Dogpatch Press

Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer.

Mouse Mission, by Prudence Breitrose. Illustrated by Stephanie Yue.
NYC, Disney•Hyperion, October 2015, hardcover $16.99 (266 pages), Kindle $9.99.

Mouse Mission is The Mousenet, Book 3; the conclusion of the trilogy that began with Mousenet and Mousemobile (both 2013). To repeat the events in the first two books, 10/11-year-old Megan Miller learns that the mice of the world are as intelligent as humans, but are too small and fragile to create a civilization. They’re isolated in small groups; and they can’t be heard by humans unless they scream all the time. The mice learn that Megan’s uncle, Fred Barnes, is an electronic tinkerer who has invented a miniature computer just for his own amusement, but which would be ideal for mice to communicate with each other throughout the world; and with humans.

In the first two books, Megan and Uncle Fred become part of the Humans Who Know about the Mouse Nation, and the mice figure out how the five humans can mass-produce the Thumbtop computers, supposedly as toy keychains but actually for the mice to use. Megan’s uncle and step-dad, Fred Barnes and Jake Fisher, create their home-run Planet Mouse factory in Cleveland, ostensibly to manufacture only a tiny number of miniature computer toys, but actually with a secret assembly line of seven hundred mice making Thumbtops for mice all around the world.

One of the Humans Who Know is Megan’s mother Susan Fisher, who is an environmental activist. Breitrose unfortunately allowed Mousemobile to become very preachy about the danger of Climate Change, which the five Humans Who Know and all the mice are very passionate about. The message of Mouse Mission, Saving the Rainforest, is fortunately integrated into the plot much better.

Susan Fisher’s current environmental campaign is saving the rainforest that covers the fictional island-nation of Marisco in the Indian Ocean (a pastiche of Madagascar).

“This was one of the last forests on that part of the planet that was still completely wild, and it had been kept that way by the government of Marisco until recently, when a group of generals seized power. A month ago, mice had found a document on the generals’ computers – a document that revealed their plan to sell the rights to the forest to Loggocorp, a huge international timber company.” (p. 16)

Susan has been working with ex-President Pindoran’s government-in-exile in London, which has been in touch with rain forest experts through London University. They hope that together they can prevent the generals’ plan to sell off Marisco’s forest and maybe even restore the previous government. But Loggocorp has hacked into Pindoran’s computer to keep track of his plans to keep them from getting the forest, and they have learned of the forest experts including Susan’s plans to stop them. Loggocorp has hired some of the best computer hackers in the world to eavesdrop on the experts (including Susan’s and, through her, the mice’s secret e-mails), so nobody dares send e-mails any more. Worse, Loggocorp has hired one of Fred’s ex-acquaintances, an individual fired for hacking, to snoop around. A delegation of humans and mice go to London to coordinate with the forest experts in privacy – but Loggocorp is waiting for them.

“For the first time since they’d known him, Sir Quentin [a mouse] spoke in a rapid burst of MSL [Mouse Sign Language, which mice usually use to talk with humans], ending with signs simple enough for the humans to understand. Pointing to a watercolor painting labeled St. Paul’s Cathedral at Dawn. Pointing at an ear. Paw to lips. Hush. St. Paul’s Cathedral at Dawn is listening.

Now Sir Quentin was making the unmistakable signs for ‘Follow me!’ and he headed for the bathroom. With one last sign. Bring the Thumbtop that Jake had left on the coffee table.”

(The mouse had stayed behind in their hotel room when the humans had gone out to see London, and he was there when a man broke in and planted an electronic bug behind the painting. p. 92)

The Humans Who Know and the British mice hastily organize a fake Rising Sea Level Conference to disguise the meeting of rain forest experts, at Buckford Hall, the palatial but run-down estate of the Duke of Wiltshire, with ex-President Pindoran posing as a concerned sea level scientist from Fiji (where the islands really are threatened by rising sea levels). But Loggocorp infiltrates that, too. A lot of hugger-mugger ensues throughout the Duke’s estate, but every time it looks like Loggocorp is about to steamroller over the Humans Who Know, the mice devise a strategy to save the situation. Okay, it gets a bit juvenile – the Mousenet trilogy is written for 8- to 12-year-olds – but it’s satisfying to have the animals save the situation rather than to have the human children save it for them.

Mouse Mission will appeal to furry readers more than the usual talking-animal children’s fantasy because the animals are not supporting characters to the children. It’s the mice who advise The Humans Who Know. The Humans Who Know – three adults and two pre-teens – are all equal partners. The kids don’t run things, and there are several mice who are also equal in planning. The mice, whose squeaking language is impractical for humans, communicate with them by Mouse Sign Language where necessary, and by computer – the mice using Thumbtops and the humans using laptops — as soon as they can.

As Stephanie Yue’s cover shows, the mice don’t wear clothes since they have fur. Breitrose’s Mousenet trilogy is like Robert C. O’Brien’s Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH in this respect (and very unlike Don Bluth’s movie, where the rats imitated the humans as much as possible). They only use what they need. There are other more sophisticated touches, such as the mice taking advantage of the humans’ inability to tell an unclothed mouse male from a female. And Ken, the London mouse with a Cockney accent.

“‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ said Ken, climbing out of Jake’s pocket, where he’d been riding. ‘Lovely stuff. ‘This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.’ We all had to learn it. Shakespeare, innit? Richard the Second. But now we got a job to do. Right? Take a message to that Sir Brian about where them experts should be delivered, from the airport.’” (p. 88)

Mouse Mission is a satisfactory end to the trilogy, and is better than the message-heavy Mousemobile. This is another book recommended for furry fans with children more than for adult fans.

– Fred Patten

• Buy on Amazon
• Learn more about the Mousenet Series
• Kirkus Review of Mouse Mission
• Prudence Breitrose’s thoughts on her books success

Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer.

Zen: Meditations d’Un Canard Égoiste (Zen: Meditations of an Egotistical Duck), by Phicil
Paris, Éditions Carabas, November 2015; hardcover €16,00 (80 pages).

Google’s automatic translator says that “un canard égoiste” is “a selfish duck”, but in this case “egotistical” is a better translation than “selfish”. Jean Plumo sees everything as revolving around himself, but he’s not particularly selfish once the needs and desires of others are brought to his attention.

The Patten-Nakashima conspiracy to get you to read French funny-animal bandes dessinées that aren’t likely to be published in English has probably let you down this time.

Jean Plumo, a mallard office-worker in a funny-animal world, is fed up with not only being yelled at by an unsympathetic boss, but at not getting the respect he feels that he’s due from his fellow deskmates. When he sees a copy of Bronzage (“Tanning”) magazine on his boss’ desk with an article about a luxurious vacation retreat to study zen meditation all day (implied under the sun; a good way to get a tan), he decides to sign up for it.

It’s not what he expects.

Zen: Meditations of an Egotistical Duck probably isn’t what you expect, either. Yes, there is a story here, but there is a serious lesson on the history and teachings of Buddhism and zen meditation as well. There are three long interludes in the story when Bernard, the master of the retreat (a Saint-Bernard dog), tells everyone a famous Buddhist legend: “Sur les Pas du Bouddha”, Prince Siddharta’s life and conversion into the Buddha in India (about 500 B.C.; Buddha drawn as a tiger); “Bodhidarma, l’Insaisissable”, one of Buddha’s “perfect disciples” (drawn as an elephant) introducing Buddhism to South China, and disappointing everyone by insisting that it’s impossible to know anything, and the secret of immortality lies in studying nothingness for the rest of your life; and “Asanga et la Sagesse”, about a famous Buddhist monk about 400 A.D. (drawn as a dog) spending a dozen years in meditation to become pure enough to see a spirit, then not recognizing one when it appears. There is a parallel in the spirits of Buddha, Bodhidarma, and Asanga appearing to Jean, and him dismissing them as just other students in the retreat. Does Jean get anything out of the retreat at the end? Well, yes – in his egotistical way.

Zen: Meditations of an Egotistical Duck is witty, but it seems more worthwhile for the student of zen Buddhism than for the average funny-animal fan. The French is more complex than usual, too; full of adult slang. There are probably better Buddhist primers for beginners available in English.

– Fred Patten

• Buy on Amazon

Sorry, I couldn’t resist a flippant headline. I’m laughing with the subjects of the story. Some of the crinkly among us will consider panties and similar undergarments to be literally just something to wear. And who am I to judge? It’s not my place to “change” them.

This reminds me of an amusing topic at Reddit’s r/furry community. It asked, if furry fandom had a motto, what would it be? Winner- “Yes, I am into that”.

There’s an endearingly permissive spectrum of Things Furries Are Into. At the far end is a topic that’s naturally going to be more uncomfortable than any other.  You see, quirky curiosities like Vore aren’t going to happen outside of fantasy and imagination.

This one (let’s name names – “cub”, babyfur, littlefur, AB/DL, age play) is likely to be nothing but consenting role-play.  But people get squeamish.  We’ve all been vulnerable kids or responsible caretakers at some point.  I don’t like slippery-slope overreaction, but it makes an extreme test of the coexistence of two fundamentally different camps.

I call it the Big Umbrella from Disney to Dirty.  This shouldn’t have to be said but many furries want NOTHING to do with dirty stuff.  The divide of clean vs. adult is unresolvable with this hobby.  But you have to remember that your parents had sex AND raised kids.  Duality is part of life.  Handling it poorly is a problem with neurotic, puritanical America, where sex is scary and murder is entertainment. Torture-porn is box office gold but a TV nipple-slip is a scandal.

Role-play can be chaste, but adult art is a specific issue.  Pushing the limits of cute, pastel-hued character art has been a thing since many furs were still in di… uh, bad figure of speech.  Read Fred Patten’s discussion about 1990’s Tiny Toons fan art that provoked Warner Bros. cease-and-desist letters. Some furries get extremely prudish, and others get vehemently defensive: “We’re here, we’re crinkly, get used to it.”

It’s certainly not a thing you’d want associated with regular life or profession – like when a character in the documentary “Fursonas” was bullied out of a job.  To push it as a “rights” thing seems ill-conceived and embarrassing… but on the other hand, it’s not fair to be scapegoated about harmless private quirks.  In 2015, the Rainfurrest convention shut down due to vandalism and it was conflated with “morals” offenses.  There’s a “fandom complex” about this.

#rainfurrest #RF2015 #rf2016
RF issues in a nutshell. pic.twitter.com/ge6Rdjp3ny

— Corri T. Cub (@corri_yammari) October 10, 2015

Does a subculture need moral nannies?  How about nannies who support cub-furs to be themselves, like good partners?

It all leads to an update for last week’s story – the launch of Furry Network, a “furry fandom game-changer”.

Complaints about management of a furry art site?  That wasn’t going to happen to Furry Network, was it?

TL;DR - cub porn is no longer permitted on Furry Network. Full details: https://t.co/sWvvgeSCZv

— Furry Network (@FurryNetwork) May 28, 2016

• Forum topic: “Remove allowing Cub Pornography on the website.“
• Forum topic: “Possible compromise for the cub art issue.“
• “It’s like they have a God-complex. “I don’t like this, remove it or else.” Even though FN HAS a blacklist so you don’t have to see that type of stuff, they feel like they have to “save everyone from seeing it”. – (Waba Grill)

Crassus writes in:

“I did a bit of research and I discovered something rather odd that I don’t think has been made widely known yet. There was a security setting on FN’s Support forums that was not toggled, so it is likely that those votes in favor of the Cub art ban were actually made by a small group of people who spoofed hundreds of votes… In other words, signs indicate it was a hoax.

The timing of the revelation coincided with Varka’s locking of the thread and preventing new comments.

If Varka knew about the possibility of a hoax, why did he proceed with their demands?
Why did Varka leave it to a democratic majority decision when this is more of a civil rights issue?
Why did Varka allow such a thread to continue when the forum itself is supposed to be for tech features?
Will Varka be pressed to consider the implications of the ban if it is made widely known that a hoax took place?

And finally, will Varka retract the ban?

I wrote a short thought-piece on it on my IB Journal: “Were the FN Cub Porn Ban Votes FAKED?“

In light of the ban taking place in record-breaking time I think this revelation is rather significant and could have a long-standing effect on the community if not acknowledged.” – (Crassus)

In my opinion, I wouldn’t be surprised if people went out of their way to take advantage of such a voting loophole.  But it just sounds circumstantial without someone naming themselves for doing many votes.

Whether voting is fair or not, it’s Furry Network’s call to set policies (you use Facebook and don’t get to vote there, right?)  Even if the voting was worthless, FN’s policy is in line with other sites.  Their announcement seem reasonable and caring to me.  It’s very sensitive content, there’s other sites that host it, and “professionalism” (a subjective word) is a tradeoff from extreme freedom for a special subset. They don’t want harm for professional artists using the site.

Furry Network runs a business, and they’re offering significant potential to improve Furry Business for others. Access to the work of developers doesn’t make entitlement to “rights”, it’s more like being a guest or partner. (Don’t like the policy, don’t use the site.)

Keep in mind how FurAffinity couldn’t make a relationship with payment processors:

• Flayrah: Fur Affinity loses AlertPay account, bans cub porn (2010)

Remember how long and loudly people complained about wanting a better site?  It makes a conundrum if you can’t pay to build a site when policies make it hard to develop a business.  Freedom or funding?  You can’t have your cake and eat it too.

Dragoneer did keep the site largely a haven for adult content – arguably a pro-artist compromise that held back development (separate from management topics), but supported Furry growth until now.

