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

[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.