Anyway for the last couple weeks I have been reading Fuzzies and Other People. Here is what I thought of it.
Fuzzies and Other People: by H. Beam Piper
The Cover:
I found this book at the same time as I found The Devil Wives of Li Fong. When I first found them at the used bookstore in Clemson, all I saw was the spine of the book but I thought that they had such ridiculous titles that they had to be funny. I didn't really think about them again until after I started this bloog.
The cover of Fuzzies and Other People is a scene taken directly from the later portions of the book as some fuzzies flee a Forest fire. The text of the novel doesn't really describe fuzzies too well other than short humanoid, covered with golden hair and with five fingered hands. so I guess the artist did a pretty good job all in all. I do like the HUGE eyes that he gave them. And that knife the one is carrying looks pretty serious.
The tagline on the cover of Fuzzies is "The first publication of the legendary long lost third Fuzzies novel." Thats right. There are two more in this series apparently. And it doesn't stop there. There are two more novels set in the Fuzzies universe ( Probably called the Fuzzyverse by its fans) by authors other than H. Beam Piper. In the 60's and 70's Fuzzies was apparently a science fiction empire. Its really a shame they made those crappy Star Wars movies in the late seventies and not an awesome Fuzzies trilogy. (Can anybody else see the similarities between Ewoks and Fuzzies? I detect a little plagerism Mr Lucas.)
The Content:
Since Fuzzies and Other People is the third in a trilogy of novels it was a inaccessible to me especially because the author does absolutely no reintroductions. From the get go you are expected to know who everybody is, what they have been doing and why they have been doing it. He does give a very brief recap of who the fuzzies are and why people are helping them out so much. apparently in the previous two novels fuzzies were discovered and, there was a lot of debate over their sentience (their language registers in the ultrasonic so they seemed like silent animals to us humans you see). Eventually they were declared sentient and thus became citizens of the interplanetary alliance or some such nonsense. Later some kind of valuable gemstone was found on the planet making it economically important for the previously mentioned alliance. some bad people decided to kidnap some fuzzies and train them to rob a bank vault full of the gem stones but they got caught.
The third book starts off with the bad folks from the second book about to stand trial. apparently in the Fuzzyverse humans have created a device that can tell truth from lies with 100% accuracy, the only problem is that it can not be proven to work on fuzzies because well... nobody has ever witnessed a fuzzy lie. In fact humans even have a hard time explaining how to lie to fuzzies. Fuzzies aren't very smart you see. well the novel then takes kind of a detour and talks about a band of fuzzies that live far to the north of the human colony and are unaware of the human presence on the planet. One day they see some humans shooting some predatory birds that like to feed on fuzzies and their leader decided that they need to find the "Big Ones" that "Make Thunder Death" and make friends with them. Along the way to finding the humans some of the other fuzzies get impatient and start arguing with their leader about why they are traveling so much and if finding the humans is really such a good idea. The leader fuzzie comes up with a completely ingenious way to placate their worries. He invents lying, and tells them a series of lies to get them to follow him. This of course is a big deal when he gets to the human colony at the end of the book because he can lie while attached to the lie detecting machine and prove that the machine works for fuzzies and therefore the fuzzies that got kidnapped can testify in court.
I Think I would have enjoyed this novel a lot more if I had read the previous two, because I really didn't feel like I knew the human characters at all. The fuzzies were pretty cute though, especially in scenes where they try to curse like the humans they have observed. Also the author of this book seems to be obsessed with hunting, as that is what the fuzzies do for the majority of the to book. It seems that detailed lists of exaclty what fictional aliens killed and ate that day was really interesting in the 70's.
It should also be noted that I am pretty sure that this book was originally intended for children or young adults but there is a tremendous amount of drinking, smoking and violence in it. I found one passage particularly awesome. The author described one of the characters as dying by "allowing his body to stop one too many submachine gun bullets." I thought it was a funny way to describe it.
Over all I didn't hate Fuzzies and Other People but It really wasn't as much fun to read as some of the other books I have reviewed have been. The cover is still pretty funny to me when I look at in though.
Next Weeks Title:
Tower of Zanid
