Dogpatch Press

Fluff Pieces Every Week

Tag: fiction

October 12, 2016

Call for submissions: The Symbol of a Nation, a new anthology edited by Fred Patten.

by Patch O'Furr

Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer. This goes out a little late (sorry). You might also be interested in others announced here at Adjective Species. 

Goal Publications is announcing its first original short story anthology.

Title: The Symbol of a Nation. Theme: national animals. Deadline: December 1st, 2016.goal-publications-full-white-bg

Wanted: original short stories (no reprints) of 2,000 to 15,000 words, featuring furries that are the national animals of countries, such as Afghanistan’s snow leopard, Algeria’s fennec, Australia’s red kangaroo, Bangladesh’s tiger, Canada’s beaver, Denmark’s swan, Eritrea’s camel, France’s rooster (fighting cock), Germany’s black eagle, Honduras’ white-tailed deer, Italy’s wolf, the U.S.’s bald eagle … There are over 200 countries and most of them have a national animal.

For this anthology, we are extending the theme to the official animals of provinces and states. There are several animals such as the koala (Queensland) and platypus (New South Wales) of Australia, or the giant squirrel (Maharashtra) and red panda (Sikkim) of India, or the coyote (South Dakota) and raccoon (Tennessee) of North America that are not national animals, but are the official animals of provinces or states.

But: this is limited to the officially adopted animals (including birds) of national or sub-national entities only. No sports team mascots, corporate mascots like the NBC peacock, political party mascots, or breakfast cereal mascots. No fictional official animals or countries like Transylvania and vampire bats. However, some countries have both a national animal and a national bird, such as Chile – its animal is the huemal, an Andean deer, and its bird is the Andean condor. We will accept stories featuring either or both.

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August 31, 2016

Doglands, by Tim Willocks – book review by Fred Patten.

by Patch O'Furr

Submitted by Fred Patten

51YDnSOQT-L._SX344_BO1,204,203,200_Doglands, by Tim Willocks
NYC, Random House, September 2011, hardcover $16.99 (308 [+1] pages), Kindle $9.99.

This has been published by Random House Children’s Books, but packaged to look like an adult title. Most reviews (non-furry) have compared it to London’s The Call of the Wild crossed with Adams’ Watership Down. The dogs in it talk to each other, which qualifies it for reviewing here.

“Once upon a time in the Doglands, a blue greyhound gave birth to four pups in a prison camp that the dogs called Dedbone’s Hole. The blue greyhound’s name was Keeva and she named her firstborn Furgul, which in dog tongue means ‘the brave.’ Keeva loved Furgul from the moment she saw him, but as she licked his newborn body clean and gave him her milk to drink, her heart was filled with fear. Furgul had been born with a terrible secret. And she knew that when the masters discovered his secret, they would take him away.” (p. 3)

Furgul is born into a puppy farm, specifically a greyhound breeding farm whose purpose is to produce as many greyhounds for dog racing as possible:

“When the pups no longer needed Keeva’s milk, they joined the other hounds in the exercise yard and Furgul got a better look at Dedbone’s Hole. A lot of greyhounds lived here, in a compound surrounded by a high wire fence. Outside the fence he saw a junkyard and some shacks. Inside the compound the greyhounds were locked in crates – one crate each, where each hound lived all alone – which were even smaller than the whelping cage that Furgul lived in. For just one hour a day the hounds were released from the crates to feed and exercise. The masters made sure there was never enough food for all the hounds, and so the hounds had to fight one another, snarling and biting at the filthy troughs of grub to get enough to eat. The older dogs said the masters starved the dogs on purpose to make them compete, so they could find out who was weak and who was strong and who might make a good racer. They did it to teach them that it was stupid to make friends. They did it because they were bullies who thought it was fun to feel so powerful.” (pgs. 4-5)

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August 26, 2016

2015 Cóyotl Awards results – by Fred Patten.

by Patch O'Furr

Submitted by Fred Patten

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The 2015 Cóyotl Awards, presented by the Furry Writers’ Guild for four categories of the Best Anthropomorphic Literature of the 2015 calendar year, were recently announced at a presentation ceremony at the Rocky Mountain Fur Con in Denver, Colorado.

