Academia strikes again. This scholarly study, #20 in the McFarland’s “Critical Explorations in Science Fiction and Fantasy” series, edited by Donald E. Palumbo and C. W. Sullivan III, presents a literary and historical analysis of the theme of intelligent animals in modern (20th) century science fiction and fantasy.

Though animal stories and fables stretch back into the antiquity of ancient India, Persia, Greece and Rome, the reasons for writing them and their resonance for readers (and listeners) remain consistent to the present. This work argues that they were essential sources of amusement and instruction--and were also often profoundly unsettling. Such authors in the realm of the animal fable as Tolkien, Freud, Voltaire, Bakhtin, Cordwainer Smith, Karel Čapek, Vladimir Propp, and many more are discussed. (back-cover blurb)

McFarland & Co., April 2010, trade paperback $35.00 (vii + 260 pages). Foreword by Van Ikin.

These two Young Adult talking-cat fantasies are recommended for readers age 10 “and up”. Yes, they are up to our age level and Furry interest.

“The Tygrine Cat”; Cambridge, MA, Candlewick Press, April 2008, hardcover $15.99 ([vii +] 242 pages); map by David Atkinson.

“The Tygrine Cat on the Run”; London, Walker Books, January 2011, paperback £5.99 (286 [+ 1] pages).

The “Mollisan Town quartet”, by pseudonymous Swedish author Tim Davys, is (are?) four hard-boiled complex crime thrillers, each set in one of Mollisan Town’s four districts, with a stuffed-animal cast. Hey, if regular animals can be anthropomorphized, why not plushies?

“Amberville” (February 2009); hardcover $19.99 (343 pages), Kindle $8.99.
“Lanceheim: A Novel” (June 2010); hardcover $21.99 (371 pages), Kindle $9.99.
“Tourquai: A Novel” (February 2011); hardcover $19.99 (325 pages), Kindle $9.99.

The first three novels were published by Albert Bonnier Förlag in Stockholm in 2007, 2008, and 2010, and published in English by HarperCollins one or two years later; all three are translated by Paul Norlen. The concluding novel, Yok, is scheduled for July 2012.

San Fernando sounds like a bleak place! It’s a small island port that has sunk into squalor, tyrannized by a giant, sadistic gangster, “Smiley O”, Smiley O’Hannigan – a wolf so massive that he seems to be literally bulletproof – and his predator thugs. The isolated town has been written off by the rest of the world:

‘But … but nobody leaves San Fernando!’ It was true. The nearest port, they had said in school, was two weeks’ journey by boat, north to the southern tip of Galway. Nobody could get visas anymore.   No one was allowed out. (p. 68)

Johnny Ludlam is a sixteen-year-old jackrabbit, the fatherless son of an elderly music teacher. In happier days his father was the local hero, a lifeguard who had saved almost forty people from drowning before he disappeared in a rescue gone bad.

Today the inhabitants of San Fernando are all dispirited, and the impoverished Johnny and his mother are about to lose their apartment. Johnny’s sole friend is the streetwise junkie Rab, a color-shifting, normally pale-green anole. Johnny’s mother is reduced to giving him her valuable clarinet to pawn for rent money, but nobody will buy it. Nobody has time for music any more in San Fernando.

Johnny dreams of becoming a hero, as his father was. And he may have a crazy chance.

Illustrated by Cooner. Dallas, TX, FurPlanet Productions, January 2011.
Trade paperback $9.95 (191 pages), Kindle $5.99.

Dangerous Jade is a work of anthropomorphic fiction for adult readers only. (publisher’s rating)

Actually, although there are some torrid romantic scenes and a lot of adult language here, it is all standard M/F sex between consenting adults; less X-rated than many mainstream novels or R-rated motion pictures.

This is also #4 in FurPlanet’s new Cupcakes line of works shorter than novel length. Dangerous Jade is “only” a novella, but it delivers a complete and satisfying story.

Illustrated by Meesh. Dallas, TX, FurPlanet Productions, January 2012, trade paperback $9.95 (vii + 81 pages).

Nominations are open for the 2011 Ursa Major Awards, intended to recognize the best works published in the field of anthropomorphics last year. Nominations close on February 29; voting starts March 15 and closes May 4 (to allow last-minute voting from Morphicon).

Furry fans may nominate up to five works in each category. The 2011 Awards will be announced and presented in a ceremony at CaliFur VIII in Irvine, CA, June 1–3, 2012.

Available awards include Best Motion Picture, Dramatic Short Work or Series, Novel, Short Fiction, Other Literary Work, Graphic Story, Comic Strip, Magazine, Website, Published Illustration, and Game.

