Finally I've got time for an informal review! I had the chance to read Furry Nation about 7 weeks ago on my flights down to Texas Furry Fiesta, and just now I gave it a two-hour skim to refresh my memory. I've avoided reading anyone else's reviews (including the one above), and I haven't even followed the 40+ comments here, so any repetition of other people's opinions is purely coincidental.
First off, this book was a really smooth read. A very friendly, speaking-to-the-reader writing style, with a solid grasp of language and how to keep it entertaining. It felt very personal.
This book covers a huge amount of territory about furry fandom. Not just back to its earliest days in the 1970s and 1980s, it includes events as recent and timely as 2016-2017, right before the book got published. There are references made to all sorts of domains of knowledge - psychology, mythology, cartoons, mass media, religion, the history of the Internet and technology, science-fiction fandom, and... there's so much! This has the unintended side-effect that there's occasional jargon, which the author does his best to quickly describe whenever it comes up. There are a lot of bases being covered! Lots of research and a wide range of personal knowledge went into this.
Furry fandom is a difficult subject to tackle because it goes all over the place, and this book manages to squeeze in so much of that breadth; I was really impressed. From my perspective - I've been doing panels about the history of furry fandom at cons for several years. I give the audience a handout which tries to compress a crazy amount of information into five and a half pages. I think it does an adequate job of covering a challenging topic - and this book makes me feel like my handout is but the 10% of the iceberg that pokes over the surface of the sea.
A down-side to having a complex topic is trying to organize all that information into a readable structure. This is accomplished by the book's chapters being pretty self-contained, with occasional (and unavoidable) topical spill-over. Within the chapters, there are sometimes abrupt shifts. A lot of the book is devoted to interviews and describing the furry journey of many individual fans - and this can start very suddenly, in a new paragraph, with no preamble. This felt a bit jarring, but as I mentioned earlier, the smooth reading overall definitely made up for these occasional small jolts.
With some of the author's thoughts on a topic scattered between chapters - actually having met and spoken with the author, it's very much part his personality, and this book reflects that nature. Info about the old Vootie APA shows up on pages 76-81, then 200-201. Chapter two ends on a minor cliffhanger, which chapter three never addresses nor resolves; the dangling thread is only mentioned again in a small footnote a hundred pages later. What this book could really use is an index. My deepest sympathies would go out to the person tasked with making the index, but the end result would be one of the most gloriously weird-looking indexes ever.
This book is stuffed full of informative talks with people from all walks of the fandom, from founding greymuzzles to young, recent fans alike, from people who make and sell stuff, to people who are simply fans. I wish the fursuit chapter had had more pictures of fursuits. There are maybe three people interviewed which made my brain go "Aw man, you talked to them?" which I think says a lot towards the author's lack of bias and willingness to talk to as many people as possible, as well as a sad admission that I wouldn't have been so objective in his place. (And no, I won't say who.) The interviews focus mainly on North American furries, though without a Californian bias as often happens when discussing the fandom's history.
The book does bring up the fandom's adult side. It's professional and honest about it. Nothing explicit, detailed nor upsetting, and it's acknowledged in a very tasteful way, most of it in two small chapters towards the end of the book. There are wink-wink-nod-grins to the adult side throughout the book, particularly in the opening chapter which does a great job of pointing out all the ways that modern mainstream society uses animals symbolically. This random hinting of it is very much in tune with furry fandom itself. Anyone from the outside the fandom, casually browsing through our fandom, will randomly encounter it without much warning. But the topic doesn't dominate the book nor distract from it. There's a much larger picture being painted, and this is simply one of the happy trees dotting the landscape.
If there's a recurring theme to this book, it's a lack of shame and celebrating his fandom. Not in the sense of "something you might not like, I don't care, and I'm going to shove it in your face". This book is far more positive. It's "Ok, my hobby is weird, and it's a fun kind of weird, and let me show you all the different ways it's made us fans happy and how we express ourselves". I think the front cover really encapsulates this forthright attitude. The author himself gets incredibly personal on two occasions, approaching too-much-information territory but never quite breaking that barrier. How his fursona was developed and his first time in fursuit, and he discusses trying out a mild kink, which leads to a cathartic experience and helping him to diet and lose weight. The author wants his discussion of the fandom to be honest with his readers, and I think that honesty really carries over the entirety of the book.
