Dogpatch Press

Fluff Pieces Every Week

Tag: science fiction

September 22, 2015

Chasing the Phoenix, by Michael Swanwick – Book Review by Fred Patten.

by Patch O'Furr

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

Chasing the Phoenix, by Michael Swanwick
NYC, Tor Books, August 2015, hardcover $26.99 (316 pages), Kindle $12.99.

51L9iPNqqiL._SX327_BO1,204,203,200_Here is Michael Swanwick’s opening of Chasing the Phoenix:

“Third year, summer, first month, of the royal year. The Hidden King killed his brothers so that there might be no rivals for his throne and continued his preparations for war. In that same month, a stranger unlike any ever seen before came to the Abundant Kingdom.

— The Summer and Winter Annals

Surplus came down out of the north dressed in a Mongolian shaman’s robes covered with multicolored ribbons and hammered copper disks. He was leading a yak adorned with red tassels and tiny silver bells. The yak carried a bundle swaddled in cloth and carefully tied up with ropes.

In the bundle was the corpse of his friend Aubrey Darger.” (p. 17)

I am tempted to end this review here. If that isn’t enough to make you want to read Chasing the Phoenix, nothing that I could say would convince you.

Chasing the Phoenix is Swanwick’s sixth novelette, novella, or novel featuring the adventures of his futuristic con-man team of human Aubrey Darger and genetically-engineered talking dog Sir Blackthorpe Ravenscairn de Plus Precieux (“Call me Sir Plus”). Three short fictions chronicled their steampunk post-utopian adventures in London, Paris, and Arcadian Greece on their way to the Grand Duchy of Muscovy. In the novel Dancing With Bears (reviewed here), they reached (and ruined) Moscow. A later adventure was set in New Orleans.

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August 28, 2015

The Island of Dr. Moreau: A Possibility, by H. G. Wells – Book Review by Fred Patten.

by Patch O'Furr

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

The Island of Dr. Moreau: A Possibility, by H. G. Wells. Frontispiece by C.R.A. [Charles Robert Ashbee]. London, William Heinemann, April 1896, x + 219 [+ 1 + 34] pages, 6/-.

the-island-of-doctor-moreauThis is arguably the first “furry” adult novel, not counting the talking animals of children’s literature such as Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. (Or the adult Metamorphosis/The Golden Ass of Lucius of Apuleius, which was caused by a magic salve and the gods.) It was intended as an anti-vivisection polemic, and it made quite a stir when it was published, although not entirely for the reason that Wells intended. According to the introduction by Alan Lightman in a later edition (Bantam Classic, 2005), “Ranked among the classic novels of the English language and the inspiration for several unforgettable movies, this early work of H. G. Wells was greeted in 1896 by howls of protest from reviewers, who found it horrifying and blasphemous. They wanted to know more about the wondrous possibilities of science shown in his first book, The Time Machine, not its potential for misuse and terror.”

The public focused less upon the animal-men than upon Dr. Moreau’s callous vivisection experiments. In the novel, the physiologist comes across as an obsessed sociopath who cares only for his scientific research, and is oblivious to the pain he causes to his animal subjects. But to the public, he was a crazed monster. This image is clearly emphasized in the second motion picture adaptation, Island of Lost Souls (1932), in which Charles Laughton plays Dr. Moreau as a whip-cracking sadist who seems interested in his experiments only as a justification for his cruel tortures of his victims, and to create subjects whom he can rule as a god.

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August 12, 2015

Subject 9 – Furry comic guest review by Vox Fox.

by Patch O'Furr

Submitted by Vox Fox, a talent in music, fursuiting and video in the San Francisco Bay Area.

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July 31, 2015

Pet Noir, by Pati Nagle – book review by Fred Patten.

by Pup Matthias

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

coverPet Noir, by Pati Nagle.

Cedar Crest, NM, Book View Café/Evennight Books, August 2013, trade paperback $14.39 (iii + 180 [+ 1] pages), Kindle $4.99.

In an undated far future, Leon is a kitten biomodified to talk and with an opposable thumb. Here he’s being taken by his handler at four weeks old from the industrial lab where he was born to his new home, in a cat carrier:

“I could just see his face if I pressed up against the wire. He watched me, looking kind of wary.

‘So what’s this Gamma Station?’

