GeneStorm Book 2, Fort Dandelion, by Paul Kidd – Book review by Fred Patten.

by Patch O'Furr

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

GeneStorm. Book 2, Fort Dandelion, by Paul Kidd
Raleigh, NC, Lulu.com/Perth, Western Australia, Kitsune Press, 11/2015, trade PB $23.11 (347 pages), Kindle $7.95.

Gene Storm: Fort Dandelion follows closely after Book 1, City in the Sky. It is also “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,” as I said about Book 1. See the cover, unsigned but presumably also by Kalahari. Or this from the first page:

“Jemima Haversham Greyfin – known to all and sundry as ‘Snapper’ – pushed back her helmet and gazed lovingly off towards the south, towards the far off ruins. She patted the neck of her great pink riding cocatoo and dragged in a breath, savouring the rich, alien scents in the air.” (p, 5)

Other major characters include Kitterpokie, a female giant mantis with four arms (two with hands, two with pincers); Beau, a fox/golden pheasant hybrid; Throckmorton, a conglomeration of green, leafy flying plants with three pairs of wings, plus vines with heads that resemble pink and orange flowers and that carry a notebook, a crossbow, and a squeeze-powered air horn; and Sparkle, a massive crocodile/wild boar/rat hybrid. I could fill this review just describing all the minor characters, many of which have to be imagined to be believed.

Snapper and the first four are residents of Spark Town, a Wild West-type settlement isolated in a deep valley, somewhere in what was Australia before the collapse of civilization in the GeneStorm that mutated everyone into a hybrid of human and god-knows-what – no two alike — 150 years before. This was several hundred years in our future, as is obvious by the ruins of giant holograms, fusion reactors, aerodynes, and the like. Spark Town and the villages around it have been cut off from the rest of the world by the mountainous walls of the valley plus swaths of deadly radiation, until the events in City in the Sky.

Fur fun in video and photo – gypsy bears and Chewbacca’s sex roar. NEWSDUMP (12/21/15)

by Patch O'Furr

Headlines, links and little stories to make your tail wag.  Guest posts welcome. Tips: patch.ofurr@gmail.com. 

Midwest Furfest 2015 – More than 5,000 gather in Chicago. (Via Furrymedia.)

The International Business Times has tons of great fursuit photos. You may find a few more in a slideshow from the same Reuters photographer. Enjoy a con video from Vox Fox and a music video from Kiba Wolf.

Buzzfeed’s worst of 2015, Furry Chic in 2016, and Fred’s birthday. NEWSDUMP (12/18/15)

by Patch O'Furr

Headlines, links and little stories to make your tail wag.  Guest posts welcome. Tips: patch.ofurr@gmail.com. 

Fred Patten’s birthday was December 11 – Happy 75th, Fred!

Read an interview with Fred about the founding of Furry fandom, by esteemed novelist Phil Geusz.  Thanks Fred for bringing so much content that helps Dogpatch Press to put out Furry News every week day.  Sorry that this went out too late to share Furplanet’s weekend birthday discount sale for Fred’s titles.  But check them out:

• The Ursa Major Awards Anthology
• What Happens Next (anthology)
• Five Fortunes (anthology)
• Anthropomorphic Aliens (anthology)
• The Furry Future (anthology)
• An Anthropomorphic Century (anthology)

“Accidental Guests of the Midwest Fur Fest” – outsider appreciation gets viral views.

This personal blog post got lots of love.  The Healthy Not Nuts blog covers a husband and wife’s thoughts on recipes, diet, health and photography.  It’s lovely when Furries add spice to the mundane!  “…how can you not love these creatures that look so cute, cuddly and happy all of the time?”  The post earned 267 comments.  The writer shared an appreciation letter for the post, where he mentioned getting over 20,000 views.

