Bibliography
Bernstein, Basil. “Elaborate and Restricted Codes: Their Social Origins and Some Consequences.” American Anthropologist 66 (1964): 55-69.
Hopkinson, Nalo. Brown Girl in the Ring. New York: Aspect, 1998.
McGregor, William. Linguistics: An Introduction. New York: Continuum, 2009.
McHugh, Maureen F. China Mountain Zhang. New York: Tor, 1992.
Wardhaugh, Ronald. An Introduction to Sociolinguistics, 4th edition. New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002.
About the Author
Brit Mandelo is a writer and occasional critic. Her primary fields of interest are speculative fiction and queer literature, especially when the two coincide. Also, comics. Her fiction has recently appeared at Tor.com (”Though Smoke Shall Hide the Sun”). She is a Louisville native and lives there with her partner in an apartment that doesn’t have room for all the books.
Same Story with a 21st Century Sensibility: A Conversation with John Scalzi
Jeremy L. C. Jones
In the opening scene of Fuzzy Nation, a dog named Carl steps on a detonator panel and sets off more than just the plot. The novel, as Scalzi says, is a “reimagining of the story and events in Little Fuzzy, the 1962 Hugo-nominated novel by H. Beam Piper.” Scalzi borrows the story arc, character names, and other plot elements and re-tells the story with, as he explains below, a “Twenty-first century sensibility.”
Furthermore, Fuzzy Nation is an example of what happens when an established writer takes creative risks — and has a lot of fun doing it. The novel is saturated with respect for Piper, affection for the source material, and an intellectual playfulness. It is charming without being trite; thought-provoking without being didactic.
Scalzi is the author of four The Old Man’s War Novels and the standalones Agent to the Stars and The Android’s Dream. His shorter fictional works include How I Proposed to My Wife: an Alien Sex and Judge Sn Goes Golfing. Scalzi has also written a variety of non-fiction books on topics such as money, the universe, and science fiction movies. The 2008 collection Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded: Selected Writing, 1998 — 2008 goes a long way toward mapping Scalzi’s sharp-witted web presence.
I spoke with Scalzi last month, a few hours after he’d finished a new novel. He was still zinging and buzzing with the thrill of it. Below, we talk about Little Fuzzy and Fuzzy Nation, the writing process and a straight man named Carl.
Where did Fuzzy Nation start? At what point did you say, “I’ve got to do this”?
I was between projects. I’d had a project fall through and I had some free time. And I was thinking, “Well, now what do I want to do now that I don’t have this big project anymore?” I had often thought about taking a book that existed before and seeing what it would be like to play with it a little.
I’d been thinking of Little Fuzzy by H. Beam Piper for a number of reasons. One because it was a really good book. It was one I enjoyed very much when I was growing up. It was one of my favorite science fiction books and I really admired Piper’s style and his way of telling a story. In some ways, and this is true with a lot of the science fiction of the 50s and 60s, the future that Piper wrote has sort of become our “past”. In some ways some ways there are little things about the book and the way its structured that seem anachronistic now. You’d read it and go, “Well, this was somebody’s future, but not our future anymore.” If you read the opening of Little Fuzzy, it has Jack Holloway there sucking on a pipe and pulling on his mustache and basically looking very much like 1950s or 60s man of the world. It’s a good story and it’s a lot of fun. There’s nothing wrong with the original. You take it for what it was, but wouldn’t it be kind of interesting to take that basic story and look at it again with a 21st century sensibility? How would it be different? How would you make the characters different? How would you do the story differently? Would it end up being the same story, would it unfold the same way, or would there be things that were different? This is something I thought about for years and years and years. So when I had that project fall through I just thought, “You know what? Why don’t I do this and see what it’s like?”
