Furry Writers' Guild discussion
One book every furry writer should read?
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This will probably be unpopular, but...Jack London's The Call of the Wild and/or White Fang. The reason is very simple. London gets inside the head of the dog or wolf and does so without turning them into humans. He translates into human language without giving any human thought or process to it. While modern furry writing is more anthropomorphic than that (similar to Black Beauty or Watership Down) I think it is essential to good furry writing to understand just where that line lies.
To me the difference between the "animal story" and the "anthropomorphic fiction" is that a furry character combines the instincts, sensory, and physical abilities of the animal with the rational mind of something more human in nature. The crucial element is the ability to override instinct by rational thinking. Animals themselves do this at times, as in cases where say a dog runs into a burning building to bring someone out rather than running from it or hiding. Anthropomorphs are civilized to some extent and would surely need to do this constantly.
This is a hard question because I think the best writers need to be reading a lot of things, or else they'll emulate their favorite work a little too hard.With that caveat, I'd strongly suggest both Redwall and Grendel (after authors had read Beowulf) for very different reasons.
While Redwall as a series struggles (and I say this spending years in its respective fandom, talking about its inconsistent world-building and its repetition of character tropes) the original book is still a classic and shows a fully fleshed out anthropomorphic world with a quick narrative and an early introduction to stock characters in their strongest form, and how this type of writing can be used to entertain.
Grendel, on the other hand, is a good answer to Redwall because it shows a better example of what goes through the mind of something non-human with human intelligence and a better presentation of an outcast's introspection. It also isn't afraid to approach philosophical ideas and I think it prepares readers for more adult subject matter than Redwall does.
I think these two books would be a very strong start and they compliment one another very well.
I like the other answers, but would respectfully submit "The Jungle Books" as my own nomination for the most instructive single work. Being a collection, it represents a wide variety of approaches. Besides, to my knowledge, Kipling is still the only significantly furry author to win the Nobel for literature. Pretty much everyone can learn something from him, and the more you re-read the more you learn.
I suppose people are probably tired of hearing me talk about how good "Watership Down" is, but..."Watership Down" is good. XP It's one of my top five favorite books.
Watership Down is indeed good. Even the animated film version of it is very good. I think some people are bothered by the strong political statements it contains.
Watership Down is clear recommendation on the list by all of us :) it's well written and features all of the traits that furry authors can learn from. Writing wise, there's nothing wrong with On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King and The Elements of Style by Strunk and White. I highly recommend Dragon's Wild by Robert Aspirin, which is a great novel showing transformation, dragons, and magical-fantasy. Young adults and those interested in more fantasy tales might like the Wings of Fire series, which features anthropomorphic dragons becoming heroes with young, fun personalities and greatly developed worlds and species.
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True on all counts, though Waterways does in fact retread the steps of dozens of young adult novels. Just none of them are furry. Kyell's writing is almost always exemplary. However, I don't seem to be at risk of retreading any furry football tropes. I'll leave those to him.
Since I see some really good answers that I would have said: Watership Down, Rudyard Kipling, Jack London (& yes, White Fang WAS/IS awesome), I will throw in what got me into 'furry' before these. Andre Norton's Breed to Come. She was this incredible and prolific author with a career spanning from the mid-30s until her death in 2003(I think). Breed to Come is an apocalyptic Earth after humanity fled to the stars and Left behind a devasted planet. As time passes, the remaining animals evolve into a type of Stone Age societies, with the cats (known as the People), the dogs are called Barkers and the rats known as Ratten. The story is told in by Furtig, the protagonist who is one of these evolved cats. The novel is told in omniscient third-person, matter-of-fact, didactic, and almost documentarian.
When Furtig loses a competition that will put him in the sights of a mate (the People have staged competitive fights among males so that females of different clans can choose mates and therefore, prevent inbreeding), he leaves in self-disgrace to strike out and follow the same path his clan's ancestor made, which is to find leftover human technology and learn from it. Oh, and after hundreds of thousands to millions of years, the humans return...
and if you don't read some of the most popular books in furry, you risk accidentally retreading old groundAgreed, but for that purpose I'd recommend something more like Best in Show (reprinted as Furry!: The Best Anthropomorphic Fiction Ever!), which collects short stories from the early fanzine days and makes for a good broad overview of early furry fiction and furry tropes in general.
