A post I could only call

[james_davis_nicoll]

Milage varies

(and I will admit here I did not and will not read the Scalzi unless someone pays me, because I don't want to be in the position of seeing him as that guy who 'fixed' Little Fuzzy by removing its essential charm to replace it with grim&grittitude)

So, one bit

One interesting caveat concerns the main female character. In Little Fuzzy, Ruth Ortheris is a psychologist who works with the Zarathustra school department, sides with the villains…and ends up playing an absolutely pivotal role in the story. In Fuzzy Nation, Isabel Wangai is a Kenyan-by-way-of-Oxford biologist whose only role in the story is to get repeatedly humiliated by Jack Holloway, whose ex-girlfriend she is, and then forgive him. This is a telling difference. I don’t know what it’s telling us—perhaps something ironic about the changes in social mores between the 1960s and the 2010s—but it seems worth mentioning.

It's telling us two things: SF's treatment of female characters still tends to suck, even in the hands of liberal-by-the-standards-of-the-USA-authors, and also Piper was pretty unusual for his time in the way he had female characters who did important things, characters like Ruth Ortheris, Sylvie Jacquemont and Martha Dane. The main exception to come to mind is Lady Elaine, who is mainly a motivational corpse, and one could speculate Piper was making a point about the Sword Worlds with the constrained roles allowed for women there.

Comments

[graydon saunders (from livejournal.com)]

I think my charitable interpretation of the linked article is that the admittedly now old-fashioned coding of character information in Little Fuzzy isn't legible to Felicity Savage.

[nathan helfinstine (from livejournal.com)]

I've got a quibble about her "Aw, who cares about lex retro non agit?" quip. In Little Fuzzy, Federation law is something like "Murder is the intentional killing of a sapient being with malice aforethought." The villainous Mr. Kellogg would have suffered an ex post facto prosecution only if the law had instead been "Murder is the intentional killing of a human, a khroogra, or an ullerite,[1] with malice aforethought." Determining if a given individual was sapient was a question of fact.

[1] Weren't there a few more sapient races?

[graydon saunders (from livejournal.com)]

Nine, as of that time, as I recall. Thorans, the ones who worship Great Ghu, come to mind.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Earth, Freya (maybe, if they are not human), Loki, Thor, Yggdrasil, Uller and Zarathustra all had native intelligent species, I believe.

[sean o'hara (from livejournal.com)]

And their fate is never revealed in Space Viking. You'd think that'd be a more interesting story-hook than, "Let's retell Little Fuzzy with the anachronisms updated for the 21st Century."

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I wondered if the humans accidentally exterminated the Fuzzies by adopting them out in reproductively isolated groups each too small to be viable.

[graydon saunders (from livejournal.com)]

Freyans are interfertile; Paula Quinton in Uller Uprising has a Freyan grandmother. So presumptively the same species.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

That is a sensible interpretation of the facts but SF of this era cannot be relied on not to have extremely wacky biology, like 'parallel evolution' producing two species so parallel as to be identical down to the genes.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I hate to have to praise Hogan but he did have that bit in Inherit the Stars where he pointed out it made no sense at all for lineages of hominids (one native, one transplant) on two worlds without contact for millions of years to both have produced Homo Sapiens Sapiens.

[tandw.livejournal.com]

IIRC, that was in "Gentle Giants of Ganymede," written before he'd fallen completely into the clutches of the Brain Eater.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

It's mentioned in Inherit the Stars: It is step one to realizing Bhe naprfgbef pnzr sebz gur svsgu cynarg'f ubzvavq yvarntr, naq jr jvcrq bhg bhe pbhfvaf sebz gur Greerfgevny yvarntr.

[tandw.livejournal.com]

That's right; it's been long enough since I read them that I'd forgotten that part. IIRC, it was dressed up in some oddness about radioisotope-tagged enzymes that sounded as though the tagging persisted across generations, so there was at least a foretaste of the Hogan to come.

[graydon saunders (from livejournal.com)]

Ah, but the very odd "Terro-humans come to Freya" short story (though not an especially short story) which is rather like the plot of Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen has acquired a would-be Chartered Company instead of Kalvan hops up and down on this point in a sensical fashion.