The winners and runners-up are:

UnknownBest Novel
Winner

Runner-Up

Best Novella
Winner

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August 19, 2016

Song of the Summer King, by Jess E. Owen – book review by Fred Patten.

by Patch O'Furr

Submitted by Fred Patten

61WDYh9RmLLSong of the Summer King, by Jess E. Owen. Map.
Whitefish, MT, Five Elements Press, July 2012, hardcover $30.00 ([viii +] 246 [+2] pages), paperback $12.99, Kindle $4.99.

“Shard is a gryfon in danger. He and other young males of the Silver Isles are old enough to fly, hunt, and fight–old enough to be threats to their ruler, the red gryfon king. In the midst of the dangerous initiation hunt, Shard takes the unexpected advice of a strange she-wolf who seeks him out, and hints that Shard’s past isn’t all that it seems. To learn his past, Shard must abandon the future he wants and make allies of those the gryfons call enemies. When the gryfon king declares open war on the wolves, it throws Shard’s past and uncertain future into the turmoil between. Now with battle lines drawn, Shard must decide whether to fight beside his king . . .or against him.” (blurb)

The beginning of the first volume of Owen’s The Summer King Chronicles tetralogy is reminiscent of Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull. “Fresh morning air lifted clouds and gulls above the glimmering sea, and drew one young gryfon early from his den. Too early, just before sunrise when forbidden darkness still blanketed the islands.” (p. 1)

Shard, a young gryphon, has sneaked out from his cave on Sun Isle early to get some additional flying practice. It’s not for the pure glory of flying, though. Shard is a native of the Silver Isles, conquered a generation ago by the gryfon Sverin the Red King and his Aesir.

“‘The king comes,’ said the older gryfon. Halvden [the son of one of Sverin’s advisors] blinked and spun as they all perked ears toward the king’s rocks. The king glided in from his morning flight, massive wings flaring, stirring the grass as he landed on the top of his rocks.

The largest of the pride, Sverin-son-of-Per looked every bit a king. He wore gold, crusted with emerald and sparkling catseye, around his neck, and golden bands clamped to his forelegs just above the spread of black talons. Tokens from Sverin’s grandfather’s war with dragons in the farthest arctic lands across the sea. The dawn outlined his copper flanks, throwing sheen across the scarlet feathers of his shoulders and the deep crimson of his face.” (p. 7)

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August 15, 2016

Les Ailes du Singe. T.1, Wakanda, by Etienne Willem – Book Review by Fred Patten

by Pup Matthias

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

1969_couvLes Ailes du Singe. T.1, Wakanda, by Étienne Willem.
Geneva, Switzerland, Éditions Paquet, May 2016, hardbound €14,00 (48 pages).

This is another fine entry in Lex Nakashima’s & my project to bring American furry fans the best of new French-language animalière bandes dessinées. We covered Étienne Willem’s previous four-volume L’Épée d’Ardenois, set about the 13th century with knights in armor. Les Ailes du Singe, The Wings of the Monkey, is considerably different. It’s set in New York in 1933, with knights of the skies.

It’s March 1933, in the depths of the Depression. Tens of thousands of people are out of work, eating in soup kitchens and living in Hoovervilles. Harry Faulkner (monkey), a top pilot in the Lafayette Escadrille during World War I, and the owner of his own barnstorming and movie stunt-flying Jenny biplane during the ‘20s, has fallen on hard times; but he’s not so desperate that he’ll take a job as a common mechanic. He complains to his girlfriend, Betty Laverne (deer), a newspaper reporter for the Herald, and to his own mechanic, Lumpy (pig), that he wants a job that will let him fly.