Joe, you're worried about things you got wrong?! Only two things bugged me, and one of them is just semantics. When you mention the prehistoric lion-man carving, you say it was made from a mammoth tooth. I would've used the word tusk - and yes, technically, a tusk is a specialized tooth - but I have a background in archaeology, and if you do an online image search for "mammoth tooth" you'll see why it doesn't quite lend itself to as good a mental image as "mammoth tusk". Anyway. The only significant error I noticed was on page 180, where you say FurryMuck eventually joined the two furry Usenet discussion groups - in fact, FurryMuck and alt.fan.furry both emerged more or less simultaneously in the early 1990s and were joined by alt.lifestyle furry later. (Earlier in the book you describe a.l.f.'s origin, it's just your placement of FurryMuck is off.)
In fact, I picked up a bunch of details from your book that were new to me! The insulting panel comment at BayCon (which did have a kind of point buried in its nastiness, similar to Blumrich's "What exactly is yer problem, Eric?" comic years later, about doing more with the concept). The table subletting at PhilCon. The growing staff revolt within CFE - I attended CFE2 and none of it showed, but I do remember that ass being kicked off of AAC's staff later. The discussion of fursuit pre-mades. Your Zootopia PR slip. And mentioning Furio! I met him once when we were stuck in the reg line at FurFright 2011, and said hi to him a couple times at Anthrocon the following year. I had no idea you two had become a thing!
If you're a teenager trying to figure out how to explain furry fandom to your parents, actually I wouldn't start with this book. I'd explain it your own way, keeping it simple, and have them come with you to a furry convention if that's possible. Once they're comfortable with the concept, if their worldview isn't too conservative and if they're in an "Ok, I want to learn more about this thing" mood, then I'd give them this book. It's a bit too deep of a dive for beginners with a lot of information to digest at once, and the historical focus especially in the first half of the book doesn't convey what the modern fandom has evolved into, which is what you'd want your parents to grasp and anchor themselves to.
That aside, I really liked this book! Particularly I'd recommend it to:
- Any furry fan who's interested in some of the fandom's origins and development, or if you'd like a book that celebrates furriness, it should give you a positive pick-me-up about your fandom.
- Anyone outside the fandom who's interested in reading about quirky subcultures.
- Any media person who's got the time to do some preliminary research and is willing to read attentively, not skim.
- Anyone in science-fiction or fantasy fandoms to see how we relate to fandom culture in general, you'll understand how much we have in common.
Finally I've got time for an informal review! I had the chance to read Furry Nation about 7 weeks ago on my flights down to Texas Furry Fiesta, and just now I gave it a two-hour skim to refresh my memory. I've avoided reading anyone else's reviews (including the one above), and I haven't even followed the 40+ comments here, so any repetition of other people's opinions is purely coincidental.
First off, this book was a really smooth read. A very friendly, speaking-to-the-reader writing style, with a solid grasp of language and how to keep it entertaining. It felt very personal.
This book covers a huge amount of territory about furry fandom. Not just back to its earliest days in the 1970s and 1980s, it includes events as recent and timely as 2016-2017, right before the book got published. There are references made to all sorts of domains of knowledge - psychology, mythology, cartoons, mass media, religion, the history of the Internet and technology, science-fiction fandom, and... there's so much! This has the unintended side-effect that there's occasional jargon, which the author does his best to quickly describe whenever it comes up. There are a lot of bases being covered! Lots of research and a wide range of personal knowledge went into this.
Furry fandom is a difficult subject to tackle because it goes all over the place, and this book manages to squeeze in so much of that breadth; I was really impressed. From my perspective - I've been doing panels about the history of furry fandom at cons for several years. I give the audience a handout which tries to compress a crazy amount of information into five and a half pages. I think it does an adequate job of covering a challenging topic - and this book makes me feel like my handout is but the 10% of the iceberg that pokes over the surface of the sea.
A down-side to having a complex topic is trying to organize all that information into a readable structure. This is accomplished by the book's chapters being pretty self-contained, with occasional (and unavoidable) topical spill-over. Within the chapters, there are sometimes abrupt shifts. A lot of the book is devoted to interviews and describing the furry journey of many individual fans - and this can start very suddenly, in a new paragraph, with no preamble. This felt a bit jarring, but as I mentioned earlier, the smooth reading overall definitely made up for these occasional small jolts.
With some of the author's thoughts on a topic scattered between chapters - actually having met and spoken with the author, it's very much part his personality, and this book reflects that nature. Info about the old Vootie APA shows up on pages 76-81, then 200-201. Chapter two ends on a minor cliffhanger, which chapter three never addresses nor resolves; the dangling thread is only mentioned again in a small footnote a hundred pages later. What this book could really use is an index. My deepest sympathies would go out to the person tasked with making the index, but the end result would be one of the most gloriously weird-looking indexes ever.
