More Fuzzy thoughts

[gryphonsegg]

I've already done one post about my immediate reaction to Fuzzy Nation and how unsatisfying I found it in comparison to the original Little Fuzzy. That post felt vaguely incomplete and I couldn't put my finger on why. Yesterday, it clicked for me what bugged me so much about the reboot, possibly more than all the other changes combined. When you get right down to it, the extra killing and the completely unnecessary love triangle and the Newer!Shinier!More Heinleinesque!Jack are fairly superficial changes in comparison to this other thing. The more I thought about it, the more certain I became that Scalzi's most radical departure from Piper's original work undermines the most important social, scientific, and philosophical point of Little Fuzzy.



The central question of Little Fuzzy, the original book by the late H. Beam Piper, is "What makes a living thing a person, and how are we to recognize it when we encounter it?" Jack Holloway, an old prospector digging for precious stones on a newly colonized planet, makes contact with a native species which he initially presumes to be a bunch of cute animals whose cognition is similar to that of other species which humans keep as pets. As he gets to know some individuals of this species, Jack begins to realize they're much closer to humans mentally, and several people he invites to examine the beings, which he calls fuzzies, become convinced that the fuzzies are people. Although the humans consider the fuzzies' technology primitive, fuzzies do make and use tools, and they quickly learn to use human-made technology. The fuzzies can't communicate with the humans verbally, but they demonstrate a humanlike level of social complexity among themselves, as well as pattern recognition and generalization abilities that human believe to be prerequisites for developing language. If the fuzzies' cognition is proven to be complex enough, then the human-centered government will grant them the legal status of persons and the human-run corporation that has been exploiting the planet's resources will be required to renegotiate everything and limit its activities so as not to harm the native sentient population. The powers that be in the corporation do not want this to happen, so they try to cover up evidence of the fuzzies' sentience, killing a fuzzy in the process. By the end of the story, the human authorities accept that the fuzzies are people rather than wild game and the fuzzy killing is ruled a murder. This happens without the fuzzies ever demonstrating proficiency in any human language. In the sequel, Fuzzy Sapiens, the fuzzies do speak to humans in the humans' language (it turns out that fuzzies had complex language all along and have picked up human speech very quickly, the humans just couldn't recognize it because the fuzzies' voices are too high-pitched for humans to hear most of their vocalizations), but that happens after the fuzzies have been recognized as having personhood.

In John Scalzi's reboot, Fuzzy Nation, the legal determination that fuzzies are sentient and killing them is murder (more fuzzies were killed in the reboot-- I suppose a single count of murder isn't cutting edge enough, especially if the victim is an adult despite being small and cute), isn't made until after a fuzzy addresses a human court using a human language in a vocal register within the range of normal human hearing. I really, really dislike this change. It makes the case far too easy from a science fictional standpoint. The original was all about figuring out how those who come after us might go about deciding where xenobiological animal behavior ends and alien anthropology and psychology begin. Determining sentience without a common language is kind of the point. Also, the original ending unsettles the assumptions of ableism and xenophobia more than the reboot ending does. I don't want future generations of humans to go out to the stars with the idea that they can kill any living things they find and keep killing them until they start speaking English.

Comments

[ithiliana]

I haven't read the Piper novels for years, but I knew I didn't want to read Scalzi's (I enjoy the hell out of his blog writing, but bounced right off his fiction--the two I tried--within the first paragraph). You have definitely pointed out what was (for me) the most important theme/issue in the series--one that I now realize is played out in other excellent sf novels (one of my favorite being Janet Kagan's HELLSPARK!), and one that is most important to me--language issues, how sentience is defined, etc.

And +10000000000000000000000 to your final point!

[gryphonsegg]

Thanks. :)

Almost all of Scalzi's changes bother me. The only thing he did that I don't disapprove of is making more of the human characters female and/or of color, but even that doesn't go far enough to make the change all that great. Piper was a bit ahead of his time on those issues anyway, and Scalzi didn't do anything unusual for his time in that regard, so it just went from "most characters white men, a few are women, at least two are people of color" to "more characters are described as women and/or POC, but they don't act any different from the white men." The difference isn't significant enough to warrant writing a whole new book. All the other changes just seem flat-out wrong. Also, I find Piper's characters much easier to like and sympathize with than Scalzi's, so even though the original has fewer female characters and fewer characters of color, it still has more female characters and characters of color whom I enjoy reading about.

[gryphonsegg]

To add more to the ableism point: In the Piper-penned sequel Fuzzy Sapiens, the fuzzies' speech is mostly inaudible to humans unless they use special electronic equipment to replicate the fuzzies' vocalization patterns at a lower pitch. They're just not built to vocalize in our hearing range. In Scalzi's reboot, the fuzzies are capable of lowering their voices to speak in the normal human range if they try hard enough, and Papa Fuzzy makes a rather lengthy speech in court to demonstrate sentience and give evidence against the murderer. No assistance is necessary; all those fuzzies have to do is put some effort into it-- bootstraps!