When I started writing I didn’t have a plan to do anything with it. When you do something like this, you are messing with somebody’s work. And when you do that the general rule of thumb is you don’t do anything with it afterwards, because, generally speaking, people get upset when you do that. But in this particular case there were two things that worked to my advantage. Piper had passed on so he would not be hugely outraged. His fans might be, but not Piper himself. The other thing is, in this particular case Little Fuzzy, the novel itself, is in the public domain. So even if people were outraged, it would still be morally and legally okay to play with it.
So I went ahead and did it. And I had a fantastic time writing it. It was really nice to be able to do something that was… fun to do. It was really enjoyable. It was fun to play with the story and to basically have no pressure on it. I wasn’t planning to sell it; wasn’t planning to do anything with it. I was just doing it for the intellectual exercise of it.
When I was done, I called up my agent and said, “You know how I was supposed to be working on an actual novel that you could sell, right? Well, I haven’t been doing that.” And I explained this weird project to him. I said, “I re-wrote this book that is in the public domain. And I will show it to you but I don’t think you can do anything with it. But I want you to see what I’ve been doing.” So he says, “All right, fine, send it along.”
So I sent it to him and I didn’t really think about it much. I was thinking about what I was going to write next. And then he sends me an e-mail and he says, “I think I can do something with this. Do you mind if I try?” “Sure, go right ahead.” Because why the hell not, right?
The Piper Estate had been sold to Ace Books back in the 1980s or something like that and is now owned by Penguin. My agent went to Penguin and said, “Look, we have this book that is based on H. Beam Piper. We know that you have the rights for Little Fuzzy. We want to publish [Fuzzy Nation]. What do we need to do to get your permission to do that? Thus began a months long process of negotiations with the rights holders so that we could get it completely cleared away.
At the end of the day they gave us permission. And so this project I had basically written just for the fun of it and for sort of getting into the habit of actually enjoying writing science fiction again turned out to be something I was actually able to sell.
Your affection for the source material really shines through, and so does the playfulness. It seems like you are really enjoying telling the story.
Piper wrote a great story. It’s got everything. It’s got questions of morality. It’s got questions of consciousness and what makes us human. It’s got issues of ecology, corporate responsibilities, and what is the role of government. It’s got all this stuff and it’s all shoved, when Piper did it, into a story that’s like 51,000 words. Which, if you think about it, is kind of remarkable. Little Fuzzy has pretty much has everything. There was a lot to play with. I could pick and choose which things to tweak and which things to bring in entirely myself. And when the only reason that you’re really doing it is because it’s a fun exercise for you, then the pressure is off. It’s like when I first wrote Agents to the Stars and Old Man’s War. I didn’t have to worry about having this deadline or doing these things. I didn’t have people expecting this or that to happen in this particular book. When you have no pressure and there are no expectations and the only thing that you’re doing is just enjoying yourself, you do enjoy yourself because who cares if you screw it up. Besides, if I’d screwed it up entirely, the only person who’d ever know would be me.
And, yes, I do have affection for Piper and for his work. I didn’t come into this saying, “I can do what Piper did and I can do it better,” because that’s stupid and it would get me killed. People would come to me with pitchforks and torches. I like what Piper did and I wondered how it would be different if someone wer
e writing it today as opposed to in 1960. And that’s, basically, what the difference is. Same story, fifty years difference.
Some people will be morally opposed to Fuzzy Nation. “How dare you go and take this work somebody else did and appropriate it for yourself.” And I can understand that. I have a library of my own intellectual property. I have my own titles. If someone came in and said, “I’ve written an Old Man’s War book!” I’d be like, “The hell you say?” So I totally understand where [people opposed to Fuzzy Nation] are coming from, but I look at it this way. Right now I have my titles and I have my books and I have my universes and I want to be the one who is the primary author of them, because I wrote them. But eventually I’m going to shuffle off, eventually my work is either going to survive or it’s not. Part of the way that works survive is that people keep coming to them again and again and they keep finding new things. A works speaks to them in new ways. Why is Shakespeare so successful while Christopher Marlowe, who is more or less contiguous in time, is much less so? Because people just keep coming again and again to Shakespeare’s works and adapting them and changing them and finding new ways to bring the stories forward. It doesn’t hurt Shakespeare at all to have West Side Story.
