I just recently read this old favorite to my boys as a bedtime story, one chapter a night, and they loved it. It’s a fun book; I first read it around 1979 or 1980, and enjoyed it amazingly well, and I liked it just about as much this time.

Jack Holloway is prospecting for sunstones on Zarathustra, a Class-III planet wholly owned under Terran Federation law by the Chartered Zarathustra Company, when he makes the acquaintance of a small, fuzzy being he christens “Little Fuzzy”. It shortly becomes clear to him that Little Fuzzy isn’t just a smart animal; he’s a little person, as sapient a being as any human. As such, he has certain rights under Terran law–and that makes Zarathustra a Class-IV inhabited planet and the Company’s charter a dead letter. The difficulty is that Little Fuzzy doesn’t meet the legal rule of thumb for sapience–he doesn’t build fires, and he doesn’t talk: the only sound he makes is “Yeek!”. How can Little Fuzzy and his family be shown to be sapient? And can the Zarathustra Company be prevented from making Little Fuzzy’s sapience a dead issue?

This is good stuff, classic science fiction and lots of fun. Hard to find; at least, I haven’t seen Piper in the bookstores recently. But today I did a Google search and found something that shocked me: a good many of Piper’s books and stories are available for free from Project Gutenberg, with the notation that they are not copyrighted in the United States of America. Given that Little Fuzzy was written in 1962, I don’t see how that can be, unless his estate formally released the copyright; I suppose that’s possible.

Anyway, here’s the Piper page at Gutenberg; I particular recommend Little Fuzzy and Space Viking. (Sure, the name is hokey, but so what. It’s good!) Go thou and read!