I have now ready Little Fuzzy and Fuzzy Sapiens, the two Fuzzy novels published by H. Beam Piper while he was alive. There is a third book - Fuzzies and Other People - which was found and published years after his death.
These are fairly short novels. I enjoyed them. I’d recommend reading them both if you read either, as the two are really one long story. Fuzzy Sapiens ties things up nicely.
Like all of Piper’s novels I’ve read thus far, this is not a complex narrative. There aren’t a bunch of storylines to keep track of. The prose is simple but solid.
The first book deals with themes like “what is sapience?”, corporate greed, and first contact with an alien species. The second book takes off pretty much from where the first one left off, and we see characters redeemed, concern for the rights of indigenous populations, and the use of science to solve problems. You could argue there is a strong colonialist streak in these books, and you’d be right. The planet is a colony.
Overall I enjoyed these novels. There’s not a lot of action in them. They are mostly about characters discussing events, solving problems, investigating mysteries.
When I was a teen in the 1980s these books were prominent on bookstore shelves. Piper was one of the authors you knew about. Alan Dean Foster, Phillip Jose Farmer, Andre Norton, Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke. The list goes on. Back then of course there was no internet, so learning a bit more about the authors and their lives was harder and more time consuming. The link above to the Wikipedia article on Piper is kind of interesting. His libertarian leanings are fairly apparent in The Cosmic Computer and Space Viking (yes, a dumb name for a book, and every time the term “space viking” came up in the novel I cringed). However, I did enjoy each of those novels as well. I love high-minded SF with the “big ideas” but I don’t demand it. A good adventure is fine with me.