That may have led to this point when a new site can swoop in with a solution – not because Furaffinity failed, but because FA navigated limitations to make this possible. There had to be a community who like what Bad Dragon sells. That’s how BD built a baked-in payment system for FN.

With Furry Network’s policy, multiple sites are still needed to cover all the bases.  Competition is good, and this doesn’t stop you from expressing what you want on your own, or sharing it peer to peer.  Enjoy being DIY, which I think is the coolest thing about furries.

Fan entitlement is another topic, but keep in mind that it’s a real thing.

Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer.

Simon Thorn and the Wolf’s Den, by Aimée Carter
NYC, Bloomsbury Children’s Books, February 2016, hardcover $16.99 (307 pages), Kindle $6.99.

Besides furry fiction, there is a category of children’s fantasy about human children learning that they can talk with animals, and that the animals have civilizations of their own. The best of these include the Chronicles of Narnia, by C. S. Lewis, in which human children discover a large fantasy dimension. Average examples include the recent Secrets of Bearhaven, Book One, by K. E. Rocha, where 11-year-old Spencer Plain learns that his parents can talk with bears and they have helped the bears establish a secret bear society hidden within our own. And then there is Simon Thorn and the Wolf’s Den, by Aimée Carter.

Simon is 12 years old and miserable. He’s picked upon by school bullies and he has no friends. He shares a cramped NYC apartment with his scarred Uncle Darryl. Nobody will tell him why Uncle Darryl is horribly scarred, or why his father is dead, or why his mother has been gone for a year on a zoological assignment – she sends him frequent “I love you” postcards from all over the country that don’t really tell him anything.

Or why he can suddenly talk with animals. He doesn’t tell anyone about this because Uncle Darryl apparently hates animals, even though a mouse he names Felix has become his best friend, and he could prove that he can talk with pigeons easily enough.

Then a one-eyed golden eagle tells him he’s in terrible danger, and his mother suddenly reappears, and Simon discovers that his mother and Uncle Darryl have been hiding the secret that they can not only talk with animals, too, but can change into them, but there’s no time to explain anything because they have to escape RIGHT NOW from an army of rats who want to kill them, and he’s really a hidden prince of all birds, but not the crown prince because he has an older twin brother that nobody told him about, and …

It’s all too much high profile adventure. There is lots of action, but it’s all meaningless. Nobody can tell him anything! Nobody notices anything! You’ve never seen such a string of interruptions and oblivious people.

“The eagle turned his head so he could see Simon with his good eye. ‘You’re in grave danger, Simon Thorn. If you don’t come with me at once –‘

‘Simon?’ said a rough voice outside his door. ‘Who are you talking to?’” (p. 5)

“Out of all the things the eagle could have said, this was the one Simon least expected. ‘You – you know my mother?’

‘Indeed,’ said the eagle. If you would come with me –‘

A snarl cut through the crisp air. Startled, the eagle took flight, and Simon cursed. ‘Wait – come back!’” (p. 14)

“‘They are coming for you, Simon Thorn, and if they find you, they will kill you.’

‘Kill me?’ he blurted. ‘Why?’

‘There is no time to explain. They are closing in as we speak. If you would come with me –‘

Another snarl cut through the air; exactly the same as that morning. Startled, the eagle took flight. ‘Run, Simon, before it is too late!’” (pgs. 28-29)

“‘Where have you been, Mom?’

She frowned. ‘I’m sorry, sweetheart. Work’s been so busy –‘

‘For a whole year? You didn’t take a single day off?’

‘I –‘ his mother began, but the door burst open before she could say anything else.” (p. 33)

“Darryl landed hard on the asphalt and began to kick the swarm of rats out of the way. Simon scrambled after him. Rats immediately began to climb up his legs again, and though he brandished the blade threateningly, he couldn’t bring himself to kill them. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway. Even as another flock of pigeons dived from above to fight the rats, Simon could see that there had to be hundreds, if not thousands by now, coming relentlessly for them. They were trapped.” (This is in the middle of a New York City street in mid-day, and nobody notices anything. p. 51)

“‘Hey!’ yelled the doorman, but Simon was already running. The rats had nearly taken over the sidewalk, but seemingly oblivious pedestrians had formed a path through the battle, and Simon jumped from one clear spot to the next, narrowly missing several tails.” (p. 78)

“Vanessa stepped out from the crowd and blocked his way. Behind her, another half-dozen human members of the pack appeared, forming a semicircle around them. Tourists and families stepped around them easily, not seeming to notice the intrusion, but Simon stopped cold.” (p. 254)

I could go on, but you get the idea. The action gets increasingly desperate, and increasingly bland since Simon, who doesn’t know what’s going on, always easily wins. When he’s forced into a magical duel with Ariana, a girl who can turn into a black-widow spider and who is famous among the Animalgams for never being beaten, Simon easily beats her. The shapeshifting is not even pretend-plausible; it includes clothing and size. If a boy or girl turns into a mosquito, a shark, an alligator, a butterfly, or an elephant, the change is instantaneous and the Animalgam is ready to go. There are the stereotypically helpful sardonic tomboyish girl his own age, and the comically awkward glasses-wearing nerd who becomes the protagonist’s only friend – here it’s Jam, Benjamin Fluke, a boy weredolphin

Simon Thorn and the Wolf’s Den (cover by Owen Richardson) does not say that it’s Book One of a series, but the inconclusive ending leaves no doubt that a sequel is coming. Buy only if you’re really desperate for talking-animal books.

– Fred Patten

• Buy on Amazon
• Buy on Bloomsbury

Headlines, links and little stories to make your tail wag.  Tips: [email protected]. 

Canada’s CBC Radio – “‘Fursonas’ unzips the complex world of furry fandom.” Interview with Dominic Rodriguez (Video the Wolf), director of the movie.

Criterioncast.com reviews Fursonas.  Joshua Brunsting calls it: “…a tender and nuanced meditation on a community that’s still trying to find itself… a noteworthy achievement for having the skill and will to let the narrative breathe.”

Furries Love Zootopia. On Uproxx, they smartly highlighted part of an interview with Video to point this out.

“Brisbane ‘furries’ find community and acceptance inside animal suits.”  ABC News in Australia covers a “haven for the shy and socially awkward”.

Mexican news interview with Paco Panda (Tip: Fred Patten.)  Translated from Spanish. Paco el Panda is identified as an artist in Guadalajara.

San Francisco Bay Area Furries get one of the best Furry News articles ever.  How the furry community rallied when Zarafa Giraffe lost his head. Don’t miss our articles that mention it here and here already… it’s too good not to link again.

Bay Area Furs are very photogenic.  “Photo Du Jour: Furries Like Taking Tourist Pics Too.”

OMG! @LoboLoc0 does amazing work! A shot from our SF photoshoot last Sun,in front of the Painted Ladies of Alamo Sq. pic.twitter.com/R53FAGZzV4

— Zarafa (@Zarafagiraffe) April 23, 2016

Fursuiters at How Weird Street Faire in San Francisco.

In past years, furries have appeared in the fair’s promotional videos, news articles, and on local ABC TV news about it. This event starts their local street fair season. This gallery (browse to find some furries) shows the huge volume of the crowds – thousands upon thousands of people all dressed their weirdest.  When fursuiters stand out among them, it says a lot about their undeniable fuzzy glamor.

RIP to Kyu Fox.

A Bay Area Furries announcement said: “Kyu Fox passed away on April 13th. He was fairly well known in the local community, and his loss is deeply felt.” There was a memorial potluck/bbq with fursuits on May 1. Photos or stories about Kyu were shared for a scrapbook scanned for everyone, with an original book given to his family.

“My First Furry Convention: Shut Up, You’re Weird, Too”.

A long time con staffer (for all kinds) gives an inside view of the mess and the magic. He discusses the small percent of assholes who inhabit every community (naming vandalism at an anime con of 17,000), mitigating complaints that Furries have unique problems.  And he praises living with an open mind.

Ever heard of “FLESHIES?” Three trashy articles about furries, petplay, and otherkin.

Britain’s Daily Star: “Who are the furries? Britain’s kinkiest sex craze: People who romp dressed as ANIMALS”. They tweaked that headline for hits – before it was “Inside the world of ‘fursonas’, sex myths and £2000 costumes.”  Marvel at the absurdly shitty fact-checking, “anonymous” sourcing and fake language. “Fleshies?”  It’s the work of dishonest journalists stuffing in fake content to meet a quota.  In journalism school, they call that “shaving the hamster”. More in Britain’s Daily Mail: “Secret Life of the Human Pups – the weird world of the grown men who enjoy dressing up as DOGS in roleplay craze sweeping the nation.” Then there’s VICE: “What It Means to Be Trans Species.” 

I honestly think some of these #HumanPups could benefit from therapy, but unfortunately they're not allowed on the couch.

— Richard Osman (@richardosman) May 25, 2016

Basically they're dog shaggers lets be honest #humanpups #vile

— Katrina (@xkatrina7291x) May 26, 2016

Missing teen lost and found, fur charged with kidnapping.

Aiyana Wolf listed her age as 19 on FurAffinity.  Her account has one art submission that declares love for Kelo, a 30-year old man.  But she turned out to be age 16. Somewhere in their relationship, he stepped over the line.  It was reported that she had a mental condition that “does not allow her to make realistic life choices.” She ended up running away from home to be with Kelo.  They were found together and he was charged with kidnapping.

The out-of-touch professor.

On philly.com – “Commentary: First on campus encounter with ‘furry’ subculture.”  A college professor belittles weird young people (it sounds like he finds “prancing” to be shamefully unmanly).  He shares his dubious research to find out what they’re into – including this absurd gem.  (Imagine this read in the droning voice of Ben Stein):

“the teenage outcast becomes a full-fledged furry, choosing a character name, a species, and personality traits, purchases a fur suit or animal costume, and joins the furry community, where he is mentored by older furs.”

Reddit – “TIFU by accidentally telling my four-year old daughter to be a cat.”  We’ve all been there.

This is a great little animated short! “Film short about disabled puppy wins hearts, 59 awards, job offers from Disney.”

______________

AMAZING FURRY NEWS COMING SOON – Are Your Kids Safe From Weird Fur Craze Sweeping The Nation?

______________

Furry Anti-Defamation League Protests "No Dogs Allowed" Signs

— Dogpatch Press (@DogpatchPress) October 23, 2015

Fox Suits: The Blue Jeans Of Fursuiting

— Dogpatch Press (@DogpatchPress) October 23, 2015

Furry-American Rights: The Surprising Wedge Issue For The 2016 Election

— Dogpatch Press (@DogpatchPress) October 26, 2015

Hotel Offers Free Rabies Shots To Guests Who Complain About Furry Convention

— Dogpatch Press (@DogpatchPress) October 26, 2015

Ambulance Called To Furry Con Due To Hug Overdose

— Dogpatch Press (@DogpatchPress) October 30, 2015

Gay Bar Shuts Down To Reopen As Furry Bar

— Dogpatch Press (@DogpatchPress) October 30, 2015

Joke news is fun.

Dragoneer Trades FA Source Code For Magic Beans From Gypsy Peddler

— Dogpatch Press (@DogpatchPress) May 25, 2016

The Hard Times is a punk rock version of The Onion. They put out some of the funniest fake news anywhere.

“No One of Any Gender Wants To Use Venue Bathroom”

Did you hear news controversy about sharing bathrooms with trans people?  Personally I pee on hydrants, so I don’t give a shit about where other dogs pee.

On a Furry topic, here’s a news story that reminds me of Poe’s Law (the internet rule that says that parodies of extreme views will be taken as sincere, unless you tell people it’s a parody.)

Willamatte Week: Getting a Grip on Furry Fandom and Species Dysphoria Blues.

“It’s 2016. Time to check your Cishuman privilege.”  Cishuman… ha ha it’s fake, right?

Poe’s Law might happen if someone talks about this.  It reminds me of a time when I praised someone using the handle SLUTTY WEREWOLF for having the funniest name. I adored the flaunty bluntness.  Then SLUTTY WEREWOLF saw me post about the absurdity of “Species Identity Disorder” and unfriended me.

The International Anthropomorphic Research Project talks about “Species Identity Disorder.”  It’s in their first published academic study, “Furries from A to Z (Anthropomorphism to Zoomorphism):”

“…that up to 46% of furries ‘may possibly represent a condition we have tentatively dubbed “Species Identity Disorder”‘.

The diagnosis of Species Identity Disorder, a term invented by Gerbasi, is defined by her as ‘…considering the self as less than 100% human and wanting to be 0% human [and] is often accompanied by discomfort with their human body and feeling that they are another species trapped in a human body‘. Gerbasi makes a direct comparison to Gender Identity Disorder.” – [Adjective][Species]: Furry Research: A Look Back at Dr Gerbasi’s Landmark 2007 Study.

Isn’t this usually called “make-believe?”  But they call it a “disorder” and compare it to transgender.  It was enough to provoke an entire criticism paper: (PDF) “Furries and the Limits of Species Identity Disorder: A Response to Gerbasi et al. Fiona Probyn-Rapsey.”  (And their own response to say nuh uh.)

To be honest, I don’t have a lot of time to read such things. But I did read an IARP member’s explanation that backpedals from a label and says they were just trying to test for some “subclinical levels” of dysphoria, using similar questions about gender identity.  Supposedly those could just translate to testing feelings about being human.

