The John Scalzi reboot of the classic Little Fuzzy, Fuzzy Nation follows conniving prospector Jack Holloway as he discovers both a rich vein of ore, and a cat-like species he calls the fuzzies. As Jack engages in a prolonged Battle of Wits with the local mining company executives to keep as much of the claim as possible, the issue is brought into question by the possibility that the creatures may be sentient, with Holloway's position and motives on all of this being hard to read.
Tropes:
- The Alcoholic: Dr. Chen, the planets linguist, who has been stranded there for two years due to a paperwork snafu, unable to actually do anything but distract himself with alcohol.
- Amicable Exes: Jack and his ex-girlfriend Isabel, in the end. He doesn't try to win her back from her current boyfriend, but they ultimately cooperate a lot and he refuses to humiliate her in court.
- Amoral Attorney: Averted with Sullivan, played straight with Meyer (who represents ZaraCorp against the Fuzzy's) and zigzagged with Holloway, who is in the Fuzzy's corner in the present (although not without ulterior motives) but was disbarred back on Earth for pulling some shenanigans to declare a mistrial while representing a very guilty and very insidious marketer of a bad drug.
- Apparently Powerless Puppetmaster: Brad Landon is seemingly just Wheaton Aubrey VI's personal assistant, until the penultimate chapter which reveals that he's really a high-ranking company observer testing whether Aubrey has the necessary savvy to be CEO someday, while having the authority to overrule him on a final policy decision about the fuzzys.
- Be Careful What You Wish For: Chen the xenolinguist wants to leave Zara XXIII but when he finally does get a transfer order it's because of the discovery of the fuzzies (something with a new and unexpected language he actually wants to study) in order to make him unavailable to testify, to Chen's great despair. Fortunately for him, the transfer is canceled at the last minute.
- Big Damn Heroes: Mark Sullivan arriving and intimidating Joe and his men from beating Jack to death in a jail cell with legal intimidation.
- Book Ends: The beginning and end of the book both feature Carl setting off a detonator.
- Canine Companion: Carl, who pretty much everyone seems to love. Basically the only way Holloway can arrange meetings with most people he knows is to bring Carl along, as his association with the dog is pretty much the only thing anyone can think of for what they like about him.
- Chekhov's Gun: Chad Bourne's skimmer, which for a few minutes is only attended to by Joe DeLise. Later on the car is used in a crime so that Chad can be framed.
- One of the new worksite defenses that the ZaraCorps workers have begun using is loudspeakers blasting ultrasonic noise, as it turns out the wildlife on the planet is sensitive to that range, while humans are unable to hear the sounds. Jack later improvises a similar defense when his Skimmer mysteriously crashes, and finally figures out the Fuzzies have been talking the whole time in that same frequency range.
- Chad Bourne cancels Jack's contract in the first chapter when he evidently causes a major ecological incident. While Jack is able to convince him to add a rider with renegotiated terms, Chad never actually remembered to un-cancel the original contract, rendering the rider null and void.
- Security cameras feature throughout the plot, coming in useful (or not) depending on the amount of foresight employed by those who need them. Jack has a camera in his cabin which normally serves as a hat rack, but which captures evidence of Joe setting fire to his cabin and killing Baby and Pinto, Jack almost gets killed because he failed to notice the absence of the security camera at Joe's favorite bar, and finally Judge Soltan reminds ZaraCorp's lawyer that she keeps a security camera in her courtroom in case any corporate lawyers get silly ideas about what sort of stunts they can pull in her courtroom.
- Chekhov's Gunman: Early on, Jack talks about a surveyor named Sam Hamilton, who had a pet monkey and was so dumb he had a device with children books to learn big words before dying at the hands of the local wildlife. Turns out the fuzzies found Joe's device with all those books (and the monkey) and used it to learn English.
- The Chessmaster: Jack is an insanely conniving guy who misleads and manipulates just about everyone to achieve his agenda, with both the readers and everyone else being in the dark about what he actually wants until the end.
- Company Town: Or rather, a company planet. Zara XXIII is owned by a mining company that employs nearly everyone on the planet.
- Courtroom Antics: Jack takes DeLise to court on charges of arson, accusing him of burning down his house. As new evidence is introduced, the preliminary hearing begins to go Off the Rails, leading to Judge Soltan having to make rulings on the ownership of the Sunstone seam (Jack, who no longer works for the company due to a clerical error in the first chapter of the book), to the sapience of the Fuzzies , and finally to ZaraCorps being ordered off the planet entirely and Jack Holloway placed in charge as the Fuzzies' appointed representative.
- The Dragon: Joe DeLise, a thuggish company security guard who repeatedly goes after Jack and the fuzzies.
- Egopolis: All of the ZaraCorp planets. Similarly, Zara XXIII's capital of Aubreytown, named for the family who owns the company. After the Fuzzies show ZaraCorp the door, the town is renamed Carlsburg, for Holloway's dog.
- Elective Unintelligible: The fuzzies turn out to have known English all along but have been testing the waters.
