Posts Tagged furry

4 results.
May03

Kismet

by Rindis on May 3, 2017 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

Set an unspecified time in the future, humanity has spread through the inner Solar System, and established a large number of bases and arcologies in the asteroid belt in the vicinity of Ceres. (This allows a certain ‘spread out’ feel between some major locations in the book, but travel times are in hours instead of days or months.) Gail, the main character, is something of a loner, with a small ship named Kismet that she uses for a salvage business. A tip off on a wreck turns into trouble that keeps getting bigger at every turn and drives the plot to a surprisingly high-stakes climax.

Along the way, Gail is pushed back into the unfinished business of her own life, and the novel does a great job driving the action forward, expanding the scope of the mystery, and making the situation matter more and more to Gail herself. I actually have some trouble with some of the early ‘pushes’ into the plot, but that fades fast.

An interesting major theme is transhumanism-as-furry. “Totemics”, people who have undergone a combination of surgical and genetic alterations to take on anthropomorphic traits, are a major part of the background. There are some minor improvements to senses and the like available, as well as much more capable (and tempermental) bio-mechanical options, but most modifications are more cosmetic. There’s a number of examples of more individual forms of self-expression with these mods, but the totemics are the most cohesive group, even though their own motivations behind their modifications vary. There’s a number of fragments of interesting philosophical arguments along the way, and one that caught at my attention towards the end dealt with the choice of form inherent in the modifying process.

It all makes for a satisfying and well-rounded SF novel. Action, mystery, philosophy, and a glimpse of a possible future all coexist gracefully between two covers.

Finally, I’ll note that FurPlanet’s hardcopy version has an elementary formatting mistake. The body text margins are weighted on the fore edge of the page instead instead of the spine, pushing the text towards the spine. Thankfully, there’s still room enough that there’s no real reading problem, but it gets uncomfortably close. It’s like they got their left/right templates reversed.

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Jan25

Digger

by Rindis on January 25, 2017 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

The problem with reviewing this is that I don’t know where to start….

Digger is one of those rare things from the world of webcomics: A small project that bloomed into a larger story, and then came in for a successful ending. (Projects that don’t successfully do this aren’t rare in any medium, but only webcomics let you see the process of wandering around trying to find the plot. In other mediums, failures don’t get published very often.) This process took a mere eight years and ~760 pages, collected into six volumes.

I jumped in the deep end with the full collected omnibus. It is now the largest graphic novel I own (yes, beating those legendary Cerebus ‘phone books’—those are only ~500 pages).

Digger echoes Bone in its use of a variation of the Visitation Fantasy where the start of the story is the main character wandering into a new and strange locale, and you never see the character’s original home. Unlike Fone Bone, Digger-of-Unnecessarily-Convoluted-Tunnels talks about her home quite often, and it helps provide defining contrast to what the setting of the story is like.

The central plot structure is The Big Quest, but it takes some doing to get there. In the meantime, the small little area Digger is in provides for more than enough conflicts, and Newhart-style comedy to be going on with.

I’d certainly like to see more of this world. We get an idea of what wombat burrows are like, we see a hyena tribe, we meet a god or two, we see… almost nothing of a human village that’s in the middle of the geographical area the story is in, though we do meet a few humans (including one that currently has a deer head). We hear of dwarves, but don’t see any. There’s a lot of very dangerous territory between Digger and her home, and it takes a lot of arcane knowledge to travel much of the distance safely. It’s a world filled with potential stories.

And a good amount of anthropology (furry-pology? zoopology? eh, heck with it), with the origin myth of hyenas explaining why females are bigger and the first child often dies. Fumbling attempts at ethics. Fortune-telling slugs.

It’s big, and it rambles, and the end is slightly disjointed, and it’s still an excellent story.

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May02

Rat’s Reputation

by Rindis on May 2, 2016 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

Michael Payne’s latest book is a bit unusual. It’s broken into four uneven parts, each of which contains several short or very short stories, each of which is preceded by quote from some work from that world. These smaller stories are not titled, and the table of contents does not refer to them, but just gives a couple passages from each part, along with the page it appears on.

So it’s not really conceived and structured as a short story collection, even though it technically is one. The volume is a publication of a bunch of stories that has been available in in bits and pieces for decades, and has gone from being about the anthropomorphic town of Ottersgate to centering on Rat.

