fred patten | Dogpatch Press

May 15, 2015

Dude, Where’s My Fox?, by Kyell Gold – book review by Fred Patten.

by Patch O'Furr

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

Dude, Where’s My Fox?, by Kyell Gold. Illustrated by BlackTeagan.
Dallas, TX, FurPlanet Productions, September 2014, trade paperback $9.95 ( [3] + 115 pages), Kindle $7.99.

This is “A Red Velvet Cupcake”, FurPlanet’s eighth “Cupcake” novella for fiction between the short story and novel lengths. It does not have FurPlanet’s usual Adults warning for NC-17 content of a M/M erotic relationship, but it probably – no; definitely! — should. Here is FurPlanet’s back-cover blurb:

“Lonnie’s slept with exactly two guys in his life: his ex-boyfriend of three years Steven, and the fox he just hooked up with while drunk at a party. The fox didn’t leave his name, just his scent in Lonnie’s fur—but a scent is enough for a wolf to follow a trail. With his friends Derek the gym wolf and Jeremy the fashionplate rat helping him, Lonnie will learn lessons of dating, sex, and trust, and maybe he’ll find the fox whose scent is just right before the clock chimes midnight.”

Lonnie (no last names here), the narrator, is a young, slightly small (5’5”) wolf. He’s a recent college graduate and structural geologist who seems to devote more of his life to his gay proclivities than to his professional career. He is still getting over his breakup with Steven, his previous red fox boyfriend, when he gets so drunk at a party that, when he wakes up the next morning, he can’t remember much about the male fox that he had sex with the night before, except that it was so good that Lonnie is determined to find him again:

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May 12, 2015

Camp Feral!: Fifteen Years, 1998 – 2012 (Part 1) by Fred Patten

by kiwiztiger

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

“Camp Feral! An all-inclusive furry summer camp where the registration fee covers your food, lodging and activities for the most unique and memorable furry experience of your life! Your fee covers all the coffee you can drink, [and] all the breakfast lunch or dinner you can eat.” (from the Camp Feral! 2012 website)

Camp Feral! is the oldest of the recorded outdoor furry conventions, going back to 1998. (There may have been earlier informal furry camping trips that made no claim of being conventions.) It is also Canada’s oldest furry event, and the fourth oldest continuing furry convention (after EuroFurence in 1995 and Anthrocon and Mephit FurMeet in 1997). It was started after the oldest furry annual convention, ConFurence in Southern California (1989), gave rise to U.S. East Coast furry conventions in 1995 to 1997 (Furtasticon, Confurence East, Albany Anthrocon), inspiring Canadian furry fans to start their own convention – but with a difference.

Camp Feral! was conceived by several Toronto-area Furry fans. P. Pardus said in the Feral! 99! Survival Guide that it got started by him and Terry Wessner asking each other “what if” questions during Albany Anthrocon ’97. Other furs remember the planning as starting just after the first Albany Anthrocon in July 1997, while still others remember it as preceding the first Anthrocon but inspired by Anthrocon’s pre-con publicity. In any case, everyone agrees that Albany Anthrocon gave them the idea. The original plan, to have an outdoor summer camping retreat with furry workshops instead of a traditional hotel-style convention (it is often called the “uncon” because it is so different from other furry conventions), is credited to P. (Panthera) Pardus (Ken Suzuki) of Mississauga, and Silfur (Dan Markey) and Terry Wessner of Toronto. They held several organizational meetings from summer 1997 through early 1998, led by Pardus in Wessner’s 22nd floor Toronto apartment. The Camp Feral! name is credited to MelSkunk (Melissa Drake), in response to a call for a name that was “evocative without being too open to ridicule”. The initial committee consisted of Pardus (chairman), Wessner (facilitator), and Silfur (activities coordinator), plus Simba (Benjamin Eren Robinson, also known as Benjamin; advertising director and web site developer) and Wilykat (Colin Bolton; safety and security), all of Toronto-area furry fandom. The committee and workshop instructor posts for this and future years have not always had the formal titles that they do today – Pardus and Wessner were known at FeralCom meetings as “president-for-life” and “facilitator” — but these are the furs and the jobs that they were responsible for. Wessner bankrolled the first Camp Feral!, which operated at a steep loss because the committee seriously underestimated expenses. (He was reimbursed over several years.) Read the rest of this entry »

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May 7, 2015

PULP! Two-Pawed Tales of Adventure – book review by Fred Patten.

by kiwiztiger

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

PULP! Two-Pawed Tales of Adventure, edited by Ianus J. Wolf
Las Vegas, NV, Rabbit Valley Books, September 2014, trade paperback $20.00 (255 pages).