A lot of young readers under the age of 30 haven’t read Piper. When I put up on my site that I’d written a book based on H. Beam Piper’s Little Fuzzy, a bunch of my readers went out and checked out Little Fuzzy at Project Gutenberg or they downloaded it for the Kindle or the Nook. All of a sudden, there were more people reading Piper that day than there had been the day before. The object here is not to put a stake in Piper’s body and say, “I am the Fuzzy master now!” That would be stupid. The original reason I wrote this book was for fun, but now that it’s actually come out, it says to people, “This is a great story. Check out the guy who actually thought it up the first time. Check out his stuff because it’s so good. Even if it’s written with a 50s or 60s sensibility. There’s lots of stuff that has a sensibility from earlier times that we still read. We still read the Brontes; we still read Jane Austen. It’s not a crime to have that more distant sensibility, but it does lend itself to re-creation. If by bringing attention to the Fuzzy-verse with this book I get more people to read Piper, then everybody wins.
The trick for you, it seems, was getting the tone just right so there was no trace of anything that could be construed as arrogance or as you trying, as you say, to put a stake in Piper’s body. The thing in the early chapters that got me, that put me completely and entirely into the story, was Carl. You must be a dog lover to have written Carl.
Carl is there for a couple of reasons. Partly, he humanizes Jack Holloway. My Jack Holloway, not to put too fine a point on it, is a bit of an asshole, right? He’s arrogant. He breaks rules. He does what he wants to do. The first two chapters are basically Jack brow-beating his poor survey representative into doing what Jack wants him to do. Jack spouts legal cases at him. Jack goes, “Wow, you really screwed up, now you have to give me what I want.” My Jack Holloway is basically a dick. The fact that he has a dog certainly helps because if your dog loves you that means that you might have some good in your soul.
The other thing with Carl is that, for me, I wanted to have someone there who was an observer of the situation that could be a fun participant, someone that isn’t going to be judging things and still play a role. And Carl certainly does play a role. He’s the guy who sets off the thing that puts the whole plot in motion.
I had a dog when I wrote Fuzzy Nation. I am a dog lover, so it was fun to put a dog in and have that dog have some of the qualities of my own dog. My cats are in there as well. It’s not any coincidence that these Fuzzies have very distinct personalities, and those personalities, to some extent, are based on my pets.
We get pretty well attached to each of the Fuzzies, to Pinto and Baby and Papa, in a pretty short period of time. It seems, in some ways, that Carl is setting us up to be able to do that. Carl gives us one end of the continuum of sentience and he puts is in a state of mind that we’re willing to accept the Fuzzies. Carl is doing a lot.
You make a good point. The point of the book is to set up the question, “Where on the line of intelligence do these creature [the Fuzzies] lie?” When the book starts, there’s not necessarily an indication that these things are more than clever little animals. On one end of the scale, we have the humans who we know are clever and who can think and do all this other stuff. On the other end, we have someone like Carl who is a good “person” but he’s a dog. He’s got tricks, but you wouldn’t have a deep philosophical conversation with Carl about Kantian principles. “I oughta have a bone!” [Laughing] Or something along those lines. It does help to have these two poles and to ask where we place the Fuzzies in between them.
Carl’s also a straight man. He a straight man for Jack, because Jack’s got things he wants to do and Carl’s sort of an unwitting accomplice to a lot of them. Carl’s also a straight man for the Fuzzies — the Fuzzies just totally railroad Carl. They’re in there and they’re like, “We’re going to use you to get into the house. We’re going to use you to do all this other stuff.” And the dog is like, “Okay! I love you!” [Laughing] “I like you a lot!”
Also, again, because you know Carl likes Jack you hold out hope that Jack is not a complete asshole. If the dog is also okay with the Fuzzies that also creates a level of comfort there as well.