As far as my one choice, although I'm tempted to agree with The Jungle Book I'll go instead with Felix Salten's Bambi. It occupies an interesting area between full-on animal stories like White Fang and the more culture-infused works like Watership Down. You won't find out-and-out religion or folk tales, and the story is very much what the subtitle advertises -- "a life in the woods" -- but there's still a sense that these are more than animal characters, while remaining to the animal end of the animal-human spectrum. Remarkably profound and low on sentiment, and definitely recommended for any furry writers who are only familiar with the Disney version.
I was tempted to mention Bambi when I brought up Jack London. Salten's books tend to be trivialized, perhaps because of the Disney versions, and they are not heavily analyzed. Placed in the context of his life though, there may be a lot more to them than what appears on the surface. Certainly from a furry point of view they stand, as Renee suggests, in a middle ground between White Fang or Curwood's Baree, Son of Kazan and Watership Down or Waterways. However, I also believe that Salten can be read allegorically, given that the author was a Jew who struggled with and failed to escape the Nazi dragnet. Bambi was widely taken as an anti-hunting polemic as well, in an era when the North American white-tailed deer had been hunted into a near-endangered status (never mind that it's a European story, not North American.)If you've only seen the Disney films of Bambi and/or Perri then you'll be surprised at the complexity and depth of the books themselves.
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White Fang, Blitzcat, and The Wild Road did a lot for 'prepping' me for the fandom. All three felt like they paid a lot of respect to the mind of an animal without having to go full-anthro, as we in the fandom might define it.
As far as specifically in-fandom, I'd suggest Kyell Gold or MCA Hogarth. When I first picked up Gold's books, I had tried and failed a few times over to get through titles specifically released from fandom-based publishers (the only exception being Furtual Horizons, since I have a story in it :P). His were the fisrt I read cover-to-cover and was left asking for more. MCA Hogarth was most definitely the second, and I can't bring myself to disentangle from her Pelted Universe to this day. I haven't been this emotionally invested in a series since Animorphs back in middle school.
"The Wind in the Willows" by Kenneth Grahame ought to be on here. It's quite good.
The Wind in the Willows (again the real book, not the Disney thing) is still one of my great faves. It's a wonderful story with suspense, mystery, and heartwarming moments as well. I don't rate it high on anthropomorphics, because the characters are largely of the "rabbits in waistcoats" variety. Meaning, they might as well just be humans in fursuits. It also has a lot of social defects, partly due to the author's own sheltered life I suspect. But it's fun to read and works out well.I really like Jan Needle's retelling of the story too. It's entitled The Wild Wood and retells the whole story but from the point of view of one of the ferrets (the bad guys in the Disney version, though more just lower class shadows in the Grahame novel.)
Needle gives us a proletarian viewpoint, and exposes the bind in which the poverty stricken find themselves in a class bounded society, which is what Grahame lived in and described though he only showed one side of the picture.
While I've read about all the classics mentioned and will be snagging Best in Show as soon as possible, I'd add Spellsinger, by Alan Dean Foster. Just to add. If I absolutely had to pick one, it would probably be Wind in the Willows as well. Though Jungle Book is a close second.
Dwale wrote: "I suppose people are probably tired of hearing me talk about how good "Watership Down" is, but..."Watership Down" is good. XP It's one of my top five favorite books."
I was introduced to "Watership Down" the animated film as a little kid. Later, in community college, I found a copy on a stack of free books in the English Dept. I keep going back to it as a reader and as a writer, esp the Elahrairah cycles constantly told in the book! I even used the book as one on my annotation list during my MFA thesis term!
Right now, I am trying to immerse myself in a lot of classic fiction. I'm surprised no one's mentioned Jack Stoneley's Scruffy. Based on a true story originally titled "The Tuesday Dog". Stoneley was a journalist and his fictional account involves a keen eye to detail. Also, the dogs don't necessarily speak but Scruffy and the other secondary characters have rich interior lives. The dialogue from humans is also unique to each personality as well. I will also mention White Fang which also uses interiority and spoken dialogue from the human characters. I also read the graphic novel version of Call of the Wild which was just as painful and gut-wrenching as the prose "White Fang". I am currently reading Dottie Smith's The One Hundred and One Dalmatians. It's one of the few Disney animations that I don't care for. The live-action was fine. The book is entertaining and Smith has her dogs speaking but in the voice of upper-middle-class Londoners. "Scruffy" read more in tune with dog physiology than "The One Hundred and One", which is a fanciful read. However, ideas of using a wet-nurse and breed specific issues are discussed and it is also an educational story.