It sounds like using colors to measure inches.  Isn’t that a non sequitur?  The long explanation intuitively seems off, and the more wordy a defense gets, the worse it smells to me.  “Subclinical” smells suspiciously like “microaggression”.  Even if furs have some feelings about their species, how is it more than “make-believe?”

“Spacekin.”

Studies of feelings can share more in common with slippery marketing than practitioners admit.  Marketers can have a lot of success with methods to reach very wrong goals. (Over-relying on focus groups does that, like in this story about Coke reformulating to New Coke, a famous bomb, after focus group testing for answers they wanted.)  I wouldn’t be surprised if testing voluntary, contained groups at furry cons gets squishy results.

To be honest again, I really like some IARP members and some of the study knowledge, but don’t trust other parts of the work that strongly resemble defensive PR.  Specifically, I don’t trust minimizing sexy topics while they enjoy being a single media go-to source. Or having “family friendly” Uncle Kage as co-author on their first paper (with “species identity disorder” in it) and then reacting badly to another researcher not allowed at Anthrocon – with what appears to be politics.

That researcher was interested in furry-as-fetish, also drawing from a model, called “ETLE”. Find details in the link, and let me just suggest that the reason ETLE is controversial is because politics don’t allow anyone to compare transgender identity to fetish.

Don’t shoot the messenger, but if some people have fetish for playing as pets, how is it bad to suggest that some people might be mixed up with fetish for something as prosaic as gender?  You don’t want to insult, but it’s not impossible to have multiple explanations.

I hosted that researcher’s study announcement and it was fiercely criticized. I was unimpressed by one IARP member’s reaction of calling it “shameful.” It smelled like politics. (Nobody noticed, but then he overcame criticism to complete the study.)

That’s a LOT of background about the silliness of “Species Identity Disorder.”

Here’s a wrinkle to calling it silly.  Some outsiders bring it up to mock transgender, the way that anti-gay people say “what’s next, you want to marry your dog?”  They think feeling at odds with your own gender is a joke and sign of moral decay.

@Montel_Williams if I've species dysphoria and think I'm a bird, can I crap on your car, legally?

— Johnny Dub (@realjohnadam) May 23, 2016

That’s funny by itself but not so much if it’s mocking trans people.

If a guy marries a guy there’s nothing wrong with it, and if someone gender transitions that’s OK.

Some people actually do want to marry their dogs and that’s… never mind.  But at least dogs exist. Meanwhile I think “real” Species Identity Disorder wouldn’t be like believing your dog is in love with you.  It would be like believing your lawnmower is in love with you. Or your sci-fi novel.

I don’t think it’s logical to compare things like gay relationships to marrying your dog, or transgender to transpecies.  But sometimes it’s good to be illogical.

Emperor Norton

Boomer The Dog is a fairly famous furry and a Real Dog who charms audiences in the documentary “Fursonas”. He has a sweet personality in spite of nastiness he attracted for going on TV and “making the fandom look bad” (furryspeak for “Think Of The Children”.)

I have no idea whether he claims to be Otherkin or Therian or Trans-Species.  I just remember him speaking in Fursonas about feeling the Spirit of a dog. To me, that sounds like a spiritual kind of philosophy.  I don’t believe Boomer deserves any judgement about medical conditions.  I don’t believe he has one related to this, and don’t think he claims to. That’s the difference from a “disorder” label.

Boomer has always been an awesome dog to me.  To others, I might call him “The Emperor Norton of Furry Fandom“.  It’s not like I know him very well, but whether he’s spiritual or just living a philosophy, I support him to be a dog.

I’d rather be a dog than dogmatically follow politics and labels.

#Triggered at stereotype in header. Not all furs are sexy wolves https://t.co/ubVGs4N7Ur #SomeAreUnsexy #NotAllBespectacledWhiteNerdboys

— Dogpatch Press (@DogpatchPress) May 25, 2016

Headlines, links and little stories to make your tail wag.  Tips: [email protected]. 

Ursa Major Awards announced.

WE’RE #2! Awooooo!!!  “Best Magazine” went to Heat from Sofawolf Press. Next year, maybe Dogpatch Press can get #1 with a shameless award campaign with sexy fursuit pin-up poses. (As fursuiter on staff, it’s not that I don’t have standards… I would enjoy it just as much as anyone who wants to see it.)

Congrats also to Furries Among Us, edited by Thurston Howl, a nice success for a new small publisher.  Then there’s the interesting topic of “Best Website” for FurAffinity.

FurAffinity hacked – furry problems reach wider community.

VICE: “Another Day, Another Hack: Furry Site Hacked, Content Deleted.”  Flayrah reported loss of six days of data and how the problem is being addressed.

Source code for the FurAffinity site was gained through a security hole.  The code ended up on flash drives distributed at Biggest Little Fur Con, even left around at random.  Shortly afterward, personal accounts were accessed.  Some people who used passwords in common with other accounts (Google etc.) reported attempts to access those. Password reset was done for all users, locking some users out of their accounts if they weren’t linked to current email addresses.

Dogpatch Press got tips, although the info was already on this gossip forum.  There was also an informative link to a timeline of FurAffinity’s problems maintained by Eevee.

There’s a long pattern of problems.  But then it couldn’t have been easy to build a large fan-based site with a very shaky business model.  In my opinion, it shows outside stigma as much as inside mistakes, and a positive testament to fan commitment.

Furry Network launched to the public – do FurAffinity’s problems make opportunity for a game-changer?  

On May 12-15, Biggest Little Fur Con was host for a planned launch event for Furry Network.  It’s the new art site sparked by IMVU’s buyout of FurAffinity, and developed by the minds behind Bad Dragon, king of what I call the “shadow economy” of Furry fandom.

If we named two leading “institutions” rising out of grassroots, DIY fandom (“Big Furry”), the other might be Anthrocon, representing the “family friendly” light side.  Occasionally I bring up the 2012 rule change that blocked Bad Dragon from Anthrocon – a superficially tiny event representing a major schism between two fundamentally conflicting camps.  Their strange coexistence is the biggest drawback and strength of Furry. (It’s no mistake that the recent Fursonas documentary specifically focused on leaders of both.)

Game-changer is a hype term – which may be well deserved.  Furry Network appears to offer the first widely useable mediation system for payments and ratings to manage Furry business.  Flayrah recently had discussion about why Furry-specific auction sites only inhabit a small niche apart from activity hubs.  This would be the first fandom-specific site to bring it together.

Remember how FurAffinity’s “cub problem” kept it from having a relationship with a payment processor, preventing growth?  Whatever Dragoneer’s faults, he kept the site largely untamed with only modest compromise about content.  But that was natively an art site, not an adult business built in the face of outside stigma about “morality”.  Furry Network starts out with a robust payment system already in place thanks to a thriving market for Bad Dragon products.

We sure do - complete with support for adult works, buyer/seller protection, and dispute resolution in-house. :D https://t.co/c14ZScQbDB

— Furry Network (@FurryNetwork) May 19, 2016

Could a potential game-changer like this come from any other fan institution?  It’s why I say “porn saves.”

FurAffinity’s most recent drama isn’t the first time they faced a challenge from competition during a crisis. Last year Flayrah reported shedding users when the FurAffinity Forums broke away.  Now, security measures on FA (including new Captchas) have a suspiciously convenient side-effect.  Grab popcorn.

Hey everyone! We're sorry the importer isn't working - we looked into it, and it seems to be because the source site is in read-only mode.

— Furry Network (@FurryNetwork) May 21, 2016

“Announcing the Furry Writers Guild University!”

It may look like just another subforum, but it’s a home for online writing workshops sponsored by the FWG.

“What I’d love for the FWGU to become — with our members’ and supporters’ help — is a place where both new and experienced furry writers can come to learn about writing in a more in-depth way than just a single critique, where our experienced members can pay it forward by leading workshops for their peers and up-and-coming writers in the fandom, and where writers who don’t have the ability to travel to conventions and attend panels can get a little of that same panel experience online from wherever they are. If anyone (member or future member) would like to lead a workshop, we have a proposal form here you can fill out and submit.” – (Renee Carter Hall, “Poetigress”, FWG President 2014-2016.)

Furry Publishers twitter accounts collected by Fuzzwolf of FurPlanet.  A list of 14 publishers for furry authors to know.

______________

AMAZING FURRY NEWS COMING SOON – Zootopia Porn Parody As Popular As Real Thing In #7!

______________

Big Pharma Upset When Furry Hugs Proven Better Than Overpriced Pills

— Dogpatch Press (@DogpatchPress) October 14, 2015

Con Rulebook Suggests Not To Party Until You Puke Inside Your Fursuit

— Dogpatch Press (@DogpatchPress) October 14, 2015

Time Traveler Comes From 2022 To Stop Furry-Brony World War

— Dogpatch Press (@DogpatchPress) October 22, 2015

Museum Of Furry's First Exhibit Is Uncle Kage’s Liver

— Dogpatch Press (@DogpatchPress) October 23, 2015

Grumpy Old Man In Sleeping Gown Throws Shoe At Furry Orgy

— Dogpatch Press (@DogpatchPress) October 22, 2015

Obama Commissions Fursuit So He Can Go Places Without Secret Service Hanging Off His Ass

— Dogpatch Press (@DogpatchPress) October 22, 2015

 

Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer.

Light: A Tale of the Magical Creatures of Zudukii, by T. S. McNally. Revised First Edition.
Syracuse, NY, Bounding Boomer Books, February 2015; trade paperback $9.99 (158 pages), Kindle $4.99.

Back in May 2015, I reviewed Light, by T. S. McNally. My review was generally positive, but I did have several complaints:

“Light is more or less worth reading, but this is one of those books where you have to grit your teeth and plow through leaden prose and grammatical errors on almost every page. There are no spelling errors, but was the novel proofread otherwise? There are plenty of obvious missing and double words, like “‘Brudder! You have my toffee?’ his [Garoo’s] young brother [a fawn] inquired as he leaning forward.” (p. 24), or “You were always were pretty bright.” (p. 31). Fangstro is constantly called a wolf; a canine. Wolves are canids, but are they canines? I can’t read the word “canine” without thinking of dogs.”

Since Light is published by print-on-demand technology, McNally has produced a Revised First Edition that corrects many of these mistakes. The date has not been changed, but the original first edition was 151 pages; this revision is 158 pages. The passage that I quoted on pages 136-137 is now on page 143. The specific errors that I pointed out have been fixed; but Garoo still has an unusually prehensile tail for a kangaroo, and the wolves are called canines, not canids.

Since most of the errors that I complained about are gone, here is my review again with those complaints gone.

“Magical creatures” are the operative words here. I usually divide anthropomorphic fiction into either furry or funny-animal fiction, depending upon whether the anthro animals show some semblance of reality as to species, or whether they are “animal-headed humans”. In Light, though, the inhabitants of Zudukii are totally, blatantly fantastic. It is rare when two characters, say a brother and sister, are the same species, and all are basically humans. A bear has an otter sister, who has a kangaroo boyfriend.

Actually, he’s not exactly a kangaroo. While Garoo is usually called a kangaroo, he is more accurately described (disparagingly) as a kangabuck, a kangaroo with antlers; the son of a stag father and a kangaroo mother. See the cover by Selkie. But most characters do not display a mixed heritage. They are either one animal or the other.

(Frankly, I thought that a kangaroo with antlers sounded ridiculous. But that was before I saw the fish with a reindeer’s antlers on the civic arms of Inari, Finland.)

Does Garoo hop or walk? The reader can’t tell. Does he have other non-kangaroo attributes? Page 29 says, “The crowd had grown to such a size that the kangaroo wrapped his tail around one of the posts as to keep himself from accidently falling into the water.” Kangaroo tails are not that prehensile.

Do the animals, including anthro birds, wear clothes or not? This is vague until page 31, when “Enveloped in a long green dress, a grey bushy form of a squirrel female […]” — although it’s still unclear as to whether all of the animals wear clothes or only some of them.

Light’s plot makes it a Young Adult novel. The adolescents of Emergant, a village in Land Province, are due to all board the Arcane, a religious/social river ship and sail to Omnigic village, the religious capital, where each will learn what magic Power he or she will receive – or none at all. Garoo, the son of Emergant’s Elder, the proudly antlered stag Bomeran, is widely expected to become his father’s successor. But Garoo stubbornly refuses to learn to fight, a necessary duty to defend the village – if it is not a contradiction, he might be called militantly pacifistic. Kareen, his tomboyish otter girlfriend, determines that if he won’t fight for himself, she will fight for him; even if this may make her more favored than him for the heir apparent. But Fangstro, the bullying wolf teenage son of Emergant’s previous Elder, plots to discredit both Garoo and Kareen to become the new favorite; a scheme that becomes more urgent on the Night of Transitions when it looks like Bomeran will be promoted to the Sage of the whole Land Province and leave for Floreinna, the Province’s capital; creating an immediate vacancy for a new Elder in Emergant. For most of the novel, it looks like Fangstro’s plans to make them both absent from the ceremony where the adolescents receive their magic powers will work.

The most interesting aspect of Garoo’s world is its slowly revealed history and social structure. The world has been undergoing a time of peace after the Tri-Societal War of a generation ago, but that may not last. Each of the four Provinces is devoted to one of the four elements – Land, Water, Fire, and Air. A Sage is responsible for a whole Province; an Elder for only one village within it. Describing more details would give away too many spoilers.

Light ends on a dramatic cliffhanger, with a “To Continue in Wind.”