“The Pulps” were the rough-edged inexpensive, popular fiction magazines that were published from the late 1890s through the early 1950s, on the cheapest wood-pulp paper available. There were general-fiction magazines like All-Story and Argosy, and specialized magazines like Black Mask (mystery), Exciting Western (Western), Fight Stories (sports), G-8 and His Battle Aces (aerial warfare), Love and Romance (romance), Railroad Stories (railroad adventure), Ranch Romances (romantic Western), South Sea Stories (sea adventure), Thrilling Wonder Stories (science fiction), Weird Tales (horror), and many others. The 1920s to the ‘50s was also a period of similar weekly radio adventure-fiction dramatizations.

Now Rabbit Valley Books has recreated that era, but with anthro animal casts. Editor Ianus J. Wolf presents eight stories as though they were episodes of “The RVO Radio Evening of Adventure”.

PULP! Two-Pawed Tales of Adventure is a very mixed bag. Some of the stories are just standard adventure stories with funny-animal casts. (Boring.) Some seem to be standard adventures with funny animals, but the animal natures of the characters turn out to be pertinent. (Clever.) And some present a new kind of adventure designed for a furry world. (Admirably imaginative!) But it would be a spoiler to say which is which.

“The Ruins” by Tym Greene is an Indiana Jones-type Amazonian adventure. Liam Felton, an experienced explorer (zebra), and Stewart Brace (Dalmatian dog), an inexperienced youth but the son of the company president who ordered the expedition, search through the South American jungle for the ancient Indian temple that holds the Secret of the Gods. An unscrupulous rival, Maicon Klauss (magpie), and his hulking henchman Bernard (Clysdale horse) are ahead of them.

“Prey” by Ocean Tigrox is a Western. A nameless grizzled badger bounty hunter comes into a dusty Nevada town looking for a rabbit outlaw. “The rabbit could run but he couldn’t hide.” (p. 23) He finds that the whole town is hiding a more deadly secret. There are a vulture saloonkeeper, a bobcat mayor, an eagle sheriff and his hyena deputy, a cougar callgirl, a jackal clergyman, and more. Read the rest of this entry »

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May 6, 2015

Abandoned Places – Book Review by Fred Patten

by kiwiztiger

Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer – with pawesome assistance from Kiwi Tiger.

abandonedplaces_web This anthology of 16 original furry horror stories was published to debut at Midwest FurFest 2014 on December 5-7. Each story has a full-page frontispiece by Silent Ravyn. To quote FurPlanet’s blurb:

“From stories about being abandoned in the heart of civilization to stories about forced abandonment for the sake of science to how abandoned places affect the mind; the stories in this anthology cover a large range of genres and types of abandoned places.
Each one with their own little piece of personal horror laying among the ruins, ready to strike when you least expect it.”

“Empathy” by Rechan doesn’t say so, but it is obviously inspired by the Kitty Genovese incident in 1964. Morty, an old man, falls on an icy sidewalk during winter and breaks his hip. He calls for help, but everyone who passes just ignores him – except the hungry rats in the garbage. The talking rat that taunts the dying Morty is what makes this a furry story. Nice but too slight.

In “Belief” by Bill Rogers, Fosse (badger) is hired by Alexander (bear) and Nicky (doe) to take them into a “spooky” abandoned mine to get video footage that can be sold to the Haunted Places TV show. There is a cave-in and Fosse is trapped alone in the black tunnel. Does he see real ghosts of miners killed long ago, or is it just his imagination? “They can’t hurt you if you don’t believe in them…”

In “Stared Too Deeply” by Tyler David Coltraine, four college students – Rick (wolf), Rodney (Rottweiler), Bella (rabbit), and Dave (raccoon) – explore an abandoned long, dark, underground service tunnel. At least one of them is not what it appears. This story should not have been placed so closely to the one before it. Read the rest of this entry »

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May 5, 2015

The Furry Future: Today’s Furry Fiction? – book review by Phil Geusz.

by Patch O'Furr

Esteemed Furry author Phil Geusz submits this guest review of…

The Furry Future; 19 Possible Prognostications, edited by Fred Patten
Dallas, TX, FurPlanet Productions, January 2015, trade paperback $19.95 (445 pages)

Furry book reviewers must always begin their task at a marked disadvantage to the critics of other genres, because in order to be comprehensible to non-fandom readers we must first define what a furry story actually is. No one seriously questions what does and does not constitute a mystery story, for example. Nor must romance critics explain or defend the basic elements of their particular flavor of literature. I’d assume that this sort of problem automatically goes along with being a new kid on the literary block except that most readers seem to have a fairly good grasp of steampunk, which is perhaps even more recent a phenomenon than furry.