In the late-middle of the book, the dialogue starts to carry a lot more of the pacing. The dialogue starts to move much more of the freight. Ultimately, in the end, this becomes a book about whether or not people can talk and as we get closer to the question of whether or not the Fuzzies can talk the people are talking more and more. Or maybe this is just a craft decision to use dialogue to move the plot faster.
There are a couple of reasons. When you first start off with a book there is a lot of world-building that has to be done. You have to talk about what sunstones are or what the ecological practices of ZaraCorp are. You introduce particular people and so on and so forth. And you can’t do that all in dialogue because it would sound very didactic and it would sound very — you know the problem in science fiction, exposition, the whole, “As you know, Bob…” thing? You want to avoid that. You strike a balance. Telling what the sunstones are, how they got there, about ZaraCorp and the way it does, some of that can be carried by dialogue, but a lot of it just has to be written up.
As you go along, you’ve established who ZaraCorp is, what the sunstones are and what they mean, so a lot of that explanation and exposition can fall away and what you have is the actual things that the characters are doing. That’s why, in a craft sense, it becomes more dialogue-heavy at the end.
On the other hand, yes, this is a book about people communicating, and not just humans communicating, but Fuzzies, too. What can they say? Because of that, yes, absolutely, people talking to people matters.
Jack had a really hard time communicating with Isabel. It just wasn’t working. And that’s one of the reasons they broke up. They just weren’t working on that particular level of communication. As the book goes along, Jack has to learn to actually communicate with humans, not just railroad them to get what he wants, but actually to start negotiating with them, to use his words in order to achieve results. So absolutely, we come to a part where the dialogue, where discussion, where talking becomes particularly important. And, of course, the last third of the book is courtroom scenes so you have to be talking, anyway.
Did you have to do much research — legal, biological, environmental?
[Laughing] Tons! Tons!
Really?
No. [Laughing] No. I did a little bit. Obviously, you want to make sure whatever you’re writing has the feeling of verisimilitude, that it seems reasonable to the average person that things would work that particular way. You use reality as a springboard for something that is plausible. There’s a lot of law in Fuzzy Nation and a lot of the law in this particular book has no real world analog, because you’re tal
king about issues of sentience and issues of planetary ecology on a planet that is not earth and what the corporate responsibilities are for that. Basically, what you do is you take a flyer and you ask yourself. What seems reasonable?” It helps to have a good, basic grounding in biology or in the law, so you can extrapolate from there. But I don’t want to sound like I spent years and years and years at the law library looking at case law. A lot of it I relied on what I learn on a day-to-day basis and also what I learned when I was in college. I took classes in law when I was at college just because they interested me. A lot of that stuff still sticks with me.
You went to University of Chicago, right? I’ve noticed Chicago grads have a particular way of thinking — a distinctive depth and thoroughness.
My two top choices for college were University of Chicago and Bennington. Bennington was very arts-oriented and very cool. Creatively awesome. But the fact of the matter is I have absolutely no structure whatsoever. That’s why I’m married to a woman who actually gets shit done. Even at 18, I knew I was not the world’s most structured person. And here’s the University of Chicago … it had structure and I knew that having that structure imposed upon me would actually do me well.
Another way the University of Chicago was perfect for me is that it’s also very egalitarian. It’s one of the top ten universities, but it’s also amazingly egalitarian. It’s basically one of those places that says, “You said you can do this, do it. Don’t tell us you can do it, just do it.” When I got there I went to the college newspaper and I said, “I want to write a column, a humor column.” And they were like, “Ah, get out of here. Go away.” But I persisted. I came in the first week and said, “Here’s my humor column.” “Fine. We’ll take it. Don’t expect that we’ll run the next one.” Next week, I came in and said, “Here’s my second column.” They were like, “Fine. We’ll run this one, but don’t expect us to run the next one.” The next week I didn’t write anything. On Monday night — the thing comes out on Tuesday — Monday night, they give me a call, “Where the hell is your column?”
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