1. S. McNally is a frequent contributor to Flayrah under the name Sonious, depicted as a kangaroo. If all his fursonas are put together, you get Tantroo Sonious McNally; but that’s still only a fursona. But it’s an active one. He has written short stories for furry anthologies, and this is his first novel.

– Fred Patten

• Buy on Amazon

Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer.

Transmission Lost, by Stefan C. Mazzara.
Seattle, WA, CreateSpace, September 2015, trade paperback $14.50 (unpaged [474 pages]), Kindle $6.99.

Transmission Lost is categorized as science fiction, not furry fiction. Its plot is very stereotyped, but one that a furry fan can enjoy. A human spaceman befriends an animal-like member of an alien civilization and brings peace and friendship to both cultures.

Jack Squier is a 26-year-old civilian cargo pilot with Stellar Horizons (“You have it, we’ll ship it! Lightspeed guaranteed!”) in the far future. The UN Navy, which seems to be part of a large interstellar human civilization (does UN still stand for “United Nations”?), is fighting against the alien feline Ascendancy, a.k.a. the Ailians. The UN Navy, due to running low on transport ships after ten years of war, contracts with Stellar Horizons in NYC to deliver combat supplies to the front. The route that SH gives to Jack cuts briefly through Ailian-controlled space, but he’s assured that he doesn’t have anything to worry about.

“‘The Star’s Eye is the largest cargo ship we have that still carries a one-man crew. Relax, Jack, you’re only gonna be in Ailian space for two realspace stops. The rest of it’s hyperspace until you get to the Antaeus sector. By then you’ll be well within friendly territory. Don’t worry about it. Besides, you hate working with other people, remember? Consider this a blessing.’” (p. [3])

The enemy is the Ascendancy, an alien interstellar empire somewhere around the Outer Milky Way worlds.

“First contact had been been made [when Jack had been sixteen years old] with the Ascendancy, an empire spanning several galaxies inhabited by the feline race of the Ailians. Looking as a cross between a ten-foot-tall human and Bengal tiger, the Ailians were strong, ruthless, and extremely protective of their territory. And as it just so happened, humanity had unknowingly begun to encroach upon that territory. Thus humanity had entered into war with the Ascendency, just as determined to expand their borders and claim much-needed resources as the Ailians were to retain them and take over human territory for their own.” (pgs. [3-4])

Mazzara writes very good space opera of the old-fashioned “Flash Gordon” variety, even if I do have serious reservations about spaceships blasting off for the other side of the galaxy from a spaceport in New York City. They have controls about as simple as 21st-century automobiles, too.

“‘Star’s Eye, you’ve got clear weather, and winds less than five kilometers per hour. You’re clear to take off whenever you’re ready.’

Jack strapped himself in, flexing his fingers around the dual joystick-type handgrips which served to control his ship. […] He flipped several switches and was rewarded with a strong thrum from the four engines as they powered on. With a press down of his left foot, the ship leapt off the spaceport tarmac to an altitude of a hundred meters in an instant.” (pgs. [4-5])

Naturally, Jack’s peaceful cargo run is interrupted by an enemy patrol boat; a one-being gunboat similar to but more powerful than his own. The space battle described seems modeled upon Battle of Britain dogfights, at really close quarters.

“Jack looked over as the Ailian ship pulled alongside his. While he was certain the pilot of the other vessel could see into his cockpit, Jack couldn’t see through the blacked-out viewports of the other. Nevertheless, he knew the enemy pilot was looking right at him, so he smiled and gave a jaunty wave. Fighting the nausea that was threatening to make him spew his guts all over his controls, Jack reached for the override switch that controlled the safeguards on his hyperspace engines.” (p. [8])

Jack’s shot-up ship emerges from hyperspace near an uncharted planet. He crash-lands. So does the equally shot-up Ailian fighter.

Jack’s preparations for leaving his wrecked spaceship to explore an unknown planet seem more like exploring a dangerous Southeast Asian jungle.

“Jack returned to his cabin, opening a locked compartment underneath the bed. Reaching inside, he drew out a belt made of military-spec webbed material. Attached to it was a holster, magazine pouches, a flashlight, and a small fixed-blade knife. Jack checked the holster out of habit. Fitted snugly inside was a matte-black .45 semiautomatic. The same one, in fact, that he’d carried as a pilot in the Navy. Jack enjoyed shooting and he’d kept up with it after retiring from the military. With ten shots in the magazine, one in the chamber, and four spare magazines n his belt, Jack would feel quite a bit stepping out onto an unfamiliar planet with it than he would have without it. He strapped the belt around his waist, and went back to the door.” (pgs. [11-12]. Note “door”, not “airlock”.)

And naturally he immediately meets the Ailian pilot.

‘Three meters tall. Pale orange, black-striped fur. A long tail, nearly half as long as the body was tall. Bipedal, two arms, carrying a rifle only vaguely similar to Jack’s own. Clad in a singed red flight suit, bright yellow eyes reflecting the firelight. Female.” (p. [12])

The female Ailian, who speaks English with what reads like a strong Russian accent, is Lieutenant Aria Me’lia. They have a stereotypical trek through the jungle/forest as reluctant allies, saving each other’s lives and bonding together. The exotic alien animals will be appreciated by furry fans, too.

“The larger animal howled in frustration as its prey escaped up the tree. Jack got a good look at it as it stood at the base of the tree, staring up at the escaped animal. The predator was huge, easily as big as Jack and maybe just a little bigger. Like the smaller animal, it had four legs, but the similarities stopped there. Twin tails extended from its haunches, each of them tipped with a wicked-looking short blade of what looked like blackened bone or horn. The blades glimmered in the firelight, shining with a natural polish. Each of the beast’s four paws ended in short, slightly curved claws. The most fearsome part of it was its muzzle, which was longer than a wolf’s and was filled with twin rows of sharp, shark-like teeth. The animal was covered with fur in a pattern of green, brown, and black, the perfect natural camouflage.” (p. [32])

and

“Jack opened his eyes and found himself face to face with a large dog-like creature. The blue-furred beast was gazing at him with five large green eyes arranged in a pentagon on its head, four nostrils flaring as it sniffed at him. It had been prodding at his face with one paw. Jack slowly raised his head, and the animal jumped back from him, spooked. Shying back several more steps, it turned and ran off into the distance.” (p. [63])

The trek includes having to climb a low mountain range. There’s a waterfall shower scene, of course.

“Aria was standing up in the waterfall, her face turned up to the cascade as she let the water flow over her. She was turned towards Jack, slightly to one side, but she hadn’t seemed to notice him. Inadvertently she was giving him quite the eyeful. Jack had already seen her nude a few times before, of course, when he was tending her wounds and in the tent, but that had been in close quarters and he hadn’t been bold enough, or interested enough, to look for more than a few seconds. But now the setting and her unguarded appearance was piquing his curiosity.” (pgs. [56-57])

By the time Jack and Aria do find help, they are more than just good friends. The “help” is of a dubious nature, however.

“‘Pirates.’ Jack said, the fear obvious in his voice. ‘That’s the insignia of the Scorpion Guild. Before the war started, they were the biggest threat to shipping in human space. They still operate throughout the war zone and all over the galaxy. They’re part of the reason that the military has a shortage of transport vessels. I bet that’s one they stole.” (p. [95])

This is barely a quarter of Transmission Lost. Plotwise, it’s a combination of well-worn newspaper comic-strip s-f and the “space empire” skullduggery that Edmond Hamilton used to churn out in the 1940s Captain Future pulps and novels like the 1949 The Star Kings. (Full disclosure: I loved The Star Kings. My junior high school library had it, and I must’ve read it a half-dozen times.) But Mazzara’s breezy, well-fleshed-out writing keeps it feeling fresh, at least as it relates to Jack Squier and his ten-foot-tall anthropomorphic tigress partner/mate (cover by Tyler McDonald). And when they get off that jungle planet and into the flow of Ascendancy society, and then the maelstrom of Ascendancy politics – well, there are enough ten-foot-tall tigeroids for everyone. If you like undemanding space opera adventure with furry aliens, you’ll like Transmission Lost.

– Fred Patten

• Buy on Amazon

Wolves are known for being proud, majestic creatures. Known for their loyalty, courage, and intelligence – but it wasn’t always that way. There was a time people saw wolves as only monsters and creatures to fear, for they hunt in the night, kill livestock, and send eerie howls to the full moon. These fears have almost driven these misunderstood creatures into extinction.  As scientist studied them more, the more public opinion of them began to change – but stereotypes are hard to get rid of.

That’s why organizations like the National Wolfwatcher Coalition strive to ‘educate, advocate, and participate’ for the long term recovery and the preservation of wolves based on the best available science and the principles of democracy.‘ One of those ways is through their popular anthology, Wolf Warriors.  

You can be a part of it.  Going into it’s third volume, Wolf Warriors III is being edited by Thurston Howl and published by Thurston Howl Publications. The anthology is used as a fundraiser for the National Wolfwatcher Coalition to continue their mission. The idea for the anthology played a huge part in getting Thurston Howl Publications off the ground and putting Howl’s editing skills to work.

Thurston Howl Publications is an odd duck in furry publishing:

“THP is one of the world’s first furry-inclusive (as opposed to furry-exclusive and furry-excluding/non-furry) publishing house. Based in TN, it publishes almost ten books a year, has a staff of almost thirty people, and, so far, has received a nomination for the Ursa Major Award for its nonfiction furry essay collection published last year. (Furries Among Us). It is a very good group, and I’ve loved all of our clients so far.”

Howl himself stumbled across our fandom when he was doing research about animals who symbolize literary representations of lust:

“Of course, I stumbled across the fandom through media portrayals of furry as a “kink,” but after going to my first furmeet and interviewing furries, I realized I wasn’t too different at all. That was roughly four or five years ago. Since then, I have written, edited, and published furry fiction. I want THP to rise up as an affordable yet high-quality seller of books for the fandom.”

Thurston Howl

This year’s theme for Wolf Warriors is Winter Wolves. What does that mean?

“Honestly, I’m expecting half of the pieces to just have a winter setting, while the other half might be specifically holiday-themed.”

If you wish to submit, you’re free to interrupt that as you will. There’s no limit to genre or even type of story. They’re looking for everything from short stories, essays, flash fiction, poetry, and artwork, to photography. Submission guidelines for each can be found on Thurston Howl Publication’s website. Please be sure you read all the requirements before writing or submitting your story. This is a general audience book, so any adult content will not be accepted.

Wolf Warrior is a non-paying market book, but if your work is accepted, Thurston Howl Publications will discuss terms and rights. The true goal of the anthology is to show people that wolves are not the monsters we’ve build them to be. To show people how amazing these beautiful creatures are. Whether they walk on four paws or two, wild or civilized, let’s show what the true beauty of wolves can be. Aroooo!

Wolf Warrior III – Winter Wolves deadline is June 15th.  The book is planned for release later this year.

-Pup Matthias

Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer.

The Sage of Waterloo: A Tale, by Leona Francombe
NYC, W. W. Norton & Co., June 2015, hardcover $22.95 (x + 224 pages), Kindle $11.99.

This leisurely novel will tell you more than you want to know about the famous Battle of Waterloo of June 17, 1815. To the rabbits who live there today, it’s the only exciting thing that ever happened there. They never tire of hearing about it, in detail. William, the narrator, is one of those rabbits.

“Waterloo is where I was born, and where I spent the first three years of my life. Well, technically it wasn’t Waterloo itself but the ancient Brabant farm of Hougoumont, one of the iconic battle sites situated in the fields a few kilometers farther up the Chaussée de Waterloo. In 1815, this long, forested avenue funneled weary streams of humanity back and forth between the battlefield and the city – between destiny and deliverance.” (p. 5)

This may be the last generation that Hougoumont knows as a farm. William describes its decline from a working farm to a forgotten relic. “I was happy at Hougoumont. The last farmer to live there was not like the aristocrats who had once owned the chateau (there was no more chateau – the French had shelled it). He raised cattle, and seemed far less interested in rabbit and pigeon dishes than his predecessors. He was, thank heavens, a frozen–food sort of man, and thus our existence was blissfully irrelevant.” (p. 7) The rural village of Waterloo has expanded into a modern small city, and the old farm with its rabbit hutches and dovecotes will soon be torn down.

“I am no longer young. I’ll be eleven in a few months, which not only requires math well beyond my skills to calculate in human years, but also obliges me to press on with my storytelling. Those of you who are already experiencing the adventure of aging may have discovered that this part of the journey does not only entail unexpected dips and fissures in the road, aches in the limbs, problems reaching those hard-to-clean areas (Old Lavender gave them up early on) and so forth.” (pgs. 12-13). William describes his hutchmates in detail. “Jonas, a distant cousin, was a rash, handsome buck infamous for his preening, scheming, and disreputable tail-chasing.” (p. 13) “Boomerang, a slightly crazed uncle, had the obscure habit of throwing himself sideways against the barrier, bouncing off at ever-more-interesting angles.” (p. 14) “Caillou was the runt (his name, fittingly, meant ‘pebble’).” (ibid.) And others. “Most of us followed the general rules that defined the Hollow Way. Yield. Bump ahead. No left turn. That sort of thing. It was a predictable sort of life, vigorously stamped with the colony’s imprimatur: milling, eating, nudging, nipping, dozing … milling, eating, nudging, nip …You get the idea.” (p. 16)

The doyen of the hutch is Old Lavender, their ancient grandmother. “No one could say how long Old Lavender had lived in the colony. She was grandmother to at least ten generations, and while other relatives disappeared over the years at the farmer’s whims, or those of Moon, the invisible arbiter of our kind, she had always been permitted to stay. No one dared to cross her. She was just too big, for one thing. And of course, there was that smell …” (p. 2) And Old Lavender likes to tell about the Battle of Waterloo.

