Droflet,
For what it's worth, there is a large number of other people who have felt the same way.
Little Fuzzy was published by Avon Books in 1962. To Avon's surprise—and delight—
Little Fuzzy was immensely popular with SF fans, and enjoyed an unusually high level of sales. It was even nominated for a Hugo Award. SF fans clamored for more Fuzzy stories. Avon immediately authorized Piper to write two more "Fuzzy" novels.
In 1963, Piper told fans that a sequel to
Little Fuzzy was coming soon, and that the title would be
Fuzzy Sapiens.
The same editor at Avon who had bought
Little Fuzzy bought
Fuzzy Sapiens, but he left Avon before it was published, and all of Piper's stories were assigned to a new editor.
I don't know this new editor's name, but he seems to have decided that he didn't like fuzzies. He couldn't stop the publication of
Fuzzy Sapiens, because at this point in time Avon was already contractually obligated to publish the book. So he decided to sabotage it instead. He commissioned a cover for the book, with a surrealistic line drawing of two primitively-drawn figures in dark blue on a black background, so that the front cover looked like it was solid black at first glance. The new editor also put a blurb above the title on the front cover that said:
"The startling new novel about man versus a superintelligent race of alien beings—By H. Beam Piper, the author of Little Fuzzy", which made it seem to be an entirely new novel about a struggle against an alien species bent on galactic conquest, rather than anything related to
Little Fuzzy. He also changed the title of the novel to
The Other Human Race, but he deliberately did not publicize the change in title. He didn't even tell Piper or Kenneth S. White, Piper's literary agent, about the change.
As a result, nobody knew that the sequel to
Little Fuzzy had been published, or that it had been published with a different title than the one Piper had announced to fans the previous year. The nearly all-black cover did not catch very many fans' eyes, and the book sold poorly.
He then argued to the publisher that the poor sales of
The Other Human Race demonstrated that there was there was no good reason to publish the third Fuzzy novel. He then sent a rejection letter for the third novel to Piper—before Piper had even submitted the manuscript!
Shortly after receiving the rejection letter, Piper committed suicide. I can't say whether or not the rejection letter had any positive role in causing Piper to commit suicide, but the timing does seem suggestive (at least to me).
The third Fuzzy manuscript could not be found after Piper's death, because he had never bothered to tell anybody its location. Twenty years later, the manuscript was serendipitously found in a steamer trunk in Piper's former home, and it was immediately published with Piper's original title,
Fuzzies and Other People, in 1984. It immediately became a best-seller.
I first read
Little Fuzzy in 1963, and I loved it. (I was five years old at the time; I didn't learn of Piper's death until 1968, when I was nine, but I was still saddened when I did learn of it.)
Later,
Mike