‘It’s a transportation hub out near Cygsee Four. It’s where I live and work.’

‘Sounds boring.’

‘No, it’s a nice place. You’ll like it.’

‘Cygsee Four. That’s Cygnius 61 C IV, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s in the middle of nowhere.’

‘Nowhere’s a relative term, Leon. It’s got a lot to offer. Better than living in a lab.’

‘Got elephants?’

‘Well, no. But there’s a nice park. You can run on the green grass.’” (pgs. 3-4)

Leon has been modified to become an undercover detective on Gamma Station, a smaller transportation hub to the outer space colonies. Smuggling of bioenhancers has been taking place, and the smugglers have escaped detection so far.

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July 30, 2015

A Whisper of Wings, by Paul Kidd – Book Review by Fred Patten.

by Pup Matthias

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

A Whisper of Wings, by Paul Kidd. [Second edition]
Raleigh, NC, Lulu.com/Perth, Western Australia, Kitsune Press, June 2015, hardcover $51.95 (557 pages), trade paperback $31.34, Kindle $8.99.

Whisper CoverThe first edition of A Whisper of Wings was arguably the first professional furry specialty press book ever published, by Vision Novels in October 1999. Anything before that was really a fanzine calling itself a book.

Kidd basically gave his manuscript to Vision just to get it published, after being told by the editors of all the major publishers for years, “A serious adult novel with funny-animal characters? Nobody will ever buy it.” Vision got out two trade paperback novels with anthropomorphic animal characters, both by Paul Kidd, before disappearing in 2001, and A Whisper of Wings has been almost unknown since then. Now Kidd has republished it through his own Kitsune Press, with Terrie Smith’s unused 1997 cover painting. If you never read it before, get it now!

A Whisper of Wings is pure fantasy. It is set in an Australian wilderness more mountainous and forested than the Outback desert, inhabited by the butterfly-winged foxlike Kashra, an alpine aboriginal tribal people. The Kashrans possess a psychic force, the Ka, that the more powerful Kashrans use to enhance their wing-power to make themselves better flyers and hunters. There is also an ïsha world-force, a “Mother Nature” spirit that some Kashran can use to get closer to the forest’s ecology. This Kashran society is thousands of years old and has become rigidly stratified – really ossified. Their civilization is divided into numerous male-dominated tribes, each ruled by a hereditary aristocracy and all under a traditional priesthood. Each tribe is supported by its elite hunters, and by its lower-class artisans who make trade goods. Each tribe is more-or-less self-supporting, coming together for only the annual jiteng games (roughly an aerial soccer tournament) and ceremonial tribal gatherings, at which each tribe tries to outdo the others in lavish feasts and similar displays of conspicuous consumption. Read the rest of this entry »

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July 23, 2015

Thousand Tales; How We Won the Game, by Kris Schnee – book review by Fred Patten.

by Patch O'Furr

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

Thousand Tales; How We Won the Game, by Kris Schnee.
North Charleston, SC, CreateSpace, June 2015, trade paperback $8.49 (2thousand45 pages), Kindle $2.99.

The chapters are years in which this takes place; from “2036: The Early Adopters” to “2040: Thousand Tales”.

The blurb is helpful. “The mad AI Ludo is taking over the Earth… but she just wants everyone to have fun.” But it’s not that simple.

Paul Kostakis is a high-school graduate who wants to go to college. However, in this regimented 2036, all youths are required to serve a government-approved social service to qualify for admission to higher education. Paul is assigned to a Green Communities Youth Initiative work camp across the country in Arizona, a shelter for the homeless and unemployable. Its coordinator is a friendly-appearing sadist who obviously intends to fail Paul. When he stops a madman with a gun from killing anyone in the cafeteria, she records Paul’s actions as “excessively violent”. When he tries to study for his college’s entrance exams, she wastes his time by ordering that he play an endless video game, supposedly to relax and socialize better.

