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.

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.

Hoo-hah! Roscoe, does this bring back memories! Memories of all the rip-roaring space operas that I devoured during my junior-high and high-school years. Among my favorites were the Chalice of Death stories by Calvin M. Knox, in Science Fiction Adventures magazine; the last of which was the wonderfully-titled “Vengeance of the Space Armadas” (collected into Lest We Forget Thee, Earth by Ace in 1958).

A hundred thousand years ago, there had been a planet called Earth. It had been a proud world ruling a thousand vassal stars, but its stellar empire had turned upon and annihilated their conquerors, and wiped the name of Earth from the maps of space. ~~~~ But Earthmen still survived . . . a strange race of worldless men and women, by tradition advisers to rulers, but never themselves ruling. Wanderers through myriad planets, their origin was a half-forgotten legend. …

It was later revealed that “Calvin M. Knox” was a pseudonym of Robert Silverberg, who had hacked out the Knox stories in his spare time while a college student, for beer money. Silverberg said later that they made it hard for the critics to accept him as a “serious author”. [Ed Valigursky's 'racy' cover likely didn't help. Update: See Mr. Silverberg's comments.]

You know what? I’m damn glad that he wrote them, because uncritical teenagers need blood-&-thunder space opera just as much, if not more, as they need Serious Literature.

I suppose video games have assumed the popular-fiction role that pulp magazines such as Captain Future, Planet Stories, and Startling Stories used to fill. Kudos to Sean for bringing space opera back to print with his “D-Evolution” s-f novels, of which Death Drop is the first.

Pueblo, CO, Vintage Six Media, October 2011.
Trade paperback $19.95 (560 pages; Amazon), EPUB, Kindle, MOBI, PDF $9.95.

“… 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.

Doove lives in Melbourne and has been one of Australia’s leading Furry fans since 1993. His “Chakat’s Den” website, the home of his (and others’) chakat fan fiction, has been up since 1995. A large number of his short stories were on the website before he began collecting and self-publishing them in book form.

Other Trails Taken is subtitled A Chakat Family Journal, Book II. In fact, it is a direct followup to Forest Tales: a Chakat Family Journal, published in May 2010. It does NOT stand on its own. You have to read Forest Tales, including the stories collected in Transformations (review) in 2005 (new ed. 2008), to understand it.

CreateSpace, May 2011. Trade paperback $25.95 (499 pages).

Back in 2000, Darrell Benvenuto's new publication company Vision Books announced that it had commissioned a series of Furry novels called Tales of the Mornmist.

The first four, written by authors Paul Kidd, Elaine Cunningham, Jeff Grubb, and Mary Herbert (with contributions by Lynn Abbey, Ed Greenwood, and Robert J. King), had been completed and would be published one at a time.

Paul Kidd's The Rats of Acomar, illustrated by Terrie Smith, was published in October 2000 to unanimously favorable reviews. But then Vision Books disappeared. In 2006 Benvenuto promised in a press release that Vision Books would return and resume its planned publication schedule, but there has been no news since then.

If the other three authors had all completed their novels, what has happened to their unpublished manuscripts? Furry fandom has seemed to forget about them. Today, eleven years after The Rats of Acomar, is anything more known about them?

Baen Books, October 2011
Hardcover $18.00 (361 pages)

The first entry in a new teen series and the origin saga for the incredibly popular, multiple New York Times and USA Today bestselling Honor Harrington adult science fiction adventures. Young Stephanie Harrington is none other than the founder of a pioneering family dynasty that is destined to lead the fight for humanity's freedom in a dangerous galaxy. [publisher’s blurb]

Yes, but this story isn’t entirely new. In January 1998, Baen Books published More Than Honor (review; YARF! #58), an anthology of three original novellas by different authors set in Weber’s “Honor Harrington” universe.

The lead novella was Weber’s own “A Beautiful Friendship” (pages 3-132), the beginning of this same story. It appears with minor expansions, retitled as “Unexpected Meetings”, as chapters 1 through 12 (pp. 3-129) of this novel.

The second part, “With Friends Like These…” (chs. 13-29; pp. 133-352), is an original sequel. This rewritten novel version is the first in Baen’s new Star Kingdom series of Young Adult s-f books.

The Tai-Pan Literary & Arts Project is one of the oldest organizations in Furry fandom. According to the Editor’s Introduction, it was started by a group of seven Seattle fans having dinner at a Denny’s during Norwescon X, March 24-27, 1988. They decided to publish a shared-world Furry space-opera fanzine, set in the 36th century against an interstellar background, with a group of writers and artists featuring the same Furry characters in stories edited to be mutually consistent. (See WikiFur for the full historical story.)

Today, twenty-three years later, the Tai-Pan Project has included over fifty writers and artists. It incorporated as a not-for-profit organization in 2000. Its Editors-in-Chief have been Whitney Ware, 1988-1994, and Gene Breshears, 1994-present. It holds a social/editorial dinner Writer’s Night gathering in the Seattle area on the third Saturday of every month. Its publication, titled The Tai-Pan under Whitney Ware and Tales of the Tai-Pan Universe under Gene Breshears, is published approximately twice a year; issue #49 is scheduled for November 2011. Tales of the Tai-Pan Universe won the Ursa Major Award for Best Anthropomorphic Magazine in 2003 and 2004, and the story “In His Own Country” by Kristin Fontaine in issue #39 won the award for Best Anthropomorphic Short Fiction in 2005.