Meanwhile, the mayor of New York (rabbit) is gambling on jump-starting a return to prosperity – and advancing his own political career – by sponsoring a fleet of high-profile dirigibles (which the mayor secretly owns a share of) powered by synthetic helium, that will replace the railroads in crossing America in comfort and speed. The first of them, the Navy dirigible Wakanda, is about to cast off from the Empire State Building on its posh maiden voyage to California. The flight is covered by Betty.

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August 9, 2016

Hoenix, by Ted R. Blasingame – book review by Fred Patten.

by Patch O'Furr

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

Fred writes: three or four reviews of furry books that I wrote in 2003 or 2004 have vanished from the Internet.  I wrote them for the first version of Watts Martin’s Claw & Quill site, which he has apparently taken down. Here they are back online.

product_thumbnail.phpHoenix, by Ted R. Blasingame.
Morrisville, NC, Dennier Publishing/Lulu, August 2004, trade paperback $12.49 (343 pages).

For about a quarter-century from 1925 to 1950, millions of Americans thrilled to rip-roaring adventure fiction in pulp magazines and movie serials. Best Western, Popular Detective, Doc Savage, Jungle Stories, G-8 and His Battle Aces — there were dozens of them. The colorful locales might change, but most featured steely-jawed adventurers who slugged, slashed or shot their way through innumerable dangers. I loved these when I was a kid.

Ted Blasingame’s galactic adventures would fit in nicely with the works of Edmond Hamilton, Jack Williamson, and L. Ron Hubbard that supposedly were among George Lucas’ inspiration for Star Wars. Blasingame has been writing his adventures of an interstellar freighter spaceship in a galaxy of anthropomorphized animals, on his http://horizon.dennier.com/ website since 1996. Recently he has started publishing them in trade paperback format through the Lulu.com print-on-demand web-publisher. Hoenix is a stand-alone novel in his Blue Horizon universe.

A wolf regains consciousness at the bottom of a deep well next to the skeleton of another canine. He has been savagely beaten and left for dead. He has almost complete amnesia. Next to him and the skeleton are a suitcase containing clothes with a sales receipt to Aramis Thorne, some rations, and a crate of rotting bags of ancient gold coins — millions of credits’ worth. The well is in a deserted primitive city, uninhabited for centuries but with signs of having been recently looted. After hiding most of the gold, the wolf discovers that he subconsciously has enough survival skills to live through an arduous desert trek, and to face down a band of thieving fennec nomads who abruptly back off when he uses the Thorne name. “Nobody crosses Captain Thorne…” “Heard you were dead… It’s all over Castelrosso…”

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August 5, 2016

It’s More Fun When You’re Not Allowed, by Isabel Marks – book review by Fred Patten.

by Patch O'Furr

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

599841-1Fred writes: three or four reviews of furry books that I wrote in 2003 or 2004 have vanished from the Internet.  I wrote them for the first version of Watts Martin’s Claw & Quill site, which he has apparently taken down. Here they are back online.

It’s More Fun When You’re Not Allowed: Namir Deiter, Year One, by Isabel Marks. Fredericksburg, VA, Fuzzy Kitten Comics/Studio Ironcat, September 2004, trade paperback $11.95 (128 pages,.

This tidy little package presents the first year’s worth of Isabel Marks’ online Namir Deiter comic strip (November 28, 1999 through January 5, 2001), plus a lot of bonus goodies: biographies of 21 main and minor characters, an original ten-page story, a Fantasy Gallery showing the main gang in s-f and fantasy settings, a foreword by Bill Holbrook, and more. Almost as good as the strips themselves are Marks’ notes on practically each one describing the conditions under which it was written and/or drawn.