“After a period of reflection – several days or so – Old Lavender would lecture to the enclosure at large. The place was crowded: we were unable to eat, groom, fornicate or daydream more than about a foot away from someone else, so she had a decent captive audience. Not that we objected. She mined her Waterloo passion for treasures that were exclusively ours for the taking.” (p. 29)

Francombe tries to keep it interesting. Parts of the story are straight narration. Parts are in the form of a quiz.

“Mornings were reserved for pop quizzes: ‘What did Wellington have for breakfast?’ (Hot, sweet tea and toast. Napoleon, by the way, took his breakfast on silver plate.) ‘Why was Napoleon such a poor rider?’ (He slid around on the saddle too much, wearing holes in his breeches.) ‘How long was Generalfeldmarschall Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher pinned under his dead horse?’ (Even longer than it takes to pronounce his name properly.) ‘What did they use to revive him?’ (Blücher, not the horse: gin and garlic.)” (p. 35)

William loses himself in visions of himself as the heroic cast.

“I hardly knew which one to choose from. For guaranteed escape, Wellington was always a good bet, so I would track him eagerly as he rode about all day in his plain blue frock coat and bicorne hat, amazed at how such a mythmaker could subsist on just hot tea and toast. Then I would leave the Duke to his reconnoitering for a while and practice pronouncing Generalfeldmarschall Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher. I never really mastered it, despite all the hours spent trying, thereby gaining a much greater appreciation of the old Prussian general’s predicament. (He was seventy-three at the time.) When these activities paled, I imagined myself boldly escaping from the Hougoumont barn during the fiercest of the fighting, leaping across the chateau garden through a blizzard of bullets, the finger of providence firmly upon me.” (p. 36)

This sort of thing goes on throughout the book. It is not all fleshed-out history, though. It is mixed with William’s explorations outside the Hougoumont rabbit hutch. He is dumbfounded to discover that a blackbird knows as much about the Battle of Waterloo as his grandmother does. When Old Lavender disappears, William and Arthur, the blackbird, search for her. What they find relates not only to her but to William’s own history.

The Sage of Waterloo (cover by the Strick&Williams art agency; a montage from Getty Images) is clever. It transcends the story of the Battle of Waterloo to tell its own original story. But if you are not interested in the Battle of Waterloo itself, there may not be enough here to hold your interest.

– Fred Patten

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• Interview with head of Strick&Williams

Pic: Nicole White/ The Daily Californian. Left to right: @Spottacus, @errowolf, Lauren Mayberry, @Metric_fox.

At a recent show by the band CHVRCHES, fursuiters in the audience were invited on stage.  Berkeley’s Daily Californian praised the spontaneity of the show:  Furries, fans unite at CHVRCHES performance at Fox Theatre.  

Lauren Mayberry, the band’s frontwoman, told the audience: “If the republicans get into office, this sh!t won’t fly!” 

It was all a surprise.  Some of the Bay Area Furries were there just as fans, with no plan to participate on stage.  But they’re not shy about sharing the spotlight that way.  It happens often, like in July 2015:  Fursuiters were kings at Andrew WK’s Pizza Party in San Francisco.

It comes from a subculture at it’s most fertile.  It’s because they’re in Furry Mecca, and 2016 is the Year of Furry, and these fans make effort like no others to spread the love.  If you’re feeling sad or afraid, or negative or worried about the world, bring furries to make it better.

Here’s full videos of the surprise fursuiting with CHVRCHES.

This activity keeps growing in the San Francisco Bay Area.  Previously in “Bay Area Furs find out why there should be a Furry award for Best Journalism” – The Daily Dot journalist Whitney Kimball visited and put out this article –  How the furry community rallied when Zarafa Giraffe lost his head.  Furries in the story loved the thoughtful, positive coverage about what they do.

There have always been many reasons for the Bay Area to be “Furry Mecca”.  Look at the history and activity:

• It’s a place that the media treats as a “hotbed” of Furry subculture, with “the world’s greatest concentration of furries per square mile” according to Wikifur.

• Wikifur names Silicon Valley as a source for early online fandom.  Even earlier, the Bay Area was the source for ‘zines that Fred Patten called “the earliest generally available publication in furry fandom” ,and “The most famous and successful furry magazine”. It helped scattered fans to grow their own community.

• BayCon helped to spawn the first Furry con (ConFurence) organized by Mark Merlino and Rod O’Riley.  “May, 1987: Merlino established BayCon as the center of activity for Furfans to gather. There was a large, and growing, contingent of Furry fans at this, and the next two, Baycons. The non-furry guests grew increasingly hostile at this ‘take over’…”

• Now, the Bay Area is home for activities like “the original furry dance party” (Frolic) which helped to spawn an entire movement of independent Furry dance parties across North America.

Frolic is where Spottacus met Whitney Kimball for her article in The Daily Dot.  He shared his opinion to her:

‘This is wonderful… it sets the right tone, weaves several threads into a great story with exactly the right feeling, and captures the essence of what is going on inside the head inside the fursuit. You really brought the different threads together, and it worked really well. I really like how you incorporated transformative aspects into both our furry and human lives, how you HEARD the tears in Zarafa’s voice when he described the community’s responses, and breaking the 4th wall when you put on my fursuit, and the observer became the subject. Articles like not only really help the fur community, but they help anyone going through life-changing, transformative experiences.

Last week, a few furfriends and I got invited onstage with CHVRCHES on their way to Coachella. Here’s the video.

And a few furfriends were asked to join a Dandy Warhols’ video shoot in February, after they saw us fursuiting.  The video was released a few weeks ago. Storyline is a down and out writer working and drinking in a fleabag hotel drinks, falls, strikes his head at a bar (at 1:50) and has a hallucinatory fugue in which he sees only furries (2:00 to 2:30). I’m the glowy-eyed Ocelot in the stair scene toward the end…”

More thoughts about all of this happened in a blog post by the proprietor of DNA Lounge.  It’s a night life destination for some of the biggest parties in San Francisco, and a venue for Frolic shows.

The club owner saw furries in a costume contest, and complained that others weren’t showing the effort:

There were also several full-body-suit furries who entered (it was furry night in Above) and nobody even cheered: you could hear a pin drop. I mean, I can kind of understand them not winning outright, because furries kind of all look the same (is that racist? That kind of sounds racist) but still, effort was expended. Even wearing one of those things is an ordeal.

Dr. Kingfish has a theory, that I find hard to counter, that these days “trying” must be a thing that is commonly considered to be uncool. People flock to these semi-crowdsourced events that offer nothing but “participation”, so long as that participation takes zero effort — the kind of Special Olympics where you get a prize just for showing up, like pillow fights and lightsaber battles. If participation means wearing a trivially simple uniform and leaving a mess for someone else to clean up, people are all in. But if participation means you had to actually try, oh, no way, forget about it. “Trying” isn’t done.

This used to be a town that treasured its costumery…

Here’s Neonbunny, promoter of Frolic:

Furries are the unapologetically enthusiastic antidote to apathy and lack of effort.  They’re all about caring.  Wherever you see them, out of costume or in full regalia, you’re going to have a good time.

Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer.

The Companions, by Sheri S. Tepper.
NYC, HarperCollinsPublishers/Eos, September 2003, hardcover $25.95 ([vi +] 452 pages), Kindle $9.99.

In the far, far future, the galaxy is being explored and colonized, and Earth is incredibly overpopulated. The Worldkeeper Council government, supported by the humans-only IGI-HFO political majority, declares that all animals (only pet dogs, cats, and small cage birds are left by this time) are to be exterminated because they take up too much room and use up too much air. The tiny underground movement that wants to keep the animals alive, called arkists because they have accumulated spaceships to use as arks to evacuate the remaining animals from Earth, decide to take them to Treasure, the moon of a newly-discovered and poorly-explored world covered in moss, where they can be hidden in safety. Jewel Delis, the narrator, is an arkist who goes from overcrowded Earth to care for the “companions” of humans, especially the dogs.

The Companions contains dialogue, but mostly Tepper writes in long, blocky narrative paragraphs:

“Earth scared me at first. The towers were huge, each a mile square and more than two hundred stories high. Podways ran along every tenth floor, north on the east side of each tower and south on the west side. Up one level, they went west on the north side and east on the south side. They stopped at the pod lobbies on each corner, so when you were on one, it went woahmp-clatter, rhmmm, woahmp-clatter, whoosh. That’s a pod-lobby stop, a slow trip across the street, another pod-lobby stop, then a mile long whoosh, very fast. The pod-lobbies were full of people, too, and that’s the clatter part, the scary part. Taddeus and I saw more people in one pod-lobby than we’d ever seen together anywhere on Mars, and many of them were dressed in fight colors: Tower 59 against Tower 58, Sector 12 against Sector 13, all of them pushing and shoving and tripping over each other. Often they got into fights or screaming fits. It took us a while to figure out how to dodge them and keep out of their way, but when we got good at it, it turned into a kind of game, and we rode the podways for fun. It was a lot safer than it sounds, because there are so many monitors on the pods that people are afraid to do anything really wicked unless they’re over the edge. Tad and I thought part of the fun was spotting people that were about to go over the edge. We could almost always tell.” (p. 18)

The dogs of this far future are divided broadly into ‘big dogs” and “small dogs”. The “small dogs” are ordinary pets. The “big dogs” have been bred to be more intelligent as well as larger:

“A murmured growl. An acknowledgement, not a challenge. When I looked up, she was sitting behind a screen of willow, next to a watering pool. After a moment, she got up and came over to thrust her muzzle into my neck, below my ear, moving it down my body and across my back as she took an inventory of where I’d been lately and whom I’d been with. Scramble was Scarlet’s granddaughter, eight years old, twice the size of her mother, four times the size of her grandmother, twice as fast, more than twice as smart. If Scarlet had sometimes thought of me as family, Scramble thought of me as a puppy. Her puppy. I adored her. She was a manifestation of every dog I’d ever loved, starting with my stuffed plush puppy on Mars.

Vigilant stepped out of shadow, Dapple behind her. Scramble returned to them and they sat, tails wrapped around their legs, utterly silent, watching me with opaque golden eyes.

[…]

Silently, they disappeared, except for Scramble, who put her nose to my cheek and tongued me along the jaw. Affection? Admonition? I didn’t know which, if either, but it was one more bit of evidence that Scramble thought of me as her pup.

‘Yu sai wen is ‘ime,’ she said, or asked.

‘I’ll tell you at once,’ I agreed. ‘It will be a good place.’ I prayed I was right that it would be a good place.

‘Ai no. Au aways magh ghu ha’van.’

Alas, I only wished always to make good happen. Sometimes I could not make anything happen at all.” (pgs. 90-92)

The Companions is a well-written combination of science-fiction, suspense, and mystery. This is very fortunate because, from an anthropomorphic viewpoint, very little happens until almost halfway through the book. The first part, about the arkists’ desperate plan to leave Earth with the remaining animals before those can be killed, is the first suspense plot. The second part, about the unexpected and deadly puzzle that they find on Moss and its moon Treasure, is the mystery that leads to the second suspense plot. But except for the brief passage quoted above on pages 90 to 92, the anthropomorphic dogs are all offstage until the arkists reach Moss and Treasure on page 173:

“‘Awf!’ said Behemoth, the moment I came in.

I shook my head, no. ‘This is just a brief stop, Behemoth. We’ll be on the ground less than an hour.’

‘Owr ome,’ he said, facing me, eyes glittering.

‘That’s the plan, yes.’

‘Wan see.’

‘I know. But you can’t see it without being seen by the crew, or by Paul, and that would ruin everything. Only the captain and a couple of his officers know that we’re dropping off some cages. We figure six months, a year from now, this will be home for you, but it’s not ready yet.’

‘Ow no rrrea’y?’

‘How? It’s not ready because you’d starve to death. The animals we’re dropping off need another year to spread and reproduce.’”

There is a better description of the dogs a little farther on:

“‘He’s a big one, isn’t he?’ I said in a doting voice, as Adam and Scramble approached. ‘Much larger than the original Great Dane or mastiff types, but with none of the bone or joint problems that used to be associated with large dogs. Life span is longer, too. Big dogs used to be old at twelve, but Behemoth will live to be thirty or forty, at least, maybe older than that! This brown bitch is his mate, Scramble.’” (pgs. 188-189)

Some of the arkists have been surreptitiously physically modified to share canine attributes:

“I caught up to Frank and Clare. ‘You all seem to be finding a lot to sniff at.’