Tai-Pan Literary & Arts Project [Editor-in-Chief: Gene Breshears], September 2011.
Trade paperback $15.00 (176 pages).

Fuzzy Ergo Sum, by Wolfgang Diehr, published in March by Pequod Press (review), is now in a revised Second Edition after a copyright claim.

The novel, intended as a “fourth” Fuzzy novel after H. Beam Piper’s Little Fuzzy, Fuzzy Sapiens, and Fuzzies and Other People, is based on the 1962 Hugo-nominated Little Fuzzy, which entered the public domain in 2006.

Two other Fuzzy novels, William Tuning’s 1981 Fuzzy Bones and Ardath Mayhar’s 1982 Golden Dream: A Fuzzy Odyssey, have been disowned from the Fuzzy canon. However, three months after Fuzzy Ergo Sum was published, Golden Dream publishers Ace Books charged that it was in copyright violation.

Four months ago, Amazon.com was selling the out-of-print first edition of "Best in Show: Fifteen Years of Outstanding Furry Fiction" for $348.33. Now it's $477.82 (+ $3.49 shipping). Is anyone really paying these prices? (Retitled second edition Furry! is still in print for $11.11)

The Saga of Rex, by Michel Gagné
Illustrated by the author
Berkeley, CA, Image Comics, Nov. 2010
Trade paperback $17.99 (200 pages)

Michel Gagné is probably better known in animation fandom than in furry fandom. His major credits include animation on the feature films An American Tail and All Dogs Go to Heaven for Don Bluth Studios in the 1980s; on Quest for Camelot, The Iron Giant and Osmosis Jones for Warner Bros. in the 1990s and early 2000s; and on The Incredibles and Ratatouille for Pixar in the 2000s.

Gagné has worked on Star Wars: The Clone Wars and other TV and video game animation projects. His personal animated short films such as the 1995 Prelude to Eden (video) have often been nominated for the animation industry’s Annie Awards.

In comic books, DC Comics has asked Gagné to write and draw a Batman serial. In 1997, he began self-publishing picture and comic books with his first Rex book, A Search for Meaning: The Story of Rex. His books earned Ursa Major Award nominations in 2002, 2005, and 2006, for the colored edition of his first Rex book and for two issues of his comic, ZED.

In 2004 Gagné was invited to create a story for annual comic-book anthology Flight, edited by Kazu Kuibishi and (then) published by Image Comics. Gagné wrote and drew a second story with his fox cub Rex, The Saga of Rex, serialized in Flight #2–7. Now Image Comics has collected the story into a 200-page full-color trade paperback, printed on high-quality paper.

Exiled: Clan of the Claw, Book One
Edited by Bill Fawcett
Stories by S. M. Stirling, Harry Turtledove, Jody Lynn Nye, John Ringo, Michael Z. Williamson
Riverdale, NY, Baen Books, August 2011, hardcover $25.00 (294 pages)

Exiled: Clan of the Claw is ostensibly alternate-universe science fiction, not fantasy. Editor Bill Fawcett postulates that the Giant Meteor that struck the Earth 65.5 million years ago, causing the extinction of the dinosaurs (according to one theory), never occurred.

The dinosaurs continue to live, evolving into an intelligent humanoid reptile “man” – the Liskash. Mammals evolve, too, resulting in an intelligent humanoid feline “man” – the Mrem. The two are instinctual deadly adversaries; both use “mind magic” against each other, but this is arguably a psionic talent, not a supernatural power.

When the Atlantic Ocean breaks into and fills the dry Mediterranean basin 5.3 million years ago, it cuts off the Mrem to the north from the Liskash to the south – except for one Mrem clan stranded in our world’s North Africa. Vastly outnumbered by its vicious Liskash neighbors, the isolated Clan of the Claw begins a desperate trek around the New Water to reunite with its Mrem brethen, in four novellas by different authors in this “Book One of a new series”.

Red Sails in the Fallout: A D&D Gamma World Novel
Paul Kidd (Wizards of the Coast, July 2011)
Paperback $7.99 (307 pages); Kindle $6.39.

This second novel in Wizards of the Coast’s “Gamma World” series is considerably Furrier than the first. As before, the setting is 150 years after a Hadron Collider catastrophe has destroyed civilization, creating a world in which “the survivors of some mythical future disaster must contend with radioactive wastes, ravaged cities, and rampant lawlessness. Against a nuclear backdrop, heroic scavengers search crumbled ruins for lost artifacts while battling mutants and other perils.”

“Red Sails in the Fallout” is not just anthropomorphic, it is flamboyantly and bizarrely Furry.

    
Sooner Dead: A D&D Gamma World Novel
Mel Odom (Wizards of the Coast, Feb 2011)
Paperback $7.99 (307 pages); Kindle $6.39

“Sooner Dead” is the first novel (of two so far) based on Dungeons & Dragons spinoff “Gamma World”.

The setting's premise is that a Hadron Collider accident in 2012 destroys civilization. 150 years later, “[survivors] must contend with radioactive wastes, ravaged cities, and rampant lawlessness. Against a nuclear backdrop, heroic scavengers search crumbled ruins for lost artifacts while battling mutants and other perils.”

Mel Odom is a veteran writer of authorized-series melodramatic paperback novels who, probably not coincidentally, lives in Oklahoma, “the Sooner State”.

Don’t look for any deep characterization or character development, just non-stop action. The mutants include many talking humanoid animals, which is how this novel qualifies as Furry.