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| The Michael Whelan cover isn't the original one…but…Michael Whelan |
H. Beam Piper was one of the greats from the Golden Age of Science Fiction, and his 1962 novel Little Fuzzy is a classic. Maybe the first "cute alien" novel, it was nominated for the best novel Hugo (back when the Hugo wasn't as divisive as everything else today). I've been re-reading Piper, and this passage near the beginning of the novel caught my attention. Great sf writers tend to see problems in human nature that are true in any time period, and Piper was no exception. Here is a psychologist speaking:
“If you don’t like the facts, you ignore them, and if you need facts, dream up some you do like,” she said. “That’s typical rejection of reality. Not psychotic, not even psychoneurotic. But certainly not sane.”
Piper understood the problems that have re-arisen today as well as anyone.
Little Fuzzy is public domain now, and you can find the novel at a number of sites to read for free. It's worth your time, and then some.
Warning: At the same time, though, I have to warn modern readers that Piper took a historian's approach to his work. He tried to be dispassionate about how a future history might unfold, for better but also worse. He expected the future would largely repeat the past, given that human nature would be the same. And so there's colonialism, the rise of a Hitler-analog…but to be fair, the flaws and evils are on full display.