As a unified set of stories, it’s all told from Rat’s point of view, except for the first story, which details his mysterious rescue as a small child from some large fire by one of the Curials (gods). The later parts of the book answer the mystery raised here, and also goes some into the nature of the Curials, but largely the book is a ‘fish out of water’ story, with the orphaned Rat growing up among squirrels and mice, and not quite fitting in (somewhat literally; the animals here have human intelligence, but the same forms we know, and somehow have buildings, and clothes, and tea—it doesn’t bear thinking about too hard—so Rat is larger than many of the people he deals with), and faces persecution from many deeply prejudiced people.

There’s also a bit of travelogue to the book. Rat spends some years on the road at one point, and you get glimpses of plenty of other towns and societies. And just what is shown of Ottersgate itself is enough to make you realize the iceberg hiding beneath the surface of this book is massive indeed. Payne has an expansive world worked out, and we’re getting bare glimpses of it.

Its structure means Rat’s Reputation does not have the tightest writing you’ll see, but each story works on its own, and while building the whole. I recommend it, and if you wonder just where some of the secondary characters disappear to near the end, I also recommend Payne’s earlier book, The Blood Jaguar. Both are good furry fantasy novels.

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Jan25

FC2010 Sickness Shuffle

by Rindis on January 25, 2010 at 8:13 pm
Posted In: Conventions

Well, lived through another Further Confusion. That shouldn’t be any kind of challenge, but then we keep getting sick in the middle of it….

Actually, we pretty much all got sick before the con, which should count as good planning, other than the fact that we were still recovering when going into the high-stress environment of the con. For the second year in a row, we hosted doronjosama at our place during the con, which is fun, we don’t see enough of her. We got her at the airport Wednesday night, and pre-con stuff was done while I went to work. -bleh-

Friday was pretty good, Radio Comix did good business, everyone had fun, and… tried to figure their way around the new hotel the con is in. The Fairmont is a bit more plush than I’m used to, with kind of a lobby in front of all the bathroom areas (carpeting, decorations, I thought I’d gone into a regular hotel room for a couple seconds the first time). Still, I think they’re not quite used to a convention that packs in this number of people, and the logistics got behind (like trying four different water coolers to find one that still had water). Our panel that night was “Where Does it Come From?”, which went very well, though we had a bit more topic drift than usual. Dinner was at the Pita Pit, which I highly recommend.

I stood almost all day Friday, which was a mistake, since my feet and legs are still recovering. So I took it easy the rest of the con, which meant loafing around the computer area keeping up on my reading. Took a look at the various furry prose-publishers around, and wondering if any of them were any good, I realized I needed Fred Patten’s reviews. *sigh* Wish you were here Fred. Baron didn’t look well to begin with Saturday morning, and looked worse as the day went on, and he drove himself home before he got so bad he couldn’t drive. Dinner was at Gordon Biersh—or it should have been, Smudge and I had appetizers and had to leave Elin and Team Shuffle (the Japanese crew Elin manages for their con appearance here) there to make our panel. Nobody’s fault really, but there was a Sharks game that night, so every place in downtown was slammed. The calamari I had was good, and I understand the dinner was excellent. Our panel was a repeat of “Fashion Tales”, which went very well. It’s a subject that’s weaker for me, but I had a few good points to put in.

On Sunday Baron stayed home, and Smudge wasn’t doing too well. And she got worse as the day went on. This created a problem, since Dave and I aren’t really qualified to drive something as big as the van, which was needed to haul out the Radio Comix stock after the dealer’s room finished that night. We got a Smudge a ride home with Drew and arranged for a friend to do van driving. After a discussion with Dave, we decided to go on with that night’s panel anyway. I wasn’t feeling entirely well, but figured I’d least make it through the day. And then Baron showed up! He had been planning on driving in, when Drew showed up with Smudge, and rode in with him instead. I was dubious about this, since he wasn’t doing so well, but thankfully he got better as the day went on. The traditional “Coffee, Tea and Memes” panel was a bit slow, thanks to being scheduled opposite of Furry Night Live, which not only drew people away, but caused a line to be going in front of the door to the room, which was probably off-putting. Of course, we’re probably one of the few things you can put opposite of it and get anyone at all. Dinner was cookies at the panel (there was a lot to do beforehand). Despite a little confusion, breakdown went well, and Baron drove us home.

I got myself some bookmarks (becoming a habit, but I cycle through them with different books, so the variety is nice), issue one of Scavengers by Flinters (I followed it on FA, and figured I owed him for the entertainment), The Van Rijn Method (collection of classic SF by Poul Anderson), Black Dogs by Ursula Vernon (I like to get something by the author guest of honor, which I guess is Ursula this year; Sofawolf Press is also a GoH and published the book, and this is one of the few things in their catalog that looked interesting to me), and Mel White’s latest little prose piece A Servant of the Consortium.

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