Mad Dogs and Englishmen, by Paul Magrs – Book Review By Fred Patten.

by Patch O'Furr

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

Mad Dogs and Englishmen, by Paul Magrs.
London, BBC Books, January 2002, paperback £5.99 (249 pages).

Doctor Who is massively popular, but his adventures do not seem to offer much for furry fandom. But they do overlap in “The 100^th Novel in the Record-Breaking BBC Worldwide Doctor Who Series”, to quote the back-cover blurb. Mad Dogs and Englishmen features the Eighth Doctor (Paul McGann, 1996-2005) and his Companions at the time, Fitz Kreiner and Anji Kapoor. The novel is also a parody of J. R. R. Tolkien’s writing of The Lord of the Rings.

The first chapter is about Professor Reginald Tyler, a reclusive British university don who spends his life from 1917 to his death in 1974 writing and rewriting his magnum opus The True History of Planets, “an epic of dwarves and swords and wizardry. And definitely no poodles. Or at least there weren’t when the Doctor read it.” (blurb) When Prof. Tyler dies, his widow takes his towering manuscript to a publisher.

“She was the one who had hoiked out the dusty manuscript of the ongoing book and promptly sold it for a bomb.

One that set off reverberations everywhere.

Up and down the length of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries on Earth, and other worlds besides.

Notably the dogworld.” (p. 3)

Koa of the Drowned Kingdom, by Ryan Campbell – Book Review By Fred Patten.

by Patch O'Furr

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

Koa of the Drowned Kingdom, by Ryan Campbell. Illustrated by Cooner.
Dallas, TX, FurPlanet Productions, September 2015, trade paperback $9.95 (146 pages), electronic edition $6.99.

Koa of the Drowned Kingdom is the tenth of FurPlanet’s “cupcakes”; novellas instead of novels. It seems at one point to be a variant of the Cinderella legend, but that’s misleading.

The setting can be taken variously as another world, as completely imaginary with funny animals, or somewhere in Melanesia in the far future. It’s a civilization of giant mangrove trees rising out of the Southern Sea, inhabited by anthropomorphic fruit bats (flying foxes), otters, wallabies, and monitor lizards. (No other Melanesian fauna like rhinoceroses or monkeys, though.) Their money is the rupiah, the real life currency of Indonesia. Magic is real, though officially only practiced by the bats.

The society is developed in rich detail. Each mangrove tree is a huge separate Kingdom with homes and shops upon its branches, with the trees all locked together by rope bridges and boat travel at the bottom. Each giant tree is divided into habitats ranging from the Crown at the top, down through the Head, the Shoulders, the Belly, the Knees, and the Toes at the bottom which are the mangrove’s roots rising above and sinking beneath the ocean. The trees’ branches are Arms. The habitats are also divided socially, with the Crown inhabited by the flying fox aristocracy who set great prestige on their ability to fly, down through the Shoulders relegated to the upper classes, the Belly to the merchants, and the Knees to the lowest class, the otters who are fishermen. Nobody lives on the Toes, which dip into and out of the ocean. Different Kingdoms are the Kingdom of Titan, the largest tree; the Kingdom of Beards, whose branches are covered in beardlike moss; the Kingdom of the Great Drinker, a bulbous hollow mangrove with a large pool of drinkable water collected from rain and dew in its belly; and others – including the Drowned Kingdom, Atlas, once the mightiest of all until it was uprooted by the Great Storm and toppled beneath the Southern Sea. Kingdom can also refer to the social strata, with the Crown as the elite of the Upper Kingdoms and the Knees as the least desirable of the Lower Kingdoms. The division is not just social; the flying foxes use magic to keep other animals out of the Crown and Head Kingdoms.

The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame – Book Review By Fred Patten.

by Patch O'Furr

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

The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame. Frontispiece by Graham Robertson.
London, Methuen & Company, October 1908, hardcover 6/- ([vi] + 302 + [ii] pages).