If you cannot think of five worthwhile nominees in each category, see the 2011 Recommended Anthropomorphics List on the Ursa Major Awards website for suggestions.

You are probably thinking of the USA's World War II propaganda animated cartoons. There were certainly lots of them!

Long articles could be (and have been) written on the adventures of Donald and Daffy Duck, Bugs Bunny, Gandy Goose and Homer Pigeon. In the last decade, most American propaganda cartoons have been re-released on DVD, so we can see them for ourselves; they are also on YouTube.

Volumes could also be written of the wartime funny-animal comic book and newspaper comic strip characters who fought the Axis, usually on the Home Front against saboteurs and hoarders. World War II's talking-animal propaganda novels are less well-known. In fact, they are forgotten today except in movie-adaptation credits. That’s too bad, as the books are still enjoyable reading.

The Holidays are special, but everyone celebrates them differently. People bake cakes, sing songs, and others make love. They celebrate with the ones they have, the ones they lost, and find new love to share.



Some days are meant for miracles.

Some days are meant for family.



And some days you have to find your own reasons to celebrate, but any day can be a special day, even just for a moment.



Join Whyte Yoté, Rechan, Jeeves the Roo, Andres Cyanni Halden, Pyrostinger, Sanada Mutt, Fraust Dogger, Vendetta Leopard, Brathor, and Ajax B. Coriander as they tell stories alongside ten illustrations by Aggro Badger of the High Holy Days, both old and new, filled with hope, family, loneliness, and love.

Aw, that’s pretty! The book also is rated “adult readers only” for “graphic sexual situations”.

The eleven holidays featured are el Día de los Muertos, Easter, Midsummer, Thanksgiving, the 4th of July, Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, Halloween, Hannukah, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve. Guess which does not have its own illustration.

Dallas, TX, FurPlanet Productions, November 2011, trade paperback $19.95 (238 pages). Illustrated by Aggro Badger.

Michael W. Bard was a popular Canadian Furry author – more accurately a 'transformation' author – who wrote many online stories during the 2000s, and was a co-editor or close supporter of online magazines TSAT and Anthro. He unexpectedly died of an aneurism in March 2010 when he was only 44. His friends in the fandom have edited and published this collection of his fiction as a tribute to him.

The majority of these thirty stories are about the protagonists (usually but not always humans) turning into Furry creatures, and how this transformation affects them. Horses (regular, centaurs, unicorns, pegasi), deer, squirrels, avians. A coelacanth. A giant snail. There are a very few 'straight' Furry tales here, and an equal few that are not Furry but about traditional Celtic shapeshifters. A couple are humorous, but Bard preferred the bittersweet ending, the emotion-tuggers.

These are all well-written, and Bard’s friends have done both him and us a service by collecting them into this memorial collection; but you’d better have a handkerchief handy while reading.

Amherst, NH, Anthropomorphic Dreams Publishing, November 2011. Cover: Heather Bruton.
Trade paperback $14.95 (417 pages), Kindle or ePub $6.95.

Too much Furry fiction, written inside the fandom and in mainstream s-f, is based on the stereotype of anthropomorphized animals bred by humans to be a prejudiced-against, believed-inferior underclass; laborers, servants, sex objects, cannon-fodder soldiers – slaves – who revolt against their creators to win equality.

Geusz’s stories are more gentle, more imaginative, and more philosophical – and on an inner level, more emotive and dramatic. The Lapists are humans who believe that late 21st-century/early 22nd-century humanity has become lost in a callous, soul-deadening materialism, and who not only create a new thoughtful, more caring religious brotherhood, but transform themselves physically through futuristic biosurgery into rabbit-people as a sign of their faith.

What is it like to be an anthropomorphized rabbit-man in a world of humans in near-future America?

San Jose, CA, Anthro Press, June 2009, trade paperback $17.49 (299 pages), Kindle $8.99.

Well, yarst! I learned in library school that the “real title” of a book is what it says on the title page. Death on the Omnibus is just what it says on the cover, and the title page says only, “The ROOMIES Omnibus”. What’s an ex-librarian to do?

This is the big (8 ½” x 11”) complete collection of all of Flinthoof’s humorous Internet comic strip, Roomies, at four strips per page. It contains all 1,200+ strips, from May 31, 1999 to November 21, 2008; plus a new story just for this edition, a new Introduction by Tibo, and thoughts by Flinthoof three years later on having drawn Roomies.