None of the Federation people are all that fussed about it, and none of them are the kind of researcher who would be able to answer the "urm, what, how?" part of the question, but they're all clear that it makes absolutely no sense for the interfertility to exist.

[awesomeaud.livejournal.com]

IIRC, this story was published after his death, and it was thought that this may have been an earlier draft of Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen. An editor may have seen it and suggested that it belonged more in Piper's Paratime series, than in the Federation series - hence the rewrite.

[graydon saunders (from livejournal.com)]

Don't specifically recall publication being posthumous, but sure, it was obviously a very good story. The "wait, wait, what, what do you mean interfertile?" part is presumably Piper, though, and so he's at least plausibly aware of what saying Paula Quinton has a Freyan grandmother implies.

(Someone with access to composition dates could presumably make an argument about "maybe he learned better later".)

Paratime distance as correlated with interfertility would be a really interesting question, too. Is the timelike distance distance? In what sense? How much do you need?

[sean o'hara (from livejournal.com)]

Maybe the Freyans are another offshoot of the Martians.

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

How often have I said to myself, "Self" --for we are not on a first-name basis-- "Self, I say, what Little Fuzzy needs is more grimdark."

[doc-lemming.livejournal.com]

Ino, rite?

Fortunately, this lack of grimdarkitude is fixed by the following updates:

• Foundation and Barbarians
• I, Robot Sex Slave (I think it was released as Saturn's Children in the U.S.)
• Alice in Wickedland
• Danny Dunn and the Painifying Machine

Others in the works include (Bestiality) City and Fahrenreich 451 and RR is for Rapist Rocket. There were plans for a B&D set of updates of the John Carter tales, but someone pointed out the Gor books.

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

(applauds until she has carpal tunnel and the skin is worn from her hands )

The Silver Metal Lover certainly qualifies as I, Robot Sex Slave, and I recommend it if you haven't read it. 20-years-younger me recommends it, anyway... no guarantees on Suck Fairy.

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

Suck Fairy would also be a title fitting into this subthread.

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

There's also a sequel, Metallic Love, aka Silver Metal Lover Meets Paradise Lost.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Did you see the thread on tor.com where I asked if there was evidence to show The City and the Stars and Don't Bite The Sun were in different universes?

[zxhrue.livejournal.com]

::wah!::

I concur with mme hardy on The Silver Metal Lover, caveats and all.

[agent-mimi.livejournal.com]

This is the first time I've even thought of the concept of Danny Dunn books being grimdarked into meathook futures and I confess my knee-jerk reaction was not a pleasant one. I may have even stomped my feet a little.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Hey, Danny Dunn is where I learned how indentures used to work!

[agent-mimi.livejournal.com]

That's part of my dismay -- they were already a little dark! I read a lot of kid's books from the 1960s (they were cheap at garage sales in the 1970s) that had some dark themes. Books like Jessamy and The Ghost Belonged to Me were somewhat dark in overall themes, too, as did one I can't recall the title of, about a teen girl who hits and critically injures a cyclist then tries to run off instead of going to the cops.

Make these books any more bleak and we'll cause an entire generation to grow up with permanent sads.

(Edited to add titles and remove spoilers.)

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

Next time you're in a bookstore in May or June, take a gander at the display tables in the kids' book section. Many bookstores prominently display the local schools' assigned summer reading. One year, my middle-schooler wailed, "It's like they WANT us to be depressed!"

For a very good (and very painful) example of this trend, see Louis Sachar's Holes, in which kids die right, left, and center, no takebacks.

[seth ellis (from livejournal.com)]

c.f. Death by Newbery (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DeathByNewberyMedal).

[dbdatvic.livejournal.com]

So basically, you're saying that both the Miss Pickerell and Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle series are badly in need of Hollywood-style makeovers, is that it?

Dave, cautionary tales for children about playing in strange old ladies' houses with undiscovered secret rooms and passages

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I can never remember the book but there was one children's mystery where while recreating the War of the Roses, as children do, one of the kids witnesses a murder and essentially spends the rest of the book with PTSD. I would have read it in 1971 or 1972 because I was at Wilmot Public School.

[roseembolism.livejournal.com]

Could that be Bill Bergeson Lives Dangerously, by Astrid Lindgren? As a kid I enjoyed that series tremendously, and didn't find it from at all.