Frank nodded. ‘You should get some dognose, Jewel. You really should. You’re a little old for it, but some of the cellular transplants would take …’

I murmured to him, ‘I have what will take, Frank, have had since I was sixteen. I volunteered for the original transplant study, but let’s for God’s sake not talk about dognose where anyone can hear us, okay?’ I jerked my head to indicate both the ESC men behind us and Paul, who was entering the headquarters. ‘We’ll have to learn to be quiet about things we talked about freely at the sanctuary. PPI is BuOr, and BuOr is enemy territory. Some of them might even be iggy-huffo. There probably aren’t a dozen people on the planet we could call sympathizers.’” (p. 190)

There are several alien races in The Companions (actually 512, but only five or six important to this novel), and three of the arkists use alien technology to shape-change into dogs; but this also is almost entirely offstage until the story moves to Treasure’s planet, Moss:

“The trainers and I rode on the floater until we were deeply into the forest, well out of sight of anyone from the compound. There the trainers stripped off their clothing and walked beside the floater as they changed. Adrenaline could make the process happen quickly, rage or great excitement could make it happen in minutes, but when things were calm, jaws and tongues slowly lengthened, eyes shifted subtly to the sides, ears rose to the top of the skull, forearms and shoulders shifted. Genetically they did not change. They became quite doglike, except for their high-domed heads, far too rounded for canines though not terribly unlike the old, large-headed dogs: St. Bernards, golden retrievers, mastiffs. At a distance, they would pass for dogs, particularly if they stayed in dog form long enough to lengthen their coats. At first their fur was merely an all-over fuzz. Adam was the same shining steel gray as his hair, with a darker gray stripe down the spine. Given long enough, he usually grew a mane. Clare was evenly brown with red glints in her fur, and she would acquire feathers on her legs and tail; Frank was a mottled gray and black, plain black at a distance, with a close, short-haired coat. Getting the coat to grow wasn’t voluntary. It simply grew, like claws, like teeth, like tails. If they stayed dogs for several weeks – which was the longest it had ever been tested – they would have full coats, long tails, longer legs, fangs, and hard claws for digging. Whatever technology Gainor had obtained, it was limited to soft tissue and young bones. At some point, Adam, Clare, and Frank would be too old. Their bones wouldn’t make the shift. I’d heard them discussing how careful they’d have to be later in life, to prevent their being dogs when that final moment came. Funny. The conclusion I drew now from that remembered conversation was quite different from the one I had drawn at the time.” (p. 236)

The arkist shape-shifters get the ability to transform into dog shapes to help the real dogs, but the latter dismiss them as “play dogs” and do not take them seriously. Jewel refers to the arkists in dog form as pseudodogs or unreal dogs.

The plot grows increasingly complex, with the real dogs turning out to have a secret agenda of their own; and the late introduction of what, to oversimplify, is a walking and talking tree:

“‘We congratulate you on your achievement,’ I said, not knowing whether to laugh or run screaming. It sounded totally nonthreatening, but it was so very large, so twiggy, so full of offshoots and wiry-looking twiny bits that it was difficult to believe it was harmless and impossible to know where the voice was really coming from. Politeness be damned, I had to know: ‘Where are your … eyes and ears and mouth?’

An agile tendril zoomed toward me, stopping just short of my face, and from its swollen tip a large blue eye regarded me with interest. The eye had an eyelid with lashes that batted flirtatiously, seeming to wink at me, enjoying its own joke. That tendril was immediately joined by several others bearing either human-style ears or assorted types of eyes, some of them not at all mammalian-looking.

‘Voice box, puffers, and tongue assembly do not fit on small parts,’ said the willog. ‘I have them inside main trunk, issuing through new mouth parts!’” (p. 328)

There are many potentially deadly surprises for both the humans on Moss and for all humans, which Jewel, with both the real dogs’ and the pseudodogs’ help, finds out about just in time to forestall them. Several of the surprises are unmasked by the dogs’ sense of smell. The anthropomorphic non-humans take almost 200 pages to become major characters, but they are important for over half the book.

Kudos to Rick Lovell for a fine painting for the hardcover dust jacket. The September 2004 paperback cover is uncredited.

– Fred Patten

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Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer.

The Guardian Herd: Landfall, by Jennifer Lynn Alvarez. Illustrated by David McClellan; maps.
NYC, HarperCollinsPublishers/Harper, February 2016, hardcover $16.99 ([xvi +] 328 [+ 4] pages), Kindle $9.99.

The adventure grows more desperate in this third volume of The Guardian Herd saga. It might be described as a My Little Pony with savage teeth and razor-sharpened hooves in it.

The multicolored flying pegasi of Anok are divided into five rival herds that the young Starfire has been trying to bring together peacefully. As he said in The Guardian Fire: Starfire, first novel in the series, when the over-stallion of another herd proposed making an alliance and forcing the other herds to join them, “But that’s not uniting; that’s conquering.” The Guardian Herd: Stormwind, the second novel, ends with Star learning that Nightwing the Destroyer, the crazed, all-powerful black stallion of 400 years ago, is flying back to Anok to conquer the herds and kill him. But the five herds are still fighting among each other; Star is still untrained; and Star fears that he may turn as crazed and deadly as Nightwing is.

Landfall begins, not counting a dramatis personae of 40 important pegasi, with a 16-page battle to the death between Nightwing and Starfire. And Star dies! Horribly (but not too horribly; this is a Young Adult book). He’s saved by a ghostly deus ex machina that tries to make us believe that he wasn’t really dead, y’know, just in an exceptionally deep suspended animation.

Umm … no. Sorry; this isn’t believable. I’ll buy the talking, flying horses, but I won’t buy Starfire being not really dead. He’s killed too definitely, and his salvation by the equivalent of Tinker Bell showing up and waving her magic wand is too cheesy. It further destroys the suspense by showing that whatever hardships Star suffers in the future at the hooves of Nightwing, if they get too bad we can expect an unexpected deus ex machina to bring him back to life.

Aside from that, Alvarez keeps up the suspense very well. Star’s friends hide his body giving him time to “heal”. Nightwing meanwhile consolidates his supremacy.

“‘The herds are hiding from him [Nightwind], right?’ asked Bumblewind, his eyes trained on his twin sister.

She snorted. ‘It’s the opposite,’ Echofrost took a gulp of air, staring at the pegasi around her, waiting for all mumbling to cease. Then she spoke. ‘They’ve answered his call. All of them.’

The gathered pegasi shrank from her words. ‘No,’ whispered Bumblewind. ‘That can’t be.’

‘It’s worse than that,’ she said. ‘Nightwing knows he injured Star, that his body is so damaged he’s dead, or as good as dead. He says his connection to Star’s mind has been severed, and he …’ Echofrost glanced at Morningleaf, grimacing.

‘What is it?’ breathed Morningleaf.

‘He’s offered to make a pact with the first steed who’ – Echofrost lashed her tail and tears raced down her cheeks – ‘who brings him Star’s head.’

‘His head!’ Morningleaf staggered sideways, and Bumblewind caught her in his wings.

Echofrost nodded. ‘Yes, to ensure that Star can’t heal himself. That he’s truly dead.’” (pgs. 51-52)

The two dozen or so of Starfire’s followers who become his guardian herd – Silverlake, Dewberry, Sweetroot, Hazelwind, Redfire, Ashrain, and others – vow to keep Star safe from Petalcloud and Frostfire, who have taken Nightwind’s offer, and the armies of thousands of pegasi that Nightwind has given them to find Star and his tiny herd.

Star eventually awakens from his long unconsciousness, but he is still grievously wounded and in need of nursing back to health. Landfall splits into two stories in alternate chapters or pairs of chapters: those of Star and his United Council of core followers hiding in the Trap, a narrow valley in northwestern Anok filled with spruce and pine trees so thick that any pegasi in it can’t be seen from the sky; and the adventures of Morningleaf, Shadepebble, and Brackentail, three yearlings who leave the Trap to lure Star’s enemies far away from them.

During this time, the holdout from Nightwind’s tyranny among the other Herds gather secretly around Star’s United Council.

“The dark bay mare [Ashrain] cocked her ears forward. ‘River Herd steeds fight best in the open sky, but Jungle Herd understands tight spaces. We know how to fight in the tree.’ She looked directly at Hazelwind. ‘We’re offering to show you our ways , and I’ve spoken to Redfire of Desert Herd and Birchcloud of Mountain Herd. They also want to share their knowledge. Desert Herd will teach us their ground-fighting techniques, and the Mountain Herd mares will teach us their aerial formations, in case we’re lured into the sky. I propose we form a United Army now, before our enemy arrives. If we train together, we’ll fight together better, and we’ll hold out longer.’” (pgs. 119-120)

It’s what Star has wanted; to bring the Herds together. Now they have a common cause; a more martial one than he’d wanted, but one that works. Star slowly heals and learns at the same time.

“That’s true,’ said Star, feeling grateful and hopeful. He would learn the warrior ways of River Herd, Jungle Herd, Mountain Herd, and Desert Herd. When in the history of Anok had there been an opportunity like that?” (p. 121)

Star and the others learn how to fight, including sharpening their hooves.

“Each pegasus took a turn examining Clawfire’s hoof. When it was Star’s turn, he lowered his head and peered at the hoof’s edge from all angles. He noticed that the very front of the hoof slanted into a thin, crisp edge. The sidewall was thick and smooth to support Clawfire’s weight. ‘Can I touch the edge?’ Star asked.

Clawfire nodded, and Star felt the rim of Clawfire’s sharpened nail with his wingtips. The severe edge sliced right through Star’s end feathers. He jerked his wing away, and the watching pegasi nickered in amazement. ‘That’s sharp,’ Star said, whistling.” (p. 134)

The pegasi can use their wings as supplely as hands. “The other warrior [one of Petalcloud’s scouts] wiped the sweat rolling down his brow.” (p. 68) “He wiped his face with his wing […]” (p. 158)

The inevitable massed battle, when it comes, lasts about sixty pages. Nightwind stays above it and sends Frostfire and his Black Army and Petalcloud and her Ice Warriors army to destroy Starfire and his United Army. It all makes me think of King Harold of England during 1066: first racing from London with the English knights to meet the invading Norwegian Vikings at Stamforth Bridge, then turning and racing to Hastings to meet the invading Normans. Harold was killed at Hastings, but Starfire doesn’t die and this series doesn’t end (except for Landfall on a cliffhanger). Volume 4, The Guardian Herd: Windborn, is due in September.

As before, the pegasi are described in very colorful terms. Crystalfeather is a small chestnut mare with bright-blue feathers, two front white socks, and a white strip on her face. Flamesky is a red roan filly with dark emerald and gold feathers. But David McClellan’s illustrations are only small chapter heading portraits of pegasi; and frankly, in black-&-white, all the pegasi look too similar. His dust jacket is attractive, though,

– Fred Patten

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Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer.

Neighbors, by Michael H. Payne
Balboa, CA, “Hey, Your Nose is on Fire” Industries, October 2014, trade paperback $10.00 (212 pages), Kindle $3.00.

August Lancer, the narrator, is a young resident of Haven Space, a sanatorium and rehabilitation clinic in Southern California. Dumped there by his father (who sends expense money but never visits), Gus is a loner in a wheelchair, afflicted by a degenerative condition that has paralyzed him from the waist down and made it almost impossible to talk. His only pleasure is watching a TV cartoon series about ponies.

This all changes when Gus is adopted by a hospital therapy black cat named Spooky, who tells him that her name is really El Brujo.

“‘El Brujo?’ I heard myself ask with words that weren’t words. ‘But … you’re female. Aren’t you?’

Another little smile. ‘I’m a bit of a trendsetter.’” (p. 19)

Gus finds himself able since her appearance to talk with the other animals and birds around him. Serena the squirrel. Jefe the crow and his flock. The sparrows who nest just outside the window. Nobody else notices anything unusual, even when El Brujo and Jefe dance together, so Gus worries about it.

“Another thought hit me hard, then, one that I’d tried my absolute damnedest over and over the last bunch of months to stop myself from thinking: what if El Brujo and Serena and the sparrows and crows this morning and the weird little voices I heard in the trees and bushes out in the neighborhood –

What if it was all in my head? What if the shredded chunks of my nervous system weren’t making me understand the animals but were instead making me imagine I could understand them? Was it just a matter of time before rows of dancing chipmunks were telling me to set things on fire and kill people?” (p. 31)

But he doesn’t worry about it for long. Soon he’s taking it in stride, as he promenades about the neighborhood in his wheelchair where the animals provide an alternate to spending all his spare time writing pony fanfiction.

“Down Parkhurst to Hawthorne is an easy enough roll, but Hawthorne between Parkhurst and Demmler has this hill. I doubt anyone not in a wheelchair would even notice, but I always have to stop for a breather at the Ramsays’ house. Fortunately their driveway was empty, so Traveler came walking out instead of charging. ‘Good afternoon, August,’ he said as formally as only a Doberman can. ‘As the master and mistress are away, I hope you’ll forgive me if I dispense with my usual barking and growling.’” (pgs. 41-42)

Neighbors is a sedate and whimsical novel. Gus wheels himself around the neighborhood, introducing the animals to each other. Jefe the crow and Traveler the watchdog become unlikely best friends. Gus puts up with Jefe’s friendly sibling rivalry with his sister Honoria, and works Serina the squirrel into their family. He is charmed when a new family with a puppy moves into the neighborhood.

“The scurrying had gotten El Brujo’s attention by then, and she surged upright, her front paws on the arm of the chair, her tail flicking slowly. ‘That smells like a –‘

Which was when it popped out from under cover into a less bushy part of the yard: a female puppy about the size of a clenched fist, all fly-away dark red fur, huge brown eyes, and flapping pink tongue. ‘Singing!’ she shouted. ‘Dancing! Just! Can’t! Stop!’ And she began spinning in circles.” (p. 53)

Gus is more than charmed when the new Schwarber family turns out to be a father with a daughter his own age, Donna, who is as crippled emotionally as he is physically. Gus’ animal friends help him develop some reluctant social skills so he can help draw Donna out of her shell.