Well, not COMPLETE. There were occasional Roomies guest strips by other Furry cartoonists over the 9+ years, notably Seattle’s Sheryl Schopfer of the Deer Me webstrip, as well as a few non-continuity strips and full-page art by Flinthoof himself.

This collection jettisons some of this extra material, retaining mostly what has been designed into the basic story line. For the complete Roomies, see its website & archives. You will still want Death on the Omnibus for its new material.

“Death on the Omnibus”, by Flinthoof (Dan Caanan)
Lynnwood, WA, Jarlidium Press, December 2011. Trade paperback $18.00 (339 pages).

The Anthropomorphic Literature and Arts Association, which administers the annual Ursa Major Awards, has updated the 2011 Anthropomorphic Reading List to include the titles recommended by furry fans through the beginning of December. This list is often used by fans to nominate in the next year's Awards.

All fans are invited to recommend worthwhile anthropomorphic works in eleven categories (motion pictures, dramatic short films or broadcasts, novels, short fiction, other literary works, graphic stories, comic strips, magazines, published illustrations, websites, and games) first published during 2011, if they are not already on the list.

Send in your recommendations and read the List to see what other fans have recommended this year. Have you read all sixteen comic strips, for example? What have you been missing?

This month is the “last chance” to recommend anything anthropomorphic first appearing in 2011.¹ The List has been revised this year to include Furry websites. If you have any favorite websites that were not previously eligible, please recommend them now.

Anne McCaffrey passed away Monday night in her home from what is reported as a 'massive stroke'. She was 85 years of age.

The creative force behind the Dragonriders of Pern fantasy series and The Ship Who Sang, McCaffrey was the first woman to be awarded a Hugo Award, and to receive the Nebula.

McCaffrey was also the first author to reach the New York Times Bestseller's List with a Sci-Fi title (The White Dragon). She published nearly 100 books, mainly fiction, beginning in 1967.

A remarkable author, McCaffrey prided herself on interaction with her fans. Up until a few weeks ago, she was still answering readers' mail on her website. She was also a frequent face at many sci-fi and fantasy conventions, often invited as the guest of honor.

R.I.P. Anne McCaffrey, 1926 – 2011

I have been a fan of Bill Willingham as a writer (his art is good but not spectacular) ever since he wrote and drew the Elementals comic book in the 1980s. I still think that Elementals vol. 2 #15, July 1990, is one of the most perfect superhero comics ever written, and I have been reading his Fables for DC Comics/Vertigo since it started in 2002. (The second story arc of Fables, “Animal Farm”, was on the ALAA’s Recommended Anthropomorphic Reading List in 2002.)

But I’ll admit that I totally missed his first novel, Down the Mysterly River (Austin, TX, Clockwork Storybook, April 2001, 230 pages, 100 copies), when it came out ten years ago. Now Willingham has heavily revised it and it is published as a major children’s fantasy under Tor Books’ juvenile Starscape imprint, with twenty-five chapter heading illustrations and an endpaper map by his Fables partner, Mark Buckingham.

Starscape describes it as a “children’s book”. It is, but of the sort that has reviewers comparing it to the Chronicles of Narnia, The Hobbit, the Oz books, The Wind in the Willows, Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels, and others with lots of talking animals and/or are dramatic fantasy adventures – books that most Furry fans will have read. While I wouldn’t rate it quite as high as a classic, this is an adventure that readers of all ages will enjoy.

Tor/Starscape, Sept. 2011, hardcover $15.99 (333 + 1 pages); Kindle $9.99; audiobook $24.99.

“… this action-packed space opera will take you to an exotic new world, filled with bold characters and species and surprises at every turn.” (back cover blurb)

This world is certainly exotic. Its intelligent species are the Geedar, well described (and depicted on the cover by ‘Notorious’; Robin McLean) as a doglike people (pp. 11-12):

Sithon, in spite of all the hardships he had suffered as a child, had grown into a fine specimen of an adolescent Geedar. Long of torso and strong in the legs, his arms reached down past his knees, a trait which allowed him to run on all fours or, more usually, on his digitigrade hind legs. His thin, muscular arms ended in hands with thick, black paw pads on the undersides of his fingers, and short, dark claws. […] He had tall, pointed ears, a long snout with a square black nose at the end which stayed wet and shiny unless he was too sick or dry, and blue-grey eyes like his mother’s. The fur covering Sithon’s body was a light grey, like the rest of his family.

Pop Seagull Publishing/CreateSpace, September 2011. Illustrated by Notorious.
Trade paperback $17.00 (483 pages), e-book $4.99.