Little Fuzzy

Little Fuzzy is a science fiction novel by the American writer H. Beam Piper, published at the start of the 1960s and long since in the public domain. The story turns on a single question: whether the small furry species that has turned up on the planet Zarathustra counts as sapient.

Jack Holloway is a prospector working alone in the wilderness, mining sunstones on a world administered by the Chartered Zarathustra Company under Victor Grego. Holloway meets one of the creatures, names him Little Fuzzy, and is soon introduced to the rest of his family. The animals hunt, use tools and behave in ways that look less like instinct and more like thinking, and Holloway starts telling other people what he has seen. The company understands the consequences immediately. If the Fuzzies are a native sapient race, the planet becomes a protected aboriginal zone with a proper government, and the charter that lets the company take whatever it likes from Zarathustra is finished. What follows is a fight over evidence and law rather than over territory, and the humans have to establish something that has never been tested before.

The novel is usually grouped with the juvenile science fiction of its period, and it carries a marked sympathy for the individual against the corporation that is holding the charter.