Little Fuzzy

I was going to talk about ACTA today, but enough has been said about it already. You can read more about ACTA and why it’s bad in many other places.

Instead I’d like to go with something a little more positive today. Yesterday I found out that H.B. Piper’s Little Fuzzy has become public domain. A lot of you may not have read this book, and I encourage you to do so.

Little Fuzzy is primarily the story of the Zarathustra company, and their reaction to the discovery of a new species of sapient creatures on the world on which their fortune was built. It is fundamentally a story that explores corporate responsibility, the legal definition of sapience, and the relationship between primitive and advanced cultures.

Piper had great mind for detail, even when it comes to something as mundane as the legal definition of sapience. Take for example this passage:

“Who’s going to define sapience? And how?” Rainsford asked. “Why, between them, Coombes and O’Brien can even agree to accept the talk-and-build-a-fire rule.”

“Huh-uh!” Brannhard was positive. “Court ruling on that, about forty years ago, on Vishnu. Infanticide case, woman charged with murder in the death of her infant child. Her lawyer moved for dismissal on the grounds that murder is defined as the killing of a sapient being, a sapient being is defined as one that can talk and build a fire, and a newborn infant can do neither. Motion denied; the court ruled that while ability to speak and produce fire is positive proof of sapience, inability to do either or both does not constitute legal proof of nonsapience. If O’Brien doesn’t know that, and I doubt if he does, Coombes will.”

The idea that someone might try to use a technicality like a lack of “sapience” to free someone of a murder charge is unthinkable to most of us, but it is exactly the kind of maneuver that a desperate lawyer might use if they are inventive and all other hope for acquittal is lost. That Piper uses it to set precedence is even better, since court rulings tend to have far-reaching consequences well beyond directly related cases.

I first read Little Fuzzy as a freshman in High School, when I found a battered paperback in my high school library. It became one of my favorite science fiction books. I recommend anyone who likes science fiction (or even just a good story) give it a try. If you’d like to get it in audiobook format you can get it here. A commercial copy of the audiobook can be found here, and of course there’s the actual harcopy of the book.

Thanks to BoingBoing for the heads up