So, what makes furry different?

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May 1, 2015

Lost on Dark Trails – Book Review by Fred Patten

by kiwiztiger

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

Lost on Dark Trails, by Rukis. Illustrated by the author.
Dallas, TX, FurPlanet Productions, January 2015, trade paperback $19.95 (312 pages), electronic edition $12.95.

This is a mature content book. Please ensure that you are of legal age to purchase this material in your state or region.

This is the sequel to Rukis’ Off the Beaten Path, reviewed here in January 2015. It is also the middle volume of a trilogy, “The Long Road Home”. It begins immediately following the events in the first volume.

Shivah (bobcat), the narrator, is an Amurescan native “squaw” in an anthropomorphic world roughly similar to late 18th-century North America. She is searching — along with Ransom, a coyote trapper, and Puck (Puquanah), a blind silver fox shaman — for vengeance against Methoa’nuk (also bobcat), Shivah’s ex-husband, a cruel native warrior who has joined a band of raiders that have wiped out Shivah’s tribe and now threaten the Otherwolf colonies along the Eastern Seaboard. Shivah, Ransom, and Puck join a party of Otherwolf lawmen led by Grant Wickham (husky) who also search for the raiders, led by Rourke (otter). But in a bloody battle at the end of Off the Beaten Path, the raiders escape and Puck is apparently killed.

Lost on Dark Trails begins with Shivah nursing Puck back to health, while Grant has been fired for allowing the raiders to escape. Ransom, believing Puck dead, has left; the others fear to commit suicide. So Shivah (a “weak woman”) is alone and apparently sidelined with the blind and recovering Puck to support. Instead, she rallies Grant (and a friend) to join her and Puck in finding Ransom; then continuing (without the friend) unofficially after Rourke and his raiders. She and Puck join them as two of the new pursuers, rather than as Grant’s tagalongs. The surprise ending of Lost on Dark Trails wraps up most of the loose threads from Off the Beaten Path, but indicates that the conclusion of the trilogy, also titled The Long Road Home, will take an unexpected new direction.

Shivah has always been a strong protagonist, and by the end of this middle novel, everyone recognizes this.

“I smiled back, and tried to look confident for them all. I was rather liking being in charge, I was finding day by day. There had been so many times in the past I’d wanted to be the one to corral the chaos amongst my comrades, to ground the menagerie of rowdy, strange men who’d become a part of my life into something more orderly. And now I could.” (p. 43) Read the rest of this entry »

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April 30, 2015

Dancing With Bears – Book Review by Fred Patten

by kiwiztiger

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

Dancing With Bears, by Michael Swanwick.
San Francisco, CA, Night Shade Books, May 2011, hardcover $24.99 (268 pages).

This is the first “Darger and Surplus” novel, although it follows two short stories and a novelette; “The Dog Said Bow-Wow”(2001), “The Little Cat Laughed to See Such Sport” (2002), and “Girls and Boys, Come Out to Play” (2005). Aubrey Darger and Sir Blackthorpe Ravenscairn de Plus Precieux (“Call me Sir Plus”) are two charismatic con-men in the postutopian future. Darger is human; Surplus is a dog. To quote the opening of “The Dog Said Bow-Wow”:

“The dog looked like he had just stepped out of a children’s book. There must have been a hundred physical adaptations required to allow him to walk upright. The pelvis, of course, had been entirely reshaped. The feet alone would have needed dozens of changes. He had knees, and knees were tricky.

To say nothing of the neurological enhancements.

But what Darger found himself most fascinated by was the creature’s costume. His suit fit him perfectly, with a slit in the back for the tail, and – again – a hundred invisible adaptations that caused it to hang on his body in a way that looked perfectly natural.

‘You must have an extraordinary tailor,’ Darger said.

The dog shifted his cane from one paw to the other, so they could shake, and in the least affected manner imaginable replied, ‘That is a common observation, sir.’”

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April 29, 2015

Wolfy, the Incredible Secret – movie review by Fred Patten

by kiwiztiger

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

Wolfy, the Incredible Secret. Directed by Eric Omond. 82 minutes. December 18, 2013 in France; March 17, 2015 in the U.S. (DVD).

Loulou, l’Incroyable Secret was the winner of France’s César Award – “the French Oscars” — in 2014 for the Best Animated Feature shown in France during 2013; not just the best French-produced animated feature of 2013. It competed against the American animated features shown in France during 2013, which was probably all of them. It was also shown at the 2014 Berlin International Film Festival, where it was nominated for the Berlinale’s Crystal Bear, selected by a Children’s Jury as the Best Children’s Film entered in the Festival, animation or live-action.

