Fuzzy Friends: Little Fuzzy

One of the advantages of a NOOK is that there is more free stuff easily available.  Knowing this, I finally wandered over to gutenburg.org and pulled down some stuff and figured out how to put it on my ereader.  Heading my list was Little Fuzzy by H. Beam Piper, mainly because John Scalzi wrote a reboot that I planned to read eventually.

Well, last week the library skipped me ahead three weeks and sent me Scalzi's book, so I moved Little Fuzzy much higher on my reading priorities.  Just as I like to read the book before I see a movie, I wanted to reread the original before trying the remake.

I enjoyed it as much as I remember doing several decades ago.  It's space fiction without a lot of emotional wailing; frontier dudes with exotic practices like cocktail hour on planets with funny names.  The emotional connection between the fuzzies and Jack the rough-hewn prospector was skimped a bit, but that was made up for with all the telling science fiction details, such as the judge's homemaker wife and the woman scientist/spy quitting her job when she gets married.  It's a double blind, with the stuff that probably was just standard when it was written now seeming quaint, but then again I'm probably accepting without even seeing things that were adventurous when written.  I vividly remembered the suicide, which I found very shocking in my youth.  I'm looking forward to seeing what Scalzi did with the story (first contact tale, or legal thriller?), but I also want to go back and read the original sequels.