I’ve been reading more ebooks lately, and rather than buying new ones or borrowing from the library, I’ve started going through my rather extensive ebook collection when I’m ready for something new. This book by John Scalzi, for example, is something I don’t even remember buying. But I like Scalzi, and I was in the mood for something light and fun, which his books tend to be.
This one did not disappoint. If you’re familiar with any of Scalzi’s other works, this book is more of the same and it delighted me, especially since the opening scene involves a dog and I’m a sucker for dogs.
The story is about Jack Holloway, a contract surveyor for a giant corporation, ZaraCorp, that owns many planets and mines them for minerals. Jack is on Zarathustra XXIII and has just found a giant seam of something called sunstone, which is incredibly valuable. Jack’s contract only gives him a fraction of a percent of whatever gets mined from the seam he finds, but sunstone is valuable enough and the seam is big enough to make his fortune.
When Jack gets back to his Swiss-Family-Robinson-style cabin, he finds a creature inside that looks kind of like a cat, but stands on its hind legs and has hands with opposable thumbs. His dog, Carl, tries to go after the creature, but Jack manages to rescue it and feed the creature before it leaves. A while later, he’s confronted with four more of the creatures, who quickly take up residence in his house and train his dog to let them in and out of the house via the dog door, which is controlled by Carl’s collar.
Jack’s ex-girlfriend, Isabel, is a biologist who works in the nearby downtown area, and he calls her over to take a look at these new creatures, which he calls “fuzzys”. Isabel comes over because they are still kind of friends, despite the fact that Jack did something unforgivable during their breakup.
Jack didn’t need Isabel to tell him the fuzzys were smart, but what he did not anticipate was for her to suspect they might be sentient, meaning they either have human-level intelligence, or the capacity to develop human-level intelligence at some point in the future. Jack thinks she’s overreacting, mostly because he has not heard the fuzzys speak, which, while not the only indication of sentience, is a very important one.
Jack also has a lot to lose because, if the fuzzys are declared sentient, by law, ZaraCorp will have to cease all mining activity (including on his very lucrative sunstone seam) to prevent ZaraCorp from damaging the fuzzys’ home environment and stealing resources they might one day want to use for themselves.
What follows is a fair amount of corporate intrigue, police brutality, and courtroom drama. I loved it.
The only thing I did not love was that the fuzzys turn out to not have genders, and yet, even though they are legally declared “people” Jack refers to each fuzzy as an “it” when he should have used “they.” That said, this book was written a decade ago, and there’s been a fair amount of progress made in the gender non-binary area since then, so I’m willing to give Scalzi the benefit of the doubt on that one.