Basic advice for writers is “Write what you know about.” Marks appears to have done this to excellent effect. As she explains in her notes, she was a high school senior with some spare time in computer class. She had recently discovered on-line comics and wanted to try one of her own.   What about? High school dating! The first strip introduces four high school gals and a guy. The guy, Devlin, is just present to start the action (he asks Tipper out on her first date). The main cast is the girls: sisters Snickers and Tipper Namir, Blue Deiter, and Joy Satu. Snickers and Joy are relatively demure; Tipper, the youngest, is tomboyish; and Blue, who was neglected as a child and raised herself by watching TV, is self-centered and apparently attention-seeking. As Namir Deiter advances during its first year, Marks points out in her marginal asides the ways in which it begins to evolve. The art style shows her experiments with different computer drawing tools and techniques. The story starts with individual gag strips, and gains depth as her characters develop individual personalities and become involved in more serious human-interest situations.

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August 4, 2016

Rats, Bats & Vats / The Rats, the Bats, & the Ugly – book reviews by Fred Patten.

by Patch O'Furr

Submitted by Fred Patten

Fred writes: a few reviews of furry books that I wrote in 2003 or 2004 have vanished from the Internet.  I wrote them for the first version of Watts Martin’s Claw & Quill site, which he has apparently taken down. Here they are back online.

510BY7EKV5L._SX323_BO1,204,203,200_Rats, Bats & Vats, by Dave Freer & Eric Flint. Maps by Randy Asplund.
Riverdale, NY, Baen Books, September 2000, hardcover $23.00 (388 pages), Kindle $6.99; September 2001, paperback $7.99 (448 pages).

The Rats, the Bats, & the Ugly, by Eric Flint & Dave Freer. Maps by Randy Asplund.
Riverdale, NY, Baen Books, September 2004, hardcover $24.00 (391 pages), Kindle $6.99.

I had intended to review just the latter “sequel”. But it is such a close continuation of the former that to read RBU alone is like starting an 800-page novel in the middle. The introductory synopsis is adequate, but it is much more enjoyable to read the whole story.

Harmony and Reason is a colony planet founded on utopian ideals, which has evolved into a split between an elite upper class of founding Shareholders and an oppressed labor class of cloned “Vats”. Unknown aliens, the sea-urchinlike Korozhet, come to HAR to warn that it is about to be conquered by still other aliens, the brutal insectlike Magh’ empire. But the friendly Korozhet will share their superior technology with the humans to help them defend themselves. Among this technology are soft-cyber implants (brain chips) to increase the intelligence of animals. The two species of animal soldiers that HAR bioengineers are bats, for flying explosive devices into Magh’ camps, and “rats” (actually a bioengineered cross between rats and elephant shrews) which make fanatically vicious commandos.

It does not take long for the front-line troops to realize that the Korozhet are not the benevolent saviors they claim to be. They have engineered the Magh’ invasion to whittle down HAR’s defenses so they can safely conquer it for themselves. The creation of the bats and rats is to develop new cyber-controlled slave species. But by then, the Korozhet have gained psychological control over the incompetent Military High Command. To complicate matters, neither the Korozhet nor most humans realize that the bats and rats are more than just computer-guided cannon fodder. They are truly intelligent and are each planning their own revolt.

This may sound dramatic, but the two-volume novel is mostly a military-political s-f comedy. Much action revolves around the evasions that the front-line troops use to get around the stupidly suicidal orders from the pompous High Command so they can effectively battle the Magh’.

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August 3, 2016

Leaping Beauty: And Other Animal Fairy Tales, by Gregory Maguire – review by Fred Patten.

by Patch O'Furr

Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer.  Fred writes: three or four reviews of furry books that I wrote in 2003 or 2004 have vanished from the Internet.  I wrote them for the first version of Watts Martin’s Claw & Quill site, which he has apparently taken down. Here they are back online.

c8486Leaping Beauty: And Other Animal Fairy Tales, by Gregory Maguire. Illustrated by Chris L. Demarest.
NYC, HarperCollinsPublishers, August 2004, hardcover $15.99 (197 pages, Kindle $7.99.

