year by the educational production lines on Terra.
And here is Jimenez as described from the viewpoint of Victor Grego, head of Zarathustra Company:
The chief mammalogist was a young man, with one of those cheerful, alert, agreeable, sincere and accommodating faces you saw everywhere on the upper echelons of big corporations or institutions. He might or might not be a good scientist, but he was a real two-hundred-proof Company man.
The characters in Piper's books, no matter how stereotypical, are individuals. They don't notice the same things. They don't have the same values. The books are not so much about good guys fighting bad guys, as a conflict between different people hashing out their different beliefs and eventually finding common ground.
And, going hand in hand with that, Piper's novel has a very strong sense of community. Most of the characters are already friends or acquaintances; there is a strong feeling of Zarathustra as a frontier with a smallish population where almost everybody knows everybody else. Scalzi's Zarathustra is constructed in a completely different, much more sterile way. In Scalzi's novel, the company rotates employees onto the planet for relatively brief shifts, and then rotates them out again. There are no permanent residents. I can't find the exact quote, but there's a part of the novel that says something along the lines of "20,000 residents, but not one child". Which made me immediately go "Seriously? And how is that enforced, exactly?" And why aren't people bringing their families with them, anyhow? And where is the black market, where are the smugglers and the squatters? Piper's Zarathustra is very plainly patterned after the American frontier, which isn't a perfect analogy to another planet. But I feel as if Piper has a better handle on the messiness of human nature and the way that people drag their emotional ties with them wherever they go than Scalzi does.
There's a strong thread of humanity running through Piper's series that is virtually absent in the Scalzi reworking. One example is how much more evil Scalzi's villains are. In both novels, there is a Zarathustra Company employee who kills a Fuzzy in a particularly brutal way, by stomping it to death, which (in both novels) triggers the court case that ends with the Fuzzies being proven sapient. However, in Scalzi's novel, the guy who does this is a bully and thug, whose only reaction to learning that he may have murdered a person is fury that he might go to jail over it. In Piper's novel, the murderer initially tries to deny that he's done anything other than kill an animal, but later is so overcome with remorse that he commits suicide.
Similarly, the guy running Zarathustra Company in Scalzi's novel is an evil, incompetent blowhard -- nothing but a bad guy to be thwarted. In Piper's novel, however, the guy in charge of the company, Victor Grego, was actually one of my favorite characters, particularly in the sequel -- he's smart, competent, and fair, and while he is flawed, mercenary, and very plainly out to win, he eventually comes around to realizing that the Fuzzies are in fact people and learning to work with them and with the newly created planetary government. Grego is a redeemable bad guy; so are all of the "villains" in Piper's first book, most of whom end up working in some capacity for the newly created planetary government in the second book.
I think it's quite telling that the character in Scalzi's novel who reminds me the most of Victor Grego is Jack Holloway himself -- smart, competent, but lonely and obsessed with money to the exclusion of personal relationships, slowly coming around to realize that there's more to life than pursuit of profit. In Scalzi's version, in other words, the hero is a pretty close analogue for Piper's villain.
And yet, despite the almost cartoonish villainny of Scalzi's villains, he never manages (at least for me) to achieve the same sense of menace as Piper does, because Scalzi's Zarathustra Company is under so much more scrutiny than Piper's less fettered version. In Scalzi's book, every time ZaraCorp threatens the main characters, they are able to point out that just about everything on the planet is monitored and the information is being sent to the colonial authority back home, so the company -- despite nominally controlling the planet -- can't do anything without going through legal channels. On top of that, the one time (early in the book) that someone from Zarathustra Company does try to kill Jack, Jack's lawyer convinces ZaraCorp that Jack is far too important to kill (he's the richest guy on the planet, after all!) and therefore untouchable. Way to defang your bad guys, for pete's sake.
In contrast, there is one bit in Piper's novel that still chills me, when the main characters, at Jack's camp out in the wilderness, are working through the legal ramifications of the Fuzzies' sapience and it suddenly hits them, like a ton of bricks, that the Zarathustra Company is going to try to hush this up, and it can. Zarathustra Company runs the planet. They're light-years from anyone who can help. They are on their own and facing people who could disappear them into the wilderness without making a ripple. All they can do is start brainstorming contingency plans to try to spread the information and make sure that they can't all be taken out with a single strike. There is nothing in Scalzi's book, despite the mustache-twirling evil of his villains, that gave me an equivalent sense of menace, because Scalzi's characters live in a world that is simply too networked and controlled for those kinds of threats. Even out here in the middle of nowhere, the homeworld legal authority is still looking over everyone's shoulders, and they're perfectly safe as long as they can prove their case legally.
Piper's novel was a very 1950s view of space -- a Wild West sort of frontier, with guns and cowboys, that feels completely outdated to us now. But speaking as someone who grew up on a frontier of sorts (in rural Alaska) I felt like Piper really got the general feeling of the sort of place I'd grown up in -- the danger and sense of community and the ever-present need for vigilance. Scalzi's feels like a very, for lack of a better way to put it, Midwest sort of frontier, very sterile and controlled and regulated. The law (incorruptable and helpful) is always looking over your shoulder.
And for all that Scalzi has updated the gender and environmental datedness of the original, the odd thing is that he's updated it to 2010 and then stopped. In fact, the general feel of the whole thing reminds me a lot of Piper's original tokenistic 1960 version of diversity, except for the 2010s. Look, our biologist/psychologist is a black woman now! And the judge is a woman too! But there is absolutely nothing cultural in Scalzi's novel that feels any more futurey than 2010 -- and not just 2010, but 2010-on-TV, a homogenous mainstream America with the occasional touch of diversity. There's not the slightest hint that social mores, gender dynamics, etc. have changed a bit in the future from prevailing standards in 2010 America. There's no technology that's significantly different from anything that we have now, or that's used in different ways, either. (The flying vehicles may as well be cars for all the difference in how they're used; the "infoscreens" may as well be laptops.) Rather than the future being Piper's 1950s, it's Scalzi's 2010s, but it's still not the future -- it's the now.
... 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.