- Establishing Character Moment: The first chapter shows Jack letting his dog Carl detonate the surveying explosives he has planted. For the rest of the book he is defending himself from rumors that he allegedly lets his dog set off explosives, among other questionable/illegal actions.
- Even Evil Has Standards: Amoral Attorney Meyer never wavers in trying to help Aubrey get away with his illegal attempts to deny the fuzzies their rights, but she does look horrified while watching a video of Joe stomping a young fuzzy to death.
- Fall Guy: Chad Bourne, a company manager who is demoted for some failures which let Jack have a piece of the claim has his skimmer stolen by DeLise when he tries to burn Jack's place down, with evidence being planted to make it look like it was Chad. Jack isn't fooled, because Bourne is fundamentally decent guy who wouldn't do that and because Joe incriminated himself in other ways.
- Get Out!: Near the end of the book, the MegaCorp personal have to vacate the planet due to its native species being recognized as sapient and are given three months to shut everything down and ship out anyone who doesn't wish to quit and work for the new government. The two main executives and The Dragon are also made to leave at the very beginning of that period, especially The Dragon due to the harm he's inflicted on Papa Fuzzy's family.Papa Fuzzy: Get off my planet, you son of a bitch.
- Heroes Love Dogs: Jack has a dog, Carl who is well-trained.
- It's All About Me: Jack's defining character flaw is that he's fundamentally willing to do anything that will benefit him, to include putting others in professionally compromising situations and (unfairly) dragging his girlfriend's professional reputation through the mud during an official inquest.
- Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Hardly anyone, least of all Holloway, would accuse him of actually having a heart of gold, but he does take a liking to the fuzzies and hates the idea of them being killed just so the Zarathustra Corps could make more money.
- As Jack later points out, Chad Bourne actually fits this example. Jack eventually admits that most of the trouble Chad gave him was because of (usually greater) trouble Jack had caused for him, and Chad had still invited him to his Christmas parties every year out of professional courtesy.
- Papa Fuzzy claims that Jack is a good person, but Jack claims that Papa is wrong and just got lucky that Jack took a liking to the Fuzzies.
- Kill the Cutie: The two youngest fuzzies are murdered by Joe.
- Know When to Fold 'Em: Landon, in the end, noting they've dug themselves in too deep and perhaps someday they can negotiate with the fuzzies to sell them the planets natural recourses.
- Let Off by the Detective: Jason Stern, a corrupt pharmaceutical executive Holloway defended, and punched on the stand (although possibly at Stern's orders to cause a mistrial) was shot dead outside the courthouse by the dying grandfather of one of the children who'd died from his bad drug. The courts dragged out the trial date and gave easy bail to let the old man die at home.
- Make It Look Like an Accident: Jack's skimmer suddenly suffers an engine failure and goes down in the jungle. Once he's finished crashing, Jack discovers that his emergency perimeter fence's battery has been drained, and someone has removed the ammo for his shotgun. He later discovers that someone had tampered with the software in his flight computer and suspects DeLise.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: After Holloway gets the judge to initiate an inquiry into whether the fuzzies are sentient, Sullivan tells him that he may have just doomed that race to extinction. He points out that the one other time a judge initiated such an inquiry, it was never completed because the species in question "mysteriously" ended up dying out (i.e. wiped out by angry miners/prospectors, who stood to lose their jobs). And indeed, some of the Fuzzy's are soon killed.
- Noodle Incident: Exactly what went down in the repeatedly mentioned Greene v. Winston court case is unclear, although it involved the competing rights of corporations and surveyors, landed Aubrey's grandfather in prison for seven years, and badly hurt the Zara Corporation.
- Out of Focus: For the first half of the story, the most prominent supporting human character is Jack's ex-girlfriend Isabel, who is the company biologist on the planet. Once she determines that the Fuzzies are sentient, and the story transitions from a frontier adventure to a legal drama, she fades into the background in favor of her boyfriend Mark Sullivan, one of the company's lawyers.
- Protagonist-Centered Morality: Discussed. For most of the book, the nicest thing that anyone can think of to say about Holloway is that they like his dog, Carl. And even then, there is the persistent rumor that he's trained Carl to set off explosives.
- Reasonable Authority Figure: Judge Soltan, who conducts the trial firmly and shuts down some of the companies chicanery with some very heavy threats.
- Running Gag: More than a few folks like to point out that Jack was disbarred back on Earth. He is always quick to point out that it wasn't because he didn't know the law. It was because he punched his own client during a trial, and it is strongly implied that his client paid him to do so to cause a mistrial.
- This Is My Chair: Dirty Cop Joe DeLise is known for attacking anyone who sits on his barstool.
- Token Non-Human: Downplayed. Its mentioned ZaraCorp has a few representatives of the only two previously discovered sentient races (the Urai and the Negad) on the payroll for diversity purposes but none of them ever appear in person.
- What You Are in the Dark: In the climax, Jack knows the fuzzies are sapient and is poised to prove it and ensure no one can legally harm them again. When he learns he'll get to keep the mining rights he's just gained on their land (worth 1.2 trillion credits) by suppressing this evidence, he still goes through with his plan to help them.