Loulou, l’Incroyable Secret is based upon the French children’s book series by Grégoire Solotareff, with hand-drawn animation in Solotareff’s art style. Solotareff, born as Gregory El Kayem in Alexandria, Egypt in 1953 of Lebanese parents, has lived in France since 1960 and been an artist of children’s books since 1985. He has written & drawn over 150 children’s books to date, winning ten awards. He began the Loulou books in 1989, about the friendship between Loulou (Wolfy), an orphaned wolf cub, and Tom, a young rabbit, in the Land of the Rabbits. The series has been favorably reviewed for promoting friendship amidst nonconformity. It was first animated in March 2003 as Loulou et Autres Loups … (Wolfy and Other Wolves …), a 29-minute featurette directed by Serge Elissade. Loulou, l’Incroyable Secret is an original story, not based upon a book, with the screenplay, dialogue, and art design by Solotareff (and others).

Wolfy the easygoing wolf cub and Tom the pessimistic rabbit are now adolescents in the Land of Rabbits, with Wolfy adopted into Tom’s family. Cornelia, a mysterious gypsy (the audience sees that she is more than just passing through) tells Wolfy that he is not an orphan as he has always believed! His mother is a princess in Wolfenberg, the Land of Wolves. Wolfy insists on going there to find her. Tom goes along, despite his misgivings. They arrive at the height of Wolfenberg’s Carnifest/Meat-Eaters’ Festival, where everyone assumes that Wolfy has brought the teenaged rabbit to be added to the menu. Read the rest of this entry »

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April 28, 2015

Bête, by Adam Roberts – book review by Fred Patten.

by Patch O'Furr

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

Bête, by Adam Roberts
London, Gollancz, September 2014, hardcover £18.00 (311 [+ 1] pages).

“As I raised the bolt-gun to its head the cow said: ‘Won’t you at least Turing-test me, Graham?’

‘Don’t call me Graham,’ I told it. ‘My wife calls me Graham. My mum calls me Graham. Nobody else.’

‘Oh, Mister Penhaligon,’ the cow said, sarcastically. We’ll have to assume, for the moment, that cows are capable of sarcasm. ‘It won’t much delay you. And if I fail, then surely, go ahead: bye-bye-bos-taurus. But!’

‘You’re not helping your case, ‘ I said, ‘by enunciating so clearly. You don’t sound like a cow.’

‘Moo, ‘said the cow, arching one hairless eyebrow.” (p. 3)

Graham Penhaligon is a farmer. Farmers traditionally slaughter their cattle and serve them at family meals. So Farmer Penhaligon kills his cow, despite its pleading to him to spare it.

And finds himself arrested for maybe-murder. Which he expects.

Bête is set in the near future, when the animal-rights movement – specifically an organization called Deep Blue Deep Green (DBDG) – is going about surreptitiously raising some animals’ intelligence – specifically, in this case, Farmer Penhaligon’s cattle – to force the courts to decide whether an animal with artificially raised intelligence is a thinking animal no different from a person, and thus a legal person. The courts have declared a moratorium on the killing of such animals while the legal debate goes on; which has been going on for seemingly forever, as such social movements tend to do.

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April 23, 2015

French Anthropomorphic Animal Animated Features, Part 4 – by Fred Patten.

by Patch O'Furr

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

Series: Part 1 – Part 2 – and Part 3. This is the last of four parts. Continuing from where we left off …

Blackie & Kanuto (Black to the Moon 3D), directed by Francis Nielsen. 81 minutes. April 17, 2013.

Blackie (or Blacky) is a black sheep who goes out of her way to be “different”. Kanuto is an exasperated sheepdog who is in love with her. When Blackie decides to travel to the Moon, Kanuto reluctantly joins her. Other characters include Blackie’s loyal followers, Pepe (horse) and Marvin (duck); Fancy, Cloe, and Victoria, the sheep fashionistas who are jealous of Blackie; Theodora, the motherly operatic cow who thinks that Blackie should be a ballerina; Karl Wolf, the haughty lupine fashion designer; Hu Flung Pu, the martial artist spider and his illegal spider seamstresses; the three Patrino Russian canine cosmonauts who have a rocket ship; Rainbow (Grumbo), the macho U.S. Army dog and rival sheepdog who acts more like Rambo; two Bulgarian birds from a singing TV reality show contest; and Pinkie, the sheep who is experimented upon and becomes as large (also as unfriendly) as Godzilla.

Blackie & Kanuto was a CGI Spanish-French-Italian animated feature premiered at the May 2012 Cannes Film Festival, and first released in Spain on February 15, 2013. It was shown in different countries (it was extremely popular in Russia) in different edits. Other titles included Head Over Hooves and Pup. Read the rest of this entry »

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