Paul does so very reluctantly, but the Thousand Tales game turns out to be brand-new, controlled by an equally new Artificial Intelligence, Ludo. Ludo, appearing as a fantasy beautiful woman, intrigues Paul by tailoring an imaginary world to his specifications. “She” gradually reveals to him that she intends to follow her programming to help her players enjoy themselves, by immersing them in increasingly-complex fantasy worlds tailored to their desires; and she wants Paul to help recruit new players who need her aid. “In return for a few little favors, she’s offering ‘brain uploading’. She can fatally dice your brain, scan it, and recreate you in a virtual-reality heaven she controls. You can do anything in there: become a griffin, upgrade your mind, fall in love, or go mad.” (back-cover blurb)

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July 14, 2015

Needle, and Through The Eye Of A Needle, by Hal Clement – book reviews by Fred Patten.

by Patch O'Furr

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

Dear Patch; Here is my review of Needle and Through the Eye of a Needle by Hal Clement that I wrote for Cubist’s Anthro several years ago.  Maybe only one fan in a hundred will take the trouble to track these down, but they’ll probably be glad if they do.  Another way of looking at it is that Dogpatch Press will have the only mention of these proto-furry books before there was a furry fiction genre.

Needle, by Hal Clement.
Garden City, NY, Doubleday & Company, March 1950, hardcover $2.50 (222 pages).

NEEDL1950Hal Clement, whose real name was Harry Clement Stubbs (1922-2003), often told of how he wrote Needle as the result of a dare. John W. Campbell, Jr., the editor of Astounding Science Fiction, the most prestigious s-f magazine in the 1940s, was given to making lofty pronouncements that were understood by his writers to be dares to disprove them. On one occasion, Campbell had said that it was impossible to write a genuine science-fictional mystery story. Any such would turn out to be a standard mystery with s-f trappings, such as being set in the future or around a superscientific macguffin; but stripped of those elements, it would turn out to be just a standard mystery. Clement wrote Needle, which Campbell conceded was a genuine mystery that could only exist as also a genuine s-f story. Campbell bought it as a two-part serial for Astounding in its May and June 1949 issues.

Needle begins with two spaceships streaking toward Earth. Their alien occupants are, for the reader’s benefit, referred to as the Hunter and the Quarry. They are a jellylike or amoeboid lifeform, used to living inside a larger lifeform in a symbiotic relationship:

“The Hunter was a metazoon – a many-celled creature, like a bird or man – in spite of his apparent lack of structure. The individual cells of his body, however, were far smaller than those of most earthly creatures, comparing in size with the largest protein molecules. It was possible for him to construct from his tissues a limb, complete with muscles and sensory nerves, the whole structure fine enough to probe through the capillaries of a more orthodox creature without interfering seriously with its blood circulation. He had, therefore, no difficulty in insinuating himself into the shark’s relatively huge body.” (p. 15)

The Hunter’s people live within the bodies of animals called perits in a symbiotic relationship evolved on their world over eons. By themselves they look rather like jellyfish, and the Hunter briefly impersonates one on Earth. The metazoons provide the intelligent direction and the perits provide the physical mobility. When the Hunter’s spaceship, pursuing the Quarry, crashes into the South Pacific Ocean, his perit is killed and he is forced to move into an Earth host body:

“The Hunter’s attitude toward the animal [perit] resembled that of a man toward a favorite dog, though the perit, with its delicate hands which it had learned to use at his direction much as an elephant uses its trunk at the behest of man, was more useful than any dog.” (p. 12)

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July 9, 2015

GeneStorm: City in the Sky, by Paul Kidd – book review by Fred Patten.

by Patch O'Furr

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

GeneStorm: City in the Sky, by Paul Kidd
Raleigh, NC, Lulu.com/Perth, Western Australia, Kitsune Press, May 2015, trade paperback $26.37 (420 pages), Kindle $7.99.

genestorm_novel___out_now__by_patpahootie-d8u5qizThis is based upon Kidd’s own new GeneStorm role-playing game, which seems to be similar to TSR/Wizards of the Coast’s 1978 Gamma World RPG. Kidd wrote an authorized Gamma World paperback novel, the rollicking adventure Red Sails in the Fallout (Wizards of the Coast, July 2011), featuring Xoota, a mutated quoll-woman, and her partner Shaani, “a mutant albino lab rat with an enthusiasm for scientific research and a Pommy accent”. It was set in the Australian desert near where Kidd lives. (Perth, Western Australia. He was the first Guest of Honour at Perth furry fandom’s annual FurWAG convention.)

Somebody sniffed that they would never read a novel hacked out as a RPG merchandising spin-off. Your loss. Kidd writes fun furry adventures.