“I nodded, but a commotion at the window drew my attention: a large scruffy crow flapping in from the afternoon to land on the sill, a slightly smaller and sleeker crow grabbing the top of the frame where it stuck out toward the outpatient center. ‘Hey, hey, hey!’ the big crow screeched. ‘What’s the beef here, huh? Honoria said she heard shouting, and –‘

‘Sounded to me,’ the smaller crow interrupted, ‘like there was gonna be a carcass or two coming out this window in a couple minutes.’ She cocked her head. ‘But nobody’s eating nobody!’

Serena huffed out a breath. ‘There will be no eating of anyone today! Today is only for happiness because soon Mr. Augie will begin courting his future mate!’

My lungs turned to stone, but the two crows seemed to explode, Jefe flapping his wings and shouting, ‘About damn time! You been miserable that way long as I’ve known you!’

Honoria swooped in over her brother’s head and skittered to a stop beside El Brujo, her talons shredding my sleeping bag worse than Serena ever could. ‘This for true, gata?’

‘Apparently so.’ El Brujo flicked her whiskersat Serena. ‘I was advocating a ‘slow but steady’ approach to counteract August’s ‘frozen and unmoving’ method, but when Miss Serena involved herself –‘

‘Yes!’ Serena chittered, doing a little dance on the bedpost. ‘I am proactive by nature!’” (pgs. 91-92)

Payne puts real personality into the raucous crows, dignified cat, hyperactive squirrel, exuberant puppy, and several others, as well as into the humans.

But the reader will recognize that, in the background, there are threats of Gus’ father losing Lancer Aeronautics and no longer being able to afford to keep Gus at Haven Space; of arrogant Mrs. Ford’s campaign to drive the sanatorium with its property-value-lowering cripples and retards out of the neighborhood; and of the animals such as Snowbird the cat and Otho the coyote who don’t believe that animals and humans should mix socially – and are ready to kill the ‘traitors’.

Neighbors (cover by Tom Payne) is never dramatic, but it is quietly charming. It’s an excellent talking-animal fantasy for those who aren’t yet ready for a furry-genre novel.

– Fred Patten

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Today is the day! Our #documentary, Fursonas, is now available on iTunes https://t.co/UzdP1HXz82 #furryfandom pic.twitter.com/QAoUdWEqN1

— Fursonas (@FursonasDoc) May 10, 2016

Here’s one of those media events where a story catches on and gets a lot of coverage at once.  That used to happen very rarely.  Now it’s happening every month or so in 2016, “The Year of Furry.”  The director, Dominic (Video Wolf) is killing it with interviews and promotion.

• Newport Beach Film Fest: “A Furry Flick: The Beauty & Complexity of the Furry Fandom
• Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: ‘Fursonas’ explores Furry fandom and the media
• Radio podcast – Dominic on The Kevin & Bean Show
• The Daily Beast: “Exposing the David Miscavige of Furries” 
• Inverse: ‘Fursonas’ Documentary Illuminates the Beauty and Anger In Furry Culture
• Slug Magazine: DOMINIC RODRIGUEZ: THE PERSONA BEHIND FURSONAS
• Glamour: What’s a Furry? A New Movie Takes You Inside Their World
• Esquire: What It Means to Be a Furry
• Salon: “‘The Lion King’ is an extraordinarily sexual film”: Inside the fascinating, misunderstood world of furries
• Uproxx: ‘Fursonas’ Offers A Dark Portrait Of A Furry Demagogue, And Some Complex Insights Into The Nature Of Acceptance

Those headlines will make some whiskers twitch!  I think the movie isn’t made just to cause a stir. It’s an honest and well told story aimed at your brain and heart.  (More about this below).  For info from other furries, see these:

• Flayrah – Interview: ‘Fursonas’ documentary director Dominic Rodriguez (Video the Wolf)
• Dogpatch Press – ‘Fursonas’ beats Zootopia as most important furry movie, coming soon on Video On Demand.

 

Coming soon – a special announcement about Fursonas, with partnership between Dogpatch Press and a high profile special event.

 

First, see the movie with a Furry audience at Biggest Little Fur Con in Reno.

The show is Saturday 5/14, 1-2 PM.  From the con events schedule:

“Fursonas is a four-year exploration into the complexities of furry fandom. The film premiered at the Slamdance Film Festival in January, where it received the Spirit of Slamdance Award for bringing positive energy into the festival. Since then, the film has shown in select theaters across America to both furry and non-furry audiences… This special screening will be followed by a Q&A with the director, Video.”

A fan comment says why Fursonas stands out as both a good Furry movie and a Good Movie:

“This film is like no other furry fandom documentary. Rather than focusing on just the innocent facade Uncle Kage puts the furry fandom behind, This film puts you into the minds of many different members of the fandom; furries who are well known and admired to ones who are criticized for their conceivably “unfavorable” lifestyles. You will be shuffled between opinions as you watch the film shift its tone, leaving you with mixed emotions and showing nothing but the truth. This film is undeniably worth the watch!” – (Caffeinated_water)

About those fur-raising headlines – just my opinion.

The movie is being characterized from some writers as a “whistleblower” piece, or a takedown story about dictatorship by Uncle Kage, the CEO of Anthrocon.

Yes and No.  There’s a lot more than Kage in it, but he serves as a focal point.

The movie does criticize how some furries’ personal expression has gotten the outcast treatment.  That’s paradoxical to acceptance.  But in my opinion, the judgy treatment represents community tendencies more than one guy’s domination.  He’s not a villain.

I sympathize with the movie.  I also respect Kage, especially with last year’s PR coup of getting a Furry parade celebrated on the streets of Pittsburgh.  I think he’s doing a job and his heart’s in the right place.  He also makes the same mistakes as the rest of us when saying personal opinions in official capacity.

I also think the movie’s criticism is fairly gentle, letting words speak for themselves.

“Exposing the David Miscavige of Furries”  compares Kage to a leader of Scientology.  I think that’s grossly exaggerated by that writer.  Furries aren’t a cult, nobody is forced to be here, and there’s little exploitation without real ranks.

Dominic was banned from Anthrocon for using con footage without permission.  Permission wouldn’t happen without giving up extreme editorial control over his work.  Con organizers have admitted not watching the movie when they made the ban.

On one hand, the ban make’s Dominic’s point. On the other hand, it’s not exactly dictating if they’ve been put in the position of needing to be strict.  Who’s most to blame for this?  Society!  If furries weren’t a target for misrepresentation, it wouldn’t be such an issue.  The con can’t just look the other way for one person, because “big media” could get away with more.

Dominic made a conscious choice to use footage against the rule.  I think his choice is legit to get his movie out, because his heart’s in the right place too. It reminds me of pirate radio vs. FCC regulation, or local craft food vs. the FDA. It’s not bad to have regulations – it’s bad when individuals can’t have freedom without overdone standards meant for big business.

Lastly, I think there’s more dubious cherrypicking by a writer here: “‘The Lion King’ is an extraordinarily sexual film”: Inside the fascinating, misunderstood world of furries.  That’s an unfortunate quote out of context.  But that kind of risk is just part of having something worthy to promote.  Check the interviews – I think Dominic is doing a fantastic job and not “scandalmongering” or discrediting people.

See the movie for yourself and make up your own mind.

Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer.

Black Angel, by Kyell Gold. Illustrated by Rukis.
St. Paul, MN, Sofawolf Press, March 2016, trade paperback $19.95 (vii + 379 pages).

Black Angel is the conclusion of Kyell Gold’s Dangerous Spirits trilogy that began with Green Fairy (March 2012) and continued with Red Devil (January 2014). The three novels are a powerful mixture of spiritualism, drugs, and adolescent angst, shifting between centuries and societies. They are also set in Gold’s larger Forester University anthropomorphic-animal alternate universe, with clear parallels to our own. Each of these three is complete, but assuming you will like Black Angel enough to want to read the others, readers are recommended to start all three from the first.

Solomon Wrightson (black wolf), Alexei Tsarev (red fox), and Meg Kinnick (otter) are three very troubled seniors at Vidalia’s Richfield High School. All three have left home. Sol, who has just realized that he is gay, is constantly nagged at home by his father to excel at sports. Alexei, who has come from Siberia on a student visa, is concerned by the silence of his sister back home; he is sure that their parents are intercepting their mail. The mannish Meg has gotten her parents to let her move into a decrepit apartment to be an artist. Her apartment has become a social center for the three. Sol’s traveling into the past in Green Fairy, and Alexei’s being haunted by a ghost in Red Devil, may be due to external causes in those novels, or – as the rational Meg scoffs – it’s all in their imagination.

“Hi. I’m Meg. I’m nineteen, and I’m fucked up.

That’s not a big secret, by the way. Pretty much anyone who knew me from about fifteen to now would tell you the same thing. Only back then I thought it was a good kind of fucked up.” (p. 1)

She’s not so sure any longer. Sol and Alexei are moving out to grow in their own directions. Sol is going to college, and Alexei has to get his student visa extended. Meg considers herself more rational and mature than either of them, but she is also aware that she’s stuck in an adolescent rut while they’re moving on with their lives. So she’s glad to have the apartment all to herself when Sol and Alexei move out, but not sure what to do next.

In addition to being an Art Institute applicant, Meg takes commissions over the Internet for fantasy art.

“‘I need to get caught up with these commissions first. You know I need to do like ten of them a month to make rent and food.’ And booze and weed, but I left those as understood.” (p. 67)

She considers starting an online comic strip, using an idea she’s had since her childhood for a story about Marie-Belle, a young muskrat living in the bayous around New Kestle [New Orleans] in the past who wants to become a voodoo priestess.

A parallel story appears in Chapter 6. Meg suddenly has dreams of Hannah, an adolescent otter in a rigid future Christian society who chafes at its restrictions on women.

“I sat bolt upright in bed, convinced I was soaked through, heart still pounding. The dark room, as silent as when I’d gone to bed, still seemed to echo with the call from my dream, the name, ‘Hannah!’

I’d never dreamed that vividly before. The meds had given me some fucked-up nightmares, but nothing that coherent, nothing with smell and dialogue and hunger in my stomach and the heat of sun and the cool of water, that left me rubbing paws through my fur surprised that it wasn’t still wet.

A dream like Alexi and Sol had had.

I made sure that I wasn’t hallucinating something from my dream coming back to my bed, the way Sol had, but it didn’t make me feel better when I didn’t find anything. Alexei’s dreams hadn’t brought back anything except a ghost.

The good news is, my ghost is a fifteen-year-old otter girl, not a scary Russian soldier. I laughed at that and then clutched my sides, breathing hard, laughter turning shaky and hysterical. It was like I was listening to myself laugh and didn’t have any control over it.” (p. 53)

To further complicate the plot, at nineteen Meg is also very concerned about her own sexuality – or lack of same. Is she heterosexual? Homosexual? Bi? Asexual? Why doesn’t she feel any urges when confronted with good-looking young otters or animals of other species?

Black Angel turns into three parallel stories, each told in full chapters. Meg’s predominate, but those of Marie-Belle the muskrat and voodoo – or is it vodou, not voodoo?– in her comic strip, and of Hannah the otter and her Christian cult in Meg’s dreamworld, are so rich that the reader will forget about the larger story while reading those. Meg grows increasingly afraid that she can’t keep them from taking her over.

[Meg is walking with Athos, her grey fox friend who supplies her pot but who also seriously cares for her. They are discussing her comic strip.]

“‘But you know that,’ he said. ‘Your comic was in Colonial times, right?’

‘No. 1915,’ I said automatically.

He said something about the style of the houses and I replied that they were old houses, all the while thinking, how did I know the date that certainly? I knew it was about a hundred years ago, but then why didn’t I answer ‘1912’? Or ‘a hundred years ago’?” (p. 83)

As Meg is drawn increasingly into her dreamworlds, and objects from those dreamworlds appear in the real world to increasingly confuse her, her friends – Athos (fox), Alexei and Sol, Mike (sheep), Bellie (raccoon), Eve (another raccoon), Alain (fox), Sherine (weasel), and maybe someone (or something) from either Marie-Belle’s or Hannah’s worlds – try to help her, despite herself.

Not only is this an excellent story, it presents several vivid word-portraits of life in three anthropomorphic societies.

[Meg’s present world.] “So I went to the [city] pool. Not many otters there, because they mostly have pools in their houses, or they live in that big complex on the river and swim there. But about every other major species demographic was there: foxes, wolves, mice, rats, deer, squirrels, cougars, rabbits – a million god-damn rabbits – and even a few bobcats, playing against the water-hating stereotype. The pool blasted Neutra-Scent and today had added in a cut-grass smell that was supposed to make it feel like a backyard pool.” (p. 32)

[Hannah’s futuristic world.] “‘Go on. What’s going to happen to me in church?’ Hannah dove before Angeline could answer, plunging through the water toward the roots of the nearest cyprus. She knew Angeline could follow easily, but when she surfaced by the trunk, only a few otters remained in the church water, and Angeline was not one of them.” (p. 103)

Besides word-portraits, this contains ten full-page interior illustrations by Rukis. Black Angel is a fine conclusion to the Dangerous Spirits trilogy.

Black Angel Cover by Rukis

– Fred Patten

• Buy on FurPlanet

Pic: UltraGor

There was a hunt for a missing giraffe…

Zarafa is a furry superstar lately.  But he didn’t go looking for notoriety.  It happened one night after a show when his treasured purple giraffe fursuit was stolen from his car.  It led to community-wide support, and miraculous recovery of the suit. Now people recognize him on the street.