I also FINALLY read Felix Salten's Bambi. It is a pastoral read of what life is like for wild animals, much like Adam's writing aesthetic.
I can't bring up Margery Sharp's The Rescuers enough. In it, the mice sometimes wear clothing, have meetings, and create furniture and housing. But Sharp's mice aren't like NIMH's rats. They are naturally highly intelligent and internationally organized. What strikes me is that Disney's "Rescuers" was one of my favorite films and I read the first book in Catholic school. Sharp's writing is deeply rich with detail, her mice carry in them the strengths and weaknesses we carry but they show more idealism, faith, and hope. Also, there is a series about these mice, especially about Miss Bianca and Bernard that I don't see mentioned on many reader sites! However, the Disney film takes its title from the first book but its story from the second in the series. For those looking for it, I suggest what I am doing: Get the omnibuses that collects three stories each. And, as an artist's dream, like mine, the books are illustrated by the incredible Garth Williams, same illustrator of the "Little House on the Prairie" books' fame.
Oh, and I am trying out Alan Dean Foster's "Spellsinger" series as well. Happy reading, everyone!
I forgot The Thirteen and a Half Lives of Captain Bluebear. That's a huge favorite of mine and a great fun read!
Okay, I have a few personal favorites with the first being considered controversial due to the author's personal stance on the furred community, but much like my love for the Ender's universe, despite not agreeing with Orson Scott Card's personal view, I have to mark Steve Boyett's The Architect of Sleep to my list.I will not try to spoil it, but I enjoyed both the society that he built, and the language barrier issues that the main character faces. I also admit that the whole, having a human as a fish out of water, appealed to me.
Another work is the Doona series, where the interactions between the races is vital to the success of both the series, and the read. (That and Anne McCaffrey and Jody Lynn Nye are always fun for me to read.)
But to pull back to everyone else, I do prefer blitzcat over Call of The Wild, but its by a very narrow margin as I think both books are fantastic. And I'm going to make a shout out to my favorite of Rudyard Kipling's works, Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. I've personally kept a version of that story with me almost my entire life, either in digital format on my phone, or in paperback resting in honor on my shelf. I love the story, the interaction of characters, and to this day I still clench with excitement in the climactic battles.
Stephen wrote: "Okay, I have a few personal favorites with the first being considered controversial due to the author's personal stance on the furred community, but much like my love for the Ender's universe, desp..."Wow, blitzcat. That's an old favorite of mine! I'm surprised to see it mentioned here. ^_^
-Fox
The Architect of Sleep was a terrific book. I don't really know the details about why Boyett got a bug up his butt about the furry community, only hearsay. While it's possible his True And Real Reasons for not continuing the series were some variant of "creepy fans want me to continue it and I refuse to give them what they want," that's not what his public statements have suggested. (Also it would be profoundly ridiculous. If you write a story that readers want to imagine themselves in, you have written a story that has Creepy Fan Attraction potential. Get used to it.)Anyway, it'd be hard for me to point to One True Book for furry writers/fans. Alan Dean Foster's Spellsinger books were influences on me, although I haven't read any in a long time. Honestly, I think a lot of early stuff from the fandom itself is worth revisiting, which makes it particularly irksome that Best in Show (also called Furry!) is so difficult to find. The Ursa Major Award anthology is mostly solid, although ironically I think some of its best stories weren't UMA winners. (Naomi Kritzer's "St. Ailbe's Hall" is pretty much the definitive take on the "when are uplifted animals people" story.)
Heather wrote: "Raptor Red needs more love."Raptor Red is an awesome book. It really brings that time period and those animals to life. It also shows what can be done with a book about non-verbal characters -- a furry book that stretches the limits of what the actual animals would be capable of as little as possible, really only anthropomorphizing their thinking.
As a veterinarian, I have to say I really have a soft spot for all the James Herriot books. But there are so many other great books in this thread, it's hard to choose!
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Books mentioned in this topic
Raptor Red (other topics)Raptor Red (other topics)
Furry!: The Best Anthropomorphic Fiction! (other topics)
Bambi: A Life in the Woods (other topics)
Waterways (other topics)
What's one book you think every furry writer should read, and why? (Fiction, nonfiction, whatever.)