Some people can’t hear Rossini’s “William Tell Overture” without thinking of the Lone Ranger. I couldn’t read Leaping Beauty without imagining it being read aloud by Edward Everett Horton as the Narrator of the “Fractured Fairy Tales” on Jay Ward’s Rocky and His Friends/The Bullwinkle Show. Leaping Beauty is categorized as an Ages 8 – 12 children’s book. Sure, and Jay Ward’s TV cartoons were for kids, too.

Leaping Beauty is exactly in the style of “Fractured Fairy Tales” except that the eight stories all feature animal casts. Some are in traditional fairy-tale settings, such as “Leaping Beauty” which takes place in a swamp kingdom with a bullfrog king & queen. At their polliwog princess’ christening, a bumblebee good fairy blesses her with a loud voice. “She will have a beautiful voice for all to hear and enjoy. Her ribbit will be as loud as a foghorn.” Old Dame Hornet, the nasty fairy they forgot to invite, wishes she will die as an exploding frog, but the last good fairy who has not used his wish yet tries to save her. So the polliwog grows up to become a weeping, sleeping, leaping beauty who hops over to demand Dame Hornet lift the curse. “The sound came right up to Old Dame Hornet’s doorway and went away again, like an ambulance driving by, and driving right back. Like an ambulance going up and down the street, hour after hour.”

Some are in modernized settings, such as “Rumplesnakeskin”:

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July 28, 2016

The Fuzzy Conundrum, by John F. Carr & Wolfgang Diehr – book review by Fred Patten.

by Patch O'Furr

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

UnknownThe Fuzzy Conundrum, by John F. Carr & Wolfgang Diehr.
Boalsburg, PA, Pequod Press, May 2016, hardcover $32.00 (421 pages), Kindle $7.99.

The Fuzzies’ story goes on! For the record, this is the sixth approved novel in the series. They are: Little Fuzzy (1962), Fuzzy Sapiens (1964), and Fuzzies and Other People (1984), by H. Beam Piper; Fuzzy Ergo Sum (2011), and Caveat Fuzzy (2012), by Wolfgang Dietr; and The Fuzzy Conundrum (2016), by John F. Carr & Wolfgang Diehr. For the full history, read “The Fuzzy Story” by yours truly. Yes, we know about Fuzzy Nation (2011) by John Scalzi, but that is a tribute to Piper’s original novel and not a part of the series.

The copyright on Little Fuzzy has lapsed and the whole novel can be read for free on Project Gutenberg. I must’ve read it a dozen times over the years; it’s one of my favorite s-f novels.

The first three novels tell of the discovery of the Fuzzies on the colony planet Zarathustra, a member of the Terran Federation, by sunstone prospector Jack Holloway; the legal establishment of their childlike human sapience; and their protection by the Zarathustran government. The next two novels, written by a Fuzzy fan with the approval of Piper’s estate administered by John F. Carr, create backstories for Jack Holloway and other established characters, add some new human characters (including strong women; one of Piper’s weaknesses), and expand on the Fuzzy-human relationship.

The Fuzzy Conundrum begins by establishing that the events of the previous two years, including the attempt by the Zarathustran underworld to train kidnapped Fuzzies for crime, were high-profile news throughout the Terran Federation. The Fuzzies have been shown on galaxywide news as so cute and cuddly that, even though their intelligence is emphasized, millions of people just have to have one as a status symbol. Those who study the Fuzzies’ official status, which is as a protected species for their human childlike mental level, apply to adopt one as a legal child. Those who just want to own one and have more money than smarts buy one illegally as a pet. The Zarathustra planetary government finds hundreds of spaceships landing at the Mallorysport terminal filled with applicants to adopt a Fuzzy. At the same time, it becomes aware that new criminals are seeking to kidnap wild Fuzzies from the Beta continent reservation, not to train them for crime but to sell them to those who do not know or care that this is illegal.

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