Fuzzy Nation

Fuzzy Nation is a science fiction novel by the American writer John Scalzi, published by Tor Books in 2011. It is a reboot of H. Beam Piper's Little Fuzzy, authorised by Piper's estate, and it uses the original plot and characters to tell a new story in a different continuity.

On the human colony planet Zara XXIII, Jack Holloway works as a contract surveyor for Zaracorp. He loses the job for environmental damage after letting his dog set off explosives, and the same explosion opens up a massive deposit of sunstones, the valuable stones the company is on the planet to find. Holloway persuades the local manager to add a rider to his contract giving him a larger share of the spoils, and shortly afterwards he meets a family of clever, cat-like creatures on the planet. The question of what those creatures are, and what their existence does to Zaracorp's licence to work the planet, ends up in court.

The book is not a sequel to Piper's original, unlike the earlier continuations Fuzzy Bones by William Tuning and Golden Dream: A Fuzzy Odyssey by Ardath Mayhar; it was written first as an exercise following negotiations over another Scalzi novel, and his agent then approached the Piper estate for permission to publish it. Scalzi aimed to make the story readable for people who had never encountered the original while still pointing them towards Piper's work.