Furries in Buzzfeed’s “The 50 Worst Things On The Internet In 2015.” (NSFW)

Use this archive link (so they get no incentive to publish unforgivable crap).  Furries are in items 14, 20, 31, and 46.  There’s also bonus bronies, puppy and pony players. Whether it’s love or hate, at least things are never boring…

Goodbye to Furnation.

Furnation was one of the first visible Web presences for Furry fandom. It helped many to discover their fursonas in the 1990’s. Reddit calls it “the end of an era.” Flayrah gave it a feature under it’s tag for collected coverage. Social network Furrtrax made a generous offer of free hosting to keep it online.  I tried helping, but got the feeling that Furnation’s admin was too burnt out with health problems to devote an ounce of effort for community moderation. I also assume the build of the site might be antiquated and burdensome (perhaps technical, or with copyright for content built by individuals.) It’s influence lives on in places like FurPlanet (formed from Furnation Magazine), one of the 3 main Furry publishers.

The Doorman, by Reinaldo Arenas – Book review by Fred Patten.

by Patch O'Furr

Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer.  Originally written for Quentin Long’s Anthro Magazine.

The Doorman, by Reinaldo Arenas. Translated from the Spanish by Dolores M. Koch.
NYC, Grove Weidenfeld, June 1991, hardcover 0-8021-1109-2 $17.95 (191 pages).

Reinaldo Arenas was a young Cuban novelist known for both novels of “magical realism” and a flamboyant homosexual life style. The Castro regime, notoriously anti-homosexual, imprisoned and tortured him, and finally exiled him as part of the Mariel boatlift of 1980. He wrote several critically-acclaimed novels, plays, and collections of poetry in New York during the 1980s. In 1987 he contracted AIDS and, giving in to worsening health, committed suicide in 1990.

The Doorman (El Portero) was published in 1987 but not translated into English until after his death. It was described as a semi-autobiographical surrealist fantasy; reviewers threw the terms “magical realism”, “sardonic Swiftian parable”, and “fabulist” around a lot. Juan, an idealistic young Cuban exile, ends up in New York City (just like Arenas). He eventually gets a position as a doorman at an exclusive luxury Manhattan apartment building. Juan is an overzealous idealist who appoints himself to be a friend of each of the tenants, with a mission to help them open a mystical “door to true happiness” (pg. 6). Alas, the tenants are all self-centered elitists who ignore him. But each tenant has a pet, and the pets listen to his message.

Friend of community dies in shooting, Zootopia and animation – NEWSDUMP (12/07/15)

by Patch O'Furr

Headlines, links and little stories to make your tail wag.  Guest posts welcome. Tips: patch.ofurr@gmail.com. 

Friend of the community lost in mass shooting in San Bernardino CA. (Tip: Bosn Otter.)

The tragedy on December 2 is described as terrorism-related, and left 14 dead and 21 injured.

Bosn said Dan Kaufman was “a friend to the furry community… a friend to pretty much everybody he ever met.”

• ABC7.com: “A coffee shop worker killed in the San Bernardino mass shooting on Wednesday was remembered by loved ones as a caring and compassionate man.”
• Inside Edition: Kaufman was “named as one of the victims of the San Bernardino massacre after his partner initially thought he’d survived.”
• L.A. Times: “For victim’s boyfriend, 22 hours of conflicting reports, then heartbreak”
• SBsun.com: “jovial person who touched lives”
• The Guardian: “a gregarious free spirit who adored horror films”
• PE.com: “Kaufman liked dressing up in costume and performed for 16 years in a local Renaissance Faire.”
• L.A. Times: “dressed as an Italian noble with a stiff lace collar and a pewter goblet, or as a peasant riding a horse”
• Frontiers Media: “San Bernardino Mass Shooting Took Gay Victim”

His Facebook account gave the impression that he had lots of friends through cons and the Ren Faires.  It was hard to find direct Furry connections, although some of his last pics were from a comic con I went to 1 month ago (Comikaze Expo) where he cosplayed as a wolf.