GeneStorm: City in the Sky is set in the Australian “weird-lands” 150 years after the GeneStorm plague has transformed the world entirely. Everyone is a mutated hybrid. The protagonist is Snapper, a female half-human, half-shark. She rides a giant cocatoo. (It sounds very similar to the real one at the Further Confusion 2001 exotic animal life-drawing session that kept squawking for attention, trying to upstage the white tiger. See the cover by Kalahari.) Other characters are a blend of human/fox/golden pheasant, human/kingfisher/cat, human/tortoise/god knows what:

“Snapper ate the salty dough, dunking it in a cup of brown onion gravy. “I met a toucan once. Sort of part cat, part bird.’ […] ‘Now she married a guy that was a sort of strawberry-dog hybrid. Well – their kid sort of stayed a cat toucan. But his feathers were al red and green strawberry colours. Pretty striking.’” (pgs. 64-65).

Some can only be described:

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June 19, 2015

The Book of Lapism, by Phil Geusz (2nd enlarged edition) – review by Fred Patten.

by Patch O'Furr

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

The Book of Lapism, by Phil Geusz. [2nd enlarged edition.]
Birmingham, AL, Legion Printing & Publishing, January 2015, hardcover $24.99 (351 [+1] pages), Kindle $4.99.

lapism-coverThis book is a bibliographer’s nightmare. It’s referred to as the Deluxe edition, the 2nd printing (but presumably means the first printing of the second edition), and as The New Book of Lapism. Fortunately, it’s easily distinguishable from the first edition (Anthro Press, June 2009). That had a different cover (this one is by Micheal Day), was a trade paperback, and had two less stories.

This new hardcover is truly impressive, in thick, high-quality boards and a 8.5” X 11” giant size with large, easily read type. Still, almost all the sales are likely to be of the more affordable and easily held Kindle edition. It’s well worth getting in either case. The first edition is out of print, and lacks the two most recent stories. This new edition is complete.

Phil Geusz’s Lapist stories are set in the unspecified near future, maybe a hundred years from now, when materialism, greed, and a callous fuck-you-Jack;-I’ve-got-mine society are making more thoughtful people despondent about whether there is anything worth living for. The philosophy/religion of Lapism grows up; a true brotherhood whose adherents have themselves physically bioengineered into anthropomorphic rabbits to show their friendly, gentle, caring nature. The Lapists have a very rocky and insecure first few years, as covered in these six stories.

More rocky than they’d probably like to admit. There are serpents in Paradise.

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June 9, 2015

Mort(e), by Robert Repino – book review by Fred Patten.

by Patch O'Furr

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

 

Mort(e), by Robert Repino. Illustrated by Sam Chung.
NYC, Soho Press, January 2015, hardcover $26.95 (358 [+ 1] pages), Kindle $12.99.

31jpc4qtJoL“Before he took his new name, before the animals rose up and overthrew their oppressors, before there was talk of prophecies and saviors, the great warrior Mort(e) was just a house cat known to his human masters as Sebastian. It was a time that now returned to him only in dreams and random moments of nostalgia that disappeared as quickly as they arose. All of it except for Sheba. The memory of her was always digging at him like a splinter under a nail.” (p. 3)

The first dozen pages of Mort(e) are Sebastian’s early life as a housecat, and his meeting Sheba, the large, slobbery dog of the man next door. It’s not until page 14 that Sebastian first learns of the war to exterminate humans, when he observes one of “his masters” watching the TV news:

“It was always the same: a river of text flowed beneath explosions, people running, buildings on fire, green trucks rolling along highways, men and women with helmets marching, building bridges, demolishing things, using flamethrowers to burn massive hills of dirt. And in between all the images were videos of creatures that Sebastian had seen crawling in the grass outside the window: ants. They were always on the television, always marching in a line, sometimes covering entire fields and picking apart dead farm animals. Sebastian saw people running away from ants the size of the Martinis’ car. The monsters could walk on their hind legs, and their jaws were strong enough to lift a human at the waist. […] All the channels were playing the same thing now. Nothing buts ants and fires. But this time, there was footage of a new creature. A pack of wolves, walking on their hind legs, approaching the camera. One of them carried a club in his hands the same way Daniel would hold a hammer. This was followed by a choppy clip of a group of animals marching alongside the giant ants. Sebastian could hear people screaming.” (pgs. 14-15)

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