[doc-lemming.livejournal.com]

I don't remember that, and I was a completist pre-teen Danny Dunn fan. Clearly I wasn't obsessive enough. (And to be fair, at this remove, I remember only the undersea one and Danny Dunn and the Smallifying Machine, though I know I read more.

I don't remember them as being dark at all, but maybe my head was in a different space, as they say. (If I were going to make them grimdark and meathooky, I'd probably start with how the professor has been feeding us inventions from aliens in order to make them meathooky, I'd damage Irene somehow because it's apparently as de rigeur as making her an overt lesbian, work harder on turning Joe into the spiky untrustworthy version of Jughead Jones, and give Danny a load of angst and possibly an addiction. I'd make Professor Grimes a co-opted agent of the Extremely Foreign Affairs Bureau assigned to keep an eye on the alien tech. And that's all in their teenage years....

(No, I have no intention of doing this.)

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

It was the one with the time machine. Joe wanders away from the group and gets asked if he's indentured. I think he thought that meant insured so he said yes. Hilarity ensued.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

It didn't turn into Twelve Years an Indentured Servant, though.

[ann-leckie.livejournal.com]

I've read both, and Scalzi's is not even remotely grim or gritty. I mean, so much not so that I'm having trouble believing in the reality of a sentence that includes both "Fuzzy Nation" and "grim and gritty."

[seawasp]

I have had many very nice interactions with John Scalzi. For this reason I absolutely will not read his re-imagining of the Fuzzyverse, for I don't want to see him as a blaspheming destroyer of worlds.

I'm actually in the middle of reading the Fuzzy stories to my son Gabriel (we're near the end of the second Fuzzy book).

[(Anonymous)]

I didn't find "Fuzzy Nation" dark or grim. A shorthand description of the differences between the two books might be this - in Piper, Holloway could be played by the old James Garner, crochety but thoroughly trustworthy, while Scalzi's Holloway could be played by the younger Garner, who might do anything to further his ends or might (to his own surprise) do the right thing.

Isabel Wangai does get very bad treatment from Jack, but at least she doesn't end up back with him at the end...

[seth ellis (from livejournal.com)]

I only read the first two chapters of Fuzzy Nation online, but the impression I got was that its 21st-century-ness had less to do with grimdark than with reflexive Whedonlike snark.

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

When all is said and done, that little weasel will have a great deal to answer for.

[zxhrue.livejournal.com]

little weasel?

what a charmingly affectionate appellation.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

I've read Scalzi's book but not the original, and I didn't think it was especially grim or gritty at all. Nor do I agree about the author's treatment of Isabel Wangai.

[aboutlikepleats.livejournal.com]

Agreed.
The author's snark was on full display - gee, I wonder why.
The fuzzies were treated with a hell of a lot more dignity than Piper gave them.
Most people got what was coming too them (oops; spoiler).
Wangai mostly gave as good as she got, and was no worse treated than anyone else. A snarky person ended up on good terms with someone he had previously treated badly, mostly because he apologized for the past. This is "very badly" how?
It was about Holloway almost to the point of Mary Sue, but I enjoyed it.
Disclaimer: I have never interacted with John Scalzi at all, but often feel the need to read his snark out loud to my mostly tolerant family.

[cshalizi.livejournal.com]

This. Scalzi has committed grimdark elsewhere (The God Engines), but Fuzzy Nation was amiable fluff, where the protagonist is transparently a manipulative asshole, but also not totally lost to conscience.

[agent-mimi.livejournal.com]

I think you should continue posting everything Felicity Savage writes because the automatic "she's stupid and sucks" reactions that occur just on mention of her name are hilarious to me.

[(Anonymous)]

Just read scalzi's and while I don't know the source material )which is why I hadn't read scalzi's book earlier) the new book isn't what I'd call grim or dark at all.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Here you go:

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18137

[roseembolism.livejournal.com]

You mean the original, where Holloway was a recovering or functional alcoholic, living alone because be threw away his chance to have a relationship, that wasn't from and dark enough?

[graydon saunders (from livejournal.com)]

Also the various indications that Jack Holloway has killed a _lot_ of people, noticeable much by Federation Frontier standards.