Award-winning sci-fi author John Scalzi used a kitten campaign to win a poll by prominent SF publisher Tor, for his short story Shadow War of the Night Dragons: Book One: The Dead City: Prologue.

His novel Fuzzy Nation (review), a reboot of H. Beam Piper's 1962 novel Little Fuzzy, placed 8th in its category. From Tor:

For those unfamiliar with Scalzi’s story, its origin can be traced back to our Best SFF Novels of the Decade Readers’ Poll and the subsequent data it generated in regards to most used words in fantasy titles. We joked that “Shadow War of the etc etc etc.” would be a powerhouse of a fantasy tale and lo, John Scalzi made our dreams come true a few weeks later.

Blotch's Nordguard: Across Thin Ice (review), published by Sofawolf Press, was #1 in comics.

Nominations for the 2011 Ursa Major Awards, intended to recognize the best works published in the field of anthropomorphics last year, close in just two weeks, on February 29. Nominate now or lose your chance to pick the five finalists in each category.

Voting starts March 15 and closes May 4 (to allow last-minute voting from Morphicon 2012).

The 2011 Awards will be announced and presented in a ceremony at CaliFur VIII in Irvine, CA, June 1–3.

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 for suggestions. Find us now on Facebook!

A dark rumpled figure sat on a subway bench next to a semi-conscious arthropod that had defecated in its pants. In a darkened corner of the moving tram, teenage crustaceans giggled like axe murderers as they passed a battered, dirty needle back and forth, injecting each other with a viscous amber liquid. Lights on the metal jalopy flickered on and off like an epileptic seizure.

Standing in the middle of the car while avoiding eye contact with anything that moved, slickly-dressed business mammals rocked with each jolt of the car as they checked their investments on shiny phones while worrying about end-of-the-year bonuses, keeping their ties straight and getting mugged. A skuzzy combination of squid and octopus shoved tentacles lined with stolen watches into the faces of whoever would look at them. (p. 10)

Right away we are plunged into the seamy underside of New Jerusalem. Well – New Jerusalem is almost nothing BUT seamy underside. The whole city is a slum beneath the floating cities of the planet Ishun, which hover serenely overhead.

The floating cities are supposed to be for the elite, but really are not much better. Oh, they do have their polished business districts and fancy upper-class neighborhoods – but Ishun has crime everywhere. So ground-bound New Jerusalem is the real pits!

Atlanta, GA, Reliquary Press, May 2010, trade paperback $14.95 (355 pages), Kindle $2.99.

M.C.A. Hogarth is raising money on Kickstarter for a print edition of her military science fiction serial Spots the Space Marine, featuring the bug-like alien Samuel-Colt and a host of human characters. The book will accompany the existing e-book and serial editions.

The work features alien culture and psychology as well as lots of explosions, cliffhangers, and gun-fights: no straight human vs. bug action here. More like bug-and-human vs. bug.

Money raised is to go towards "cover art, layout; all the things that make a physical book great." Backer reward options include the book or e-book, the author's original notes, and art of floating bug aliens. The project now stands at $625 of its $1500 goal, with 25 backers.

Graveyard Greg explains in his Foreword how he came to write this novel. Firstly, there was the Second Life virtual-reality world, for which he created a jackal persona with a red Mohawk wearing black jeans and red sunglasses. Secondly, there was his brief job as a barista at a Starbucks. Thirdly, there was John “The Gneech” Robey’s series Fictionlets: The Extremely Brief Adventures of Bridgid and Greg, each of 400 words or less. Fourthly, there was his own imagination, which blended them together, named his jackal Venti and gave him a job as a part-time barista at a Starbucks clone, and he was off and running in a series of short-short-short chapters of one page or slightly over each. Voilà; Welcome to Cappuccinos! (exclamation point optional).

FurPlanet Productions, January 2012, trade paperback $19.95 (246 pages). Illustrated by Mitternacht.

Despite the title, the protagonist of Otters in Space, Kipper, is a tabby cat.

The bus stop sign and shelter were in front of a giant, white church. The Church of the First Race was an historical building, preserved from the time when humans still walked the Earth. It dwarfed the taller but smaller-scale high-rises around it. It was the oldest building in New LA. Kipper had been inside once and sat on the monstrous pews, but, like most cats, she didn’t feel comfortable with First Race doctrine. It was a dog religion – they preached that humans, the First Race, had left Earth as emissaries to the stars and would return to bring all the peoples of Earth into a confederation of interstellar sentience. Someday. (p. 1)

“Otters in Space: The Search for Cat Havana”, by Mary E. Lowd.
FurPlanet Publications, January 2012, 2nd Ed.; trade paperback $9.95 (176 pages); ebook $5.99.

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 $5.62 (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.

This gritty crime novel is a parody with anthropomorphic dog and cat detectives. Oh, gee, we haven’t seen THAT before!

San Bernardo is their territory, a seething metropolis where fat-cats prance in the exclusive island enclave of Kathattan while working dogs wallow in the stinking squalor of the Kennels. (back-cover blurb)

NYC, Simon & Schuster/Scribner, July 2009, trade paperback $14.00 (259 pages), Kindle $10.99.

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.

The Anthropomorphic Literature and Arts Association, which administers the annual Ursa Major Awards, has closed the 2011 Recommended Anthropomorphic Reading List.

Recommendations for the 2012 Reading List are now being accepted, although the 2012 List will not be posted on the UMA website until March 1, after the nominations for the 2011 Awards have closed. Voting on the 2011 Awards finalists will open on March 15.

All fans are invited to recommend what they feel are 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, games, and websites) first published during 2012. This List is often used by fans to nominate in the next year's Awards.

These are Books 2 and 3 in Englert’s “A Bull Moose Dog Run Mystery” series. They are enjoyable enough, but not worth reviewing separately.

Here’s an e-book we recently stumbled across: Legacy by Hugo Jackson is the author’s first book, and also the start of “The Resonance Tetralogy”, which presumably means there will be three books to follow. “Faria Phiraco [a fox ] is a ‘resonator’, a manipulator of crystals from the moon who wields control of the elements. It is a rare and secret power which she and her father, the Emperor of Xayall, guard with their lives. But they are not alone… The Dhraka, malicious red-scaled dragons, have discovered an ancient artefact, a mysterious relic from the mythical, aeons-lost city of Nazreal. Their plan already in motion, they besiege Xayall, launching upon the city to find Faria and tear more of Nazreal’s secrets from her. But she knows nothing, except that the powers hunting her threaten the entire world. With her father missing, Faria has to rely on her own strength and brave the world that attacks her at every turn. Friends and guardians rally by her to help save her father and reveal the mysteries of the ruined city, while the dark legacy of an ancient cataclysm wraps its claws around her fate… and her past. She soon realises that this is not the beginning, nor anywhere near the end. A titanic war spanning thousands of years unfolds around her, one that could yet cost the lives of everyone on Eeres.” The book is available for the Kindle on Amazon, at it seems to be getting good reviews from the readers quoted there.

The Wolf Chronicles trilogy is the story of why wolves and humans can never be friends. Or why they MUST be friends. Actually, I am not sure of anything. If there is one thing at which Hearst excels, it is Being Mysterious.

'Promise of the Wolves'; NYC, Simon & Schuster, June 2008, hardcover $25 (341 pages), paperback $11, Kindle $11.99.

'Secrets of the Wolves'; NYC, Simon & Schuster, August 2011, hardcover $24.00 (371 pages), Kindle $10.99.

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.