Little Fuzzy (Paperback)

But, the first of the little humanoids (Fuzzies) discovered knows nothing about charters and the law. Little Fuzzy joins Pappy Jack, and discovers a whole new world, a world full of fun and adventure. These are the adventures of Little Fuzzy, and his turning upside-down of a whole world!

This book was originally published in 1962, but is every bit as good today as it was back then. The story starts out a bit slow, but it picks up speed, and by the end you find that you can't put it down! H. Beam Piper was an author whose suicide tragically cut short what would have been a full and brilliant career. If you like good science fiction, set in a realistic and believable milieu, then I highly recommend this book to you.

In the Federation, there really isn't a legal definition of sapience, just a handy criterion of talk-and-build-a-fire intended to keep greedy speculators, sadists, and other lowlifes from claiming they couldn't tell that an obviously inhabited planet *was* inhabited. Zarathustra is legally a Class-III planet with no native intelligent species, so the Chartered Zarathustra Company essentially owns it outright, and makes a *lot* of money on its resulting monopoly on sunstones, not to mention a long list of assorted exports the CZC extracts from Zarathustra's virgin ecology.

Then one day Jack Holloway, a freelance sunstone prospector, comes home to find his door open - and a tiny creature, no more than two feet tall and covered in golden fur, in his shower stall. Being an independent-minded bachelor of a certain age doesn't mean one can't get lonely, and Jack's inclined to let the gutsy little guy hang around. Jack names him "Little Fuzzy", and quickly notices that his new friend is bright. So bright that he doesn't need to be shown things twice. So bright that he can generalize.

So bright that he can not only use tools Jack makes for him, but brought some of his own with him.

He and the rest of his hunter-gatherer family just don't seem to be able to talk, and they haven't mastered fire yet. The scientists working for the CZC are soon tasked quietly with "proving" that Fuzzies aren't sapient, and when one group tries to "confiscate" the little family living with Jack, there's a tragedy: Leonard Kellogg stomps one of the female Fuzzies to death, and Jack shoots another of the invaders dead.

The main conflict, though, isn't the shootout but the subsequent pair of criminal cases, which the chief justice of the planet opts to try together almost in the form of a lawsuit since the resolution of either would prejudice the verdict of the other: Leonard Kellogg's trial for the murder of a sapient being, and Jack's trial (where his defence is that he was attempting to prevent someone else's murder). As Jack's lawyer Gus Brannhard puts it, this *is* a lawsuit, in a way, with the CZC's charter hanging in the balance.

Really great story, with a crackerjack legal circus at the end and a lot of Fuzzies throughout (who're much better at having fun than humans are, for all that they're little guys in a very big dangerous world).

IRRELEVANT NOTE: Michael Whelan's Fuzzy cover paintings are famous. However, one point that's sometimes overlooked is that the only human in the group on the cover of *this* book - "Pappy" Jack Holloway - has been depicted by Whelan as a likeness of Piper himself.