Credit is due to Neonbunny, the show DJ, for pounding the sidewalk to spread flyers.  How many promoters would do it for one show goer?  Dedication like that built a local scene for furry dance parties.

Finding the suit flipped around the loss to amazing extremes beyond Zarafa and a circle of furry friends.  The support drew notice from local media, and they found it irresistible to share:

• SAN FRANCISCO FURRIES NOW TARGETS FOR ROBBERY.
• Identity Theft: Furry Furious Until Stolen Suit Recovered.

The San Francisco Bay Area Furry scene drew a journalist from New York.

A new surprise came two months later.  Another news article covered Zarafa’s night out and loss of his suit.  The journalist had been on the scene, but not with intentions to write about drama like that.

Whitney Kimball originally contacted me through Dogpatch Press.  She was looking for leads for a story about older people who may have discovered Furry fandom in later life. (I told her the word was “greymuzzle”). I pointed her to Zarafa, Neonbunny, and Spottacus.

After my introductions, they handled the rest.  Whitney learned about Neonbunny’s “Furries vs. Drag Queens” dance party.  Soon she was flying from New York to San Francisco to be there.  (That’s dedication, right?)  I had nothing else to do with the resulting article (although I’m told the main graphic seems to show me in the background. Nice!)  It’s exciting to share it:

How the furry community rallied when Zarafa Giraffe lost his head – by Whitney Kimball.

It’s a kickass article, according to the feedback.  Have you read many others that talk about the “lightning bolts” you get from wearing a fursuit?  (It invited more interest too – Zarafa was then contacted by Zoomin TV, a euro outfit doing video news for niche channels.) Spottacus said:

‘This is wonderful… it sets the right tone, weaves several threads into a great story with exactly the right feeling, and captures the essence of what is going on inside the head inside the fursuit.”

One furry friend (and journalist in real life) had an interesting comment:

@Spottacus @DogpatchPress Also, Patch, this article needs to go in some type of Furry Hall of Fame. Do we have an award for media coverage?

— Zeigler IRL (@ZeiglerJaguar) April 25, 2016

Why don’t we have an award?

The Ursa Major award seems to be all for fiction, even if there’s an “other” category. Fred Patten is a member of the award committee.  He told me: “what to do about non-fiction works with regard to the Ursa Majors is being discussed.”  

Everyfur knows how the furry community regards the dreaded “THE MEDIA”. It starts with supersensitivity, and maybe a hate/hate relationship.  Attention from them seems to cause a defensive crouch with claws out.

But furries are in many ways created by the media. It’s an internet-based subculture of fans. With “The Year of Furry” happening, and furry movies blowing up the box office, I think it’s a good time to stop dancing around this frenemy.

The quality of Whitney’s article makes me want to do more than share. It made me talk about establishing an award because of the story. Whitney liked that:

“WOW, I think that is the most flattering feedback I have ever gotten in 6 years of writing!! Thank you for featuring the story, Patch, I really appreciate it! And I’m happy to hear that the news coverage is improving in general. That Vanity Fair piece was just godawful.”

If “the media” is mostly bad, reward it when it’s good.

If they’ve spread negativity before, it’s part of notoriety that now draws them back.  That’s a monster they helped to create.  Now the more interest grows, the more you have power to say “no” if they ask for access.  Making them work to do better would flip the dynamic.  It would be smart to own that power and award good attention.

Well written articles are coming with growing frequency. It makes me want to start a short list of the best. Here’s a few that I would list for special recognition:

• You Can’t Get Inside – by mouse at The Hooded Utilitarian.
• CSI Fur Fest: The Unsolved Case of the Gas Attack at a Furry Convention – by Jennifer Swann at Vice.
• How the furry community rallied when Zarafa Giraffe lost his head – by Whitney Kimball at The Kernel.
• Fursonas Takes On the Secretive World of Furries—and the Movement’s Furrious Fuhrer – by Matt Coker at OC Weekly.

What do you think about an award name?  How should it be organized?  Who could pitch in? 

Look for a second article here soon about more spotlight on Bay Area Furries.

Just another day in San Francisco! @AlastairGSD, me, @ZantalScalie,& @chairoraccoon #FursuitFriday pic:@LoboLoc0 pic.twitter.com/lITrXqU4Wv

— Zarafa (@Zarafagiraffe) April 29, 2016

OMG! @LoboLoc0 does amazing work! A shot from our SF photoshoot last Sun,in front of the Painted Ladies of Alamo Sq. pic.twitter.com/R53FAGZzV4

— Zarafa (@Zarafagiraffe) April 23, 2016

 

 

There’s a vast community of writers within the Furry Fandom.  From building community sites like SoFurry, to their own Furry Writers Guild, they come together to explore the anthropomorphic writing arts with novels, comics, and anthologies.  Many anthologies are being made in the fandom, and they’re always looking for new talent.  Keep your ears perked for announcements about anthologies open for submission, and you may find one with a vision that inspires you to get involved.

Did you like Zootopia, and the way Disney brought an anthropomorphic world to life, accounting for all the different sizes and species and their needs?  Did it make you imagine your own society of walking, talking animals? Zootopia was only about mammals, but what about reptiles, birds or insects? Will they all live together, or is one group seen as lesser to another?

If you think about this when you write, The Society Pages is the anthology for you.

The Society Pages is edited by Lily White, known for writing the NSFW webcomic Pierce Me. She founded Scratchpost Press earlier this year to publish a variety of work she found lacking in the fandom. Lily says:

“I’ve always wanted to work in publishing so this seemed like a great way to just dive in.”

Those questions of how an anthro society works inspired this anthology.  Lily says:

“I’m interested to see writers look into how an anthro society would actually function instead of hand-waving of it just functioning. How do you make friends with a species that traditionally eats yours? How does that extrapolate into an entire civilization that somehow manages to get along?

It is something that has always bothered me about the fandom, though it might be I don’t delve deeply enough into the content produced by other artists and writers, that it often feels like this is something that is just sort of ignored. When writing fiction so closely linked to people’s personas there is a tendency towards wish fulfillment and I think that makes these opportunities for drama fall away. I really love exploring this stuff and wanted to see more of it in print.

There have been some that have looked at it in different forms. Comics like Blacksad use anthro animals to represent what role/kind of character they are. While Endtown looks at how well we adapt in a post apocalypse where people are mutated into animals and how much we don’t. And of course Zootopia. There are many examples for writers to get inspired by.

… the first that comes to [my] mind is Fauxlacine’s fantastic series of short stories and illustrations under the title of ‘Dog Eat Dog’. While a bit gory for a lot of people their work explores some of the realities of a furry society under pressure and I think it is a great body of work to look at. Not everything needs to be as gloomy as hers, of course.

Of course you go with the tone that works for you. You want hard hitting drama? Go for it. Absurd comedy? Tragic romance? Horrific horror? Go for it. It’s your world. Have fun with it.”

The Society Pages will be the first book published from Scratchpost, but it’s not planned to be the last.

“I have a few other anthology concepts I would like to produce based on how The Society Pages works out. If it seems like anthologies are a sustainable system to get new work out into the world I will likely continue in that vein, but I am also always keeping an eye out for submissions that are not necessarily for an anthology – I would love to help produce long-form fiction for writers.”

The Society Pages deadline is June 1st, with a projected publishing date sometime around September. Accepted authors will be paid 30 dollars, a contributor’s copy, plus a code for extra discounted copies. Lily shares the submission details:

“The pieces should be 2,000 to 8,000 words and saved in whatever format you are most comfortable with using. I would also prefer that people provide an introduction to themselves and their piece in the initial email. Aside from that, it should be sent to [email protected] with the subject line ‘The Society Pages – (Author Name) Query’.

I would prefer to know what I’m going to be reading before I receive it – query before delivery if possible. There isn’t much reason for it, but it does help show the writer knows their own work (and read the submission guidelines). If a writer can break down their story effectively into a pitch it can usually show any major issues from the start.”

To learn more about the submission guidelines please visit Scratchpost’s website.

Well? What are you waiting for? You only have a month. Crack open that Word Doc and bring your society to life.

-Pup Matthias

Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer.

DreamKeepers, volume 4, Descent to the Archives, by David & Liz Lille
Monroe, MI, Vivid Independent Publishing, July 2015, trade paperback $24.99 (117 [+ 11] pages).

“Dreamkeepers is a supernatural fantasy adventure series for teens and up.” (publishers’ advisory)

After two years and an incredibly successful Kickstarter campaign, here is DreamKeepers, volume 4, Descent to the Archives, containing Chapters 10 through 12. By now, so much has happened that you have to first read What Has Gone Before; either page-by-page for free on the DreamKeepers website or as albums from Amazon.com.

To rephrase what I have said in my reviews of the first three volumes, “The Dreamworld is a mysterious reality that parallels our own,” inhabited by funny-animal DreamKeepers, one for each person in the world. They guard us from the nightmares that would drive us mad. “Everyone’s DreamKeeper is completely unique – your personality and subconscious influence your DreamKeeper’s appearance and abilities.” Since there are now over seven billion people in the world, that’s a lot of almost-all different funny animals; but David Lillie has shown in large crowd scenes that he can draw that many DreamKeepers. Most DreamKeepers live in “Anduruna, the largest DreamKeeper city in the DreamWorld.”

“The protagonist is Mace, a young puppy (or is he a kitten?) in Grunn’s orphanage, a Dickensian hellhole along Anduruna’s eastern seacoast. Mace, the equivalent of a ten- or eleven-year-old human boy, is always getting in trouble for his practical jokes. He doesn’t care that he makes it easy for the orphanage’s real troublemakers to blame their tricks on him. But when his best friend is brutally murdered and he is blamed, he is forced to flee with Whip, his little blue companion (don’t call him a pet) into Anduruna’s lower-class throngs. There he meets Lilith Calah, a female counterpart from the aristocracy’s elite Sabbaton Towers who has just escaped a murder attempt (with the help of her half-sister, Namah) that apparently is connected to a black magic plot (and believe me; Dave & Liz can draw really gory and frightening black magic!) by the Dark DreamKeepers to overthrow the DreamKeepers and bring the nightmare hordes into the ascendency.”

The first three volumes, especially volume 3, Intentions Entwined, establish the original quartet of Mace, Whip, Lilith, and Namah; Bast, who seems to be Mace’s violent enemy but helps them because he has romantic feelings for Lilith; and the trio of Woods, a deer, Bill, a cat, and Damon, a dog. All four albums are “wall-to-wall full-color gorgeous art (no margins) on glossy paper”, printed in China.

This poster shows (front row, left to right) Mace, Paige (Mace’s best friend – she’s murdered in vol. 1), Whip, (second row) Bast, Randy (a bad guy), Lilith, (third & fourth rows) Grunn, Tinsel, Wisp, Namah, (background) Scuttles.

Chapter 10, “Throat of Stone”, begins with Woods, Bill, and Damon having escaped underground, where they are drafted into the Underground to fight the Nightmares (which they don’t believe in). Viriathus (Vi, shown on the cover) teaches them against their will how to fight guerilla-style. But she tries unsuccessfully to get them excused from any action, feeling that they would only be cannon-fodder. Lilith’s group of herself, Namah, Mace, and Whip, with the tagalong Bast, tries to sneak away from the Underground to go even deeper underground, into the caverns beneath Anduruna to find the lost Archives and its books. Meanwhile the Nightmare Lord Nabonidus orders the turncoat DreamKeeper Tinsel Nanaja to go into the caverns (despite her extreme reluctance) to find and get captured by Lilith’s group and get taken by them to the Archives, as a spy to get whatever they learn.

This synopsis omits several other things that are going on. (What is Operation Guillotine?)

Oh, I didn’t mention that each character in the DreamWorld has a superhero psionic talent (Whip = telekinesis, Lilith = healing, Namah = ‘ether tendrils’, Tinsel = ‘burning hair tendrils’, etc). It is illegal in Anduruna to use these, so they are usually undeveloped. In Chapter 11, “Echoes”, Nabonidus wants his agents to start using their powers. He sends the childlike but evil Wisp to train them. Lilith’s group go down and down into the caverns and eventually reach the Archives, but Bast’s legs are broken. After Lilith finds what she needs to fight the Nightmares, they are ready to return except for Bast’s broken legs. While they argue over abandoning Bast or not – he orders them to; they refuse – Lilith suddenly discovers that there is a level lower than the Archives.

In Chapter 12, “Tomb of the Forsaken God”, everybody fights. The Good Guys seem to win, but is it a real victory or just a breathing spell?

“It appears there’s a distinct probability of life as we know it horribly ending.”

“Well … at least we won’t have to file taxes anymore.”

To be continued.

It’s all terribly confusing, but so beautiful that you won’t care. The colors are so vivid (the publisher’s name has been chosen carefully) that they practically glow. The cavern sequences abound in deep purples and fiery reds. There’s a lot of commando action with plenty of bloodshed among cute funny animals, some of whom are so fluffy with such long, flowing tails that it’s impossible that they could keep from tripping over them or keep them from getting slammed in doors.

– Fred Patten

• Buy on Amazon
• Learn more about Dreamkeepers
• Dreamkeepers Kickstarter
• Fred’s Review of Volume 3 on Flayrah
• Fred’s Review of Volume 2 on Anthrozine
• Fred’s Review of Volume 1 on Anthrozine