The Wind in the Willows is world-famous today. It was almost immediately world-famous. President Theodore Roosevelt praised it in 1909. Yet until Grahame died in 1932, he did not think that the entire book could be illustrated. The sole illustrations published during Grahame’s lifetime were of the famous “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn” chapter featuring the god Pan. Paul Bramson illustrated the 1913 edition showing Rat and Mole gazing at Pan as natural unclothed small animals, even though they get to him by rowboat and by implication have been of human size and wearing clothes just before that. Ernest Shepard’s illustrations in 1933, Arthur Rackham’s in 1940, and the Walt Disney animated feature The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad in 1949 made it “illustratable” – but usually by omitting the Pan scene.

The reason is because the narrative segues so often between Mole, Rat, Otter, Badger, the weasels and field-mice and hedgehogs and rabbits as natural English riverbank and woodland animals, and their being imitation humans – not just Toad in stately Toad Hall, but each having a small, furnished home – sometimes tiny, sometimes of human size; rowing a boat, presumably wearing clothes (Toad certainly wears clothes and is of human size when he disguises himself as a washerwoman, yet is of toad size when he enters Rat’s riverbank hole), capable of driving a motor-car and of being tried in court. Everyone was aware of the disparity, but because Grahame’s writing was so lyrical, everyone was willing to gloss over the disparity.

Natural woodland animals? The book begins with a blending of the animal and human worlds:

Odyssey from River Bend, by Tom McGowen – Book Review By Fred Patten.

by Patch O'Furr

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

“Here is another old review, fixed up the way that it should be published.”

Odyssey from River Bend, by Tom McGowen.
Boston, Little, Brown and Company, April 1975, hardcover $5.95 (ix + 166 pages).

This was a minor children’s/Young Adult fantasy in 1975, but it is notable as one of the first novels to promote the theme of talking animals inheriting the earth after mankind has become extinct through its own mismanagement of the environment.

“It was an old village. Many generations of animals had been born, lived, and died in it. Its name was Jallakragga, which in the language of the animals meant ‘river bend.’

Around the entire village was a stout wall made of logs that had been cut and trimmed by the beaver builders, stuck upright in the ground, and plastered over with clay from the riverbank. The wall formed an irregular circle, and at several places along its length were watchtowers. From these, day and night, the wolf soldiers peered down, alert for any sign of the wandering bands of weasels or wildcats that roamed the forest and sometimes attacked villages. In the part of the wall that faced the great, dim mass of the forest there was a gateway, with a wide door made of thick logs. This door was kept closed and barred during the hours of darkness, and the logs were covered with carved, frightening faces, to scare away any wandering ghosts or wicked spirits that might try to enter.” (pgs. 3-4)

Jikatik and Ikatibby, two raccoon children foraging for food in the nearby forest in autumn, find an ancient object exposed where the river has undercut the bank.

In a Dog’s World, by Mary E. Lowd – Book Review By Fred Patten.

by Patch O'Furr

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

In a Dog’s World, by Mary E. Lowd.
Dallas, TX, FurPlanet Productions, July 2015, trade paperback $9.95 (181 pages), Kindle $6.99.

This novella is the third book in Lowd’s “Otters in Space” series following Otters in Space (2010) and Otters in Space II: Jupiter, Deadly (2013), although her short fiction “When a Cat Loves a Dog” in Five Fortunes (edited by Fred Patten) and “A Real Stand-Up Guy” (with Daniel Lowd) in Allasso volume 3 (edited by Brian Lee Cook) are also in the same “world”. Humans have become extinct, and uplifted cats, dogs, otters, and a few others have inherited Earth and its space outposts. The cats and dogs are theoretically equals, but in fact the dogs are socially and politically superior, with strong prejudice in both species against the other. Lowd’s protagonists – Kipper Brighton in the two novels, and Lashonda Brooke in the short fiction – are mature cats who are disinterested in the prejudice (in Kipper’s case) or actively oppose it (in Lashonda’s case; she is married to a dog and they both want to adopt children, but are turned down by prejudiced adoption agencies among both cats and dogs).

The protagonist of In a Dog’s World is Katasha Blake, a studious tabby point Siamese cat in an upper-class cat family; a high school senior planning to go on to college. Preferably prestigious Isleywood College of Science and Technology, but she’ll take the local state college that her littermates intend to attend if she can’t get into Isleywood – a dog college. Tash, whose goal is an engineering degree to qualify for the space program, is sure that she’s got the grades to get into Isleywood, since dogs aren’t known for their studiousness: