John Scalzi Plans to Reboot H. Beam Piper’s Little Fuzzy

SF writer John Scalzi stunned science fiction and fantasy fandom by announcing that he has contracted with the estate of H. Beam Piper to rewrite Piper's classic, Hugo Award-winning novel Little Fuzzy. Scalzi's "reboot" of the story will be called Fuzzy Nation.

SciFi fans took note of the announcement quickly and began asking questions almost at once. The Little Fuzzy novel was not a standalone book, but rather was part of a larger series often referred to as the Terro-Human Future History series. Piper is considered to be one of the pioneers of so-called Militaristic science fiction, which pitches military forces of the future against various challenges. Piper's protege, Jerry Pournelle, went on to popularize militaristic SF with his CoDominium/Empire of Man stories.

Little Fuzzy was considered to be groundbreaking because it introduced a diminutive humanoid species on a distant planet that sparked a legal battle over the definition of sentience. Obviously looking in retrospect at how European colonial expansion into the Americas dehumanized American and African peoples, the story challenges many racial stereotypes at a time when the American Civil Rights Movement was just beginning to achieve significant political victories at state and federal levels.

Scalzi says he has not yet sold the rewrite to any publisher, but he has secured approval from Piper's estate and that is a critical first step toward unleashing a new wave of thoughtful militaristic SF upon the literary world. It remains to be seen how Scalzi will handle the themes that Piper addressed but the recent anthropological controversy over the correct classification of the now affirmed Homo Florienensis hominin species (popularly called the "Hobbit of Flores", named for the island in Indonesia where remains were discovered) has certainly brought Piper's ideas into the mainstream.

Scientists argued passionately over the Hobbit's capacity for rational thought. One camp held that the diminutive remains were the bodies of brain-impaired children of Homo Erectus, but the prevailing wisdom now is that the skeletal remains constitute a new species. The full implications of the Flores discovery have not yet been revealed.

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