This book is stuffed full of informative talks with people from all walks of the fandom, from founding greymuzzles to young, recent fans alike, from people who make and sell stuff, to people who are simply fans. I wish the fursuit chapter had had more pictures of fursuits. There are maybe three people interviewed which made my brain go "Aw man, you talked to them?" which I think says a lot towards the author's lack of bias and willingness to talk to as many people as possible, as well as a sad admission that I wouldn't have been so objective in his place. (And no, I won't say who.) The interviews focus mainly on North American furries, though without a Californian bias as often happens when discussing the fandom's history.
The book does bring up the fandom's adult side. It's professional and honest about it. Nothing explicit, detailed nor upsetting, and it's acknowledged in a very tasteful way, most of it in two small chapters towards the end of the book. There are wink-wink-nod-grins to the adult side throughout the book, particularly in the opening chapter which does a great job of pointing out all the ways that modern mainstream society uses animals symbolically. This random hinting of it is very much in tune with furry fandom itself. Anyone from the outside the fandom, casually browsing through our fandom, will randomly encounter it without much warning. But the topic doesn't dominate the book nor distract from it. There's a much larger picture being painted, and this is simply one of the happy trees dotting the landscape.
If there's a recurring theme to this book, it's a lack of shame and celebrating his fandom. Not in the sense of "something you might not like, I don't care, and I'm going to shove it in your face". This book is far more positive. It's "Ok, my hobby is weird, and it's a fun kind of weird, and let me show you all the different ways it's made us fans happy and how we express ourselves". I think the front cover really encapsulates this forthright attitude. The author himself gets incredibly personal on two occasions, approaching too-much-information territory but never quite breaking that barrier. How his fursona was developed and his first time in fursuit, and he discusses trying out a mild kink, which leads to a cathartic experience and helping him to diet and lose weight. The author wants his discussion of the fandom to be honest with his readers, and I think that honesty really carries over the entirety of the book.
Joe, you're worried about things you got wrong?! Only two things bugged me, and one of them is just semantics. When you mention the prehistoric lion-man carving, you say it was made from a mammoth tooth. I would've used the word tusk - and yes, technically, a tusk is a specialized tooth - but I have a background in archaeology, and if you do an online image search for "mammoth tooth" you'll see why it doesn't quite lend itself to as good a mental image as "mammoth tusk". Anyway. The only significant error I noticed was on page 180, where you say FurryMuck eventually joined the two furry Usenet discussion groups - in fact, FurryMuck and alt.fan.furry both emerged more or less simultaneously in the early 1990s and were joined by alt.lifestyle furry later. (Earlier in the book you describe a.l.f.'s origin, it's just your placement of FurryMuck is off.)
In fact, I picked up a bunch of details from your book that were new to me! The insulting panel comment at BayCon (which did have a kind of point buried in its nastiness, similar to Blumrich's "What exactly is yer problem, Eric?" comic years later, about doing more with the concept). The table subletting at PhilCon. The growing staff revolt within CFE - I attended CFE2 and none of it showed, but I do remember that ass being kicked off of AAC's staff later. The discussion of fursuit pre-mades. Your Zootopia PR slip. And mentioning Furio! I met him once when we were stuck in the reg line at FurFright 2011, and said hi to him a couple times at Anthrocon the following year. I had no idea you two had become a thing!
If you're a teenager trying to figure out how to explain furry fandom to your parents, actually I wouldn't start with this book. I'd explain it your own way, keeping it simple, and have them come with you to a furry convention if that's possible. Once they're comfortable with the concept, if their worldview isn't too conservative and if they're in an "Ok, I want to learn more about this thing" mood, then I'd give them this book. It's a bit too deep of a dive for beginners with a lot of information to digest at once, and the historical focus especially in the first half of the book doesn't convey what the modern fandom has evolved into, which is what you'd want your parents to grasp and anchor themselves to.
That aside, I really liked this book! Particularly I'd recommend it to:
- Any furry fan who's interested in some of the fandom's origins and development, or if you'd like a book that celebrates furriness, it should give you a positive pick-me-up about your fandom.
- Anyone outside the fandom who's interested in reading about quirky subcultures.
- Any media person who's got the time to do some preliminary research and is willing to read attentively, not skim.
- Anyone in science-fiction or fantasy fandoms to see how we relate to fandom culture in general, you'll understand how much we have in common.
Joe - Great work!