Fred Patten's YARF! reviews (complete)

ANTHRO's index of anthropomorphic literature

The Yarf! reviews by Fred Patten

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Welcome to the “Patten’s reviews” wing of the Anthro Library! Since this is a collection of columns from a dormant (if not dead) furzine called YARF!, a word of explanation might be helpful: In its day, YARF! (aka ‘The Journal of Applied Anthropomorphics’) was perhaps the best-known—and best in quality—of furry zines. Started in 1990 by Jeff Ferris, YARF!’s roster of contributors reads like a Who’s Who of furdom in the last decade of the 20th Century. In any issue, the zine’s readers could expect to enjoy work by the likes of Monika Livingstone, Watts Martin, Ken Pick, and Terrie Smith; furry comic strips such as Mark Stanley’s Freefall… and Fred Patten’s reviews of furry books and comics.
Unfortunately, YARF! has been thoroughly inactive since its 69th issue, which was released in September 2003. We can’t say whether YARF! will ever rise again… but at least we can prevent its reviews from falling into disremembered oblivion. And so, with the active cooperation of Mr. Patten, Anthro is proud to present Mr. Patten’s review columns—including the final one, which would have appeared in the never-printed YARF! #70.

		#1 / Jan 1990


	Title:	Howling Mad
	Author:	Peter David
	Publisher:	Ace Books (NYC), Nov 1989
	ISBN:	0-441-34663-4
		Paperback, 201 pages, USD $3.50
	Availability:	Am / BN / Al / Pw

   Howling Mad is not the first werewolf tale about a wolf that turns into a man rather than the familiar vice-versa, but it may be the first to use that concept for a serious novel rather than a one-gimmick short story.
   Not that Howling Mad is completely serious. At one point, Darlene introduces the humanized wolf, Joshua, to movies by taking him to see An American Werewolf in London. That’s a joke, but it’s also Peter David’s acknowledgement of the novel’s model. The plot is original, but the basic concept and the mixture of black comedy and horror is too similar to be coincidental. Yet there is a key difference. Landis’ movie is a tragedy in which the werewolf hero is powerless to alter his doom. David’s novel is a quirky thriller in which Joshua the werewolf (wereman?) has considerably more freedom of action. The story keeps the reader guessing what will happen to him, except for the fact that there will be a happy ending because the novel is told by Joshua as a flashback.
   A demonic werewolf (eight feet tall, bipedal, with fiery eyes) is terrorizing a Canadian town and forest. It attacks both men and animals. The only survivor of one of its attacks is the leader of the local wolf pack, who is badly enough wounded that he is unable to escape when found by hunters. The wolf is sold to a New York City zoo, which is where he is when the next full moon turns him into a man. The novel relaxes and segues into his humorous misadventures as he encounters Darlene, an animal-rights activist who can’t hold on to a boyfriend, and she determines to teach him human ways. Yet he is only human for a couple of days each month; the rest of the time, he’s a wolf being hidden in a no-pets-allowed apartment house. He is also a wolf who feels an obligation to his pack and mate, and is torn between his developing relationship with Darlene and his need to return to his forest to help defend it against the monster. And the demonic werewolf has his own agenda in New York to strike against Joshua.
   This comedic thriller is primarily about humans, but there are plenty of clever anthropomorphic incidents in it. When Joshua tells of his life as leader of his pack, it’s a good realistic wolf’s-eye description of lupine sociology. When the wolf turns human, he gains human intelligence but not knowledge. (David essentially admits that he stretches coincidence pretty thin in keeping Joshua free in the midst of New York long enough to figure out speech and the necessity of wearing clothes.) When he turns wolf again, he retains his human memories but they are compressed by his wolf’s intellect. This enables Joshua to make many sardonic comments about civilization from the viewpoint of an intelligent animal while he is human. After he becomes a wolf again, David plausibly describes how his wolf’s memory of what he learned as a human might help him battle the demon. Joshua is more richly characterized than a fictional wolf who conveniently has human intelligence. Howling Mad is a novel that is definitely worth adding to Furry reading lists.


	Title:	*Cat House*
	Author:	Michael Peak
	Publisher:	Signet Books/New American Library (NYC), Sep 1989
	ISBN:	0-451-16303-6
		Paperback, 255 pages, USD $3.95
	Availability:	Am / BN / Al / Pw

A three-page prologue gives the impression that this novel is going to be very imitative of Watership Down. Fortunately, this is misleading. Cat House is in that genre, the talking ‘realistic animal’ story, but it is refreshingly original and imaginative.
The setup is the same as in Watership Down, or in countless folk tales of how the Maker created the world and all of the furry, feathery, and scaly people upon it. In this case, the focus is upon the cats— Felis domestica in particular. Their name in Peak’s animal language is the ‘farries’, evoking resonances of both ‘furry’ and ‘faery’.

   A large community of farries live together with their paladins (the human companions who feed and protect them) in a modern suburb of San Diego, on the edge of the California desert. The farries love and reward their paladins with affection, but they really prefer to conduct their social affairs outside of their paladins’ notice, in back alleys and vacant lots.
   This farri community is different than most. One of the Creator’s rules to all animals is to be fruitful and multiply, which cats do frequently and joyfully. However, some female farries are taken by their paladins to be scarred, after which they no longer go into heat. They can still enjoy the pleasure of mating, but if they cannot go into heat, they are usually fated to watch the toms go courting elsewhere. But this community contains a wise cat, Mistress Halina, who organizes the scarred girls and teaches them how to be sophisticated in attracting the toms. Halina’s Den soon becomes the most popular social spot in the community.
   Halina tries to maintain friendly relations with everyone. But one of the toms, Coron, is so disgustingly brutal to the girls that she is forced to order him away permanently. In revenge, Coron starts a campaign to convince the normal females that it is sacrilege against the Creator for cats who cannot bear young to continue mating. Unfocused jealously quickly swells into an organized, self-righteous crusade to force Halina’s girls from the community. At the same time, a drought is driving wildlife from the desert into the housing development. This includes individual menaces such as rattlesnakes and hawks, and a very large menace in the form of a pack of krahstas (coyotes), the age-old enemies of the farries. And this pack has an unusually skillful leader, Dahrkron, a fanatic who believes himself blessed by the Creator to destroy all farries.
   Cat House switches back and forth between three viewpoints: Halina and her closest friends, Mahri and Melena, as they try to fight the growing prejudice against them; Dahrkron and his pack as they grow in strength and daring attacks; and Roger Anderson, Halina’s paladin, who works for the San Diego Courier and who suspects that one of his neighbors is engaged in organized crime. This third plot is nicely handled, but it seems to have no connection with the novel other than to serve as an example of the paladins’ own affairs which keep them too busy to notice what is happening among the farries all around them. It feels like poorly-justified padding, which keeps annoyingly interrupting the real story. But despite this, Cat House is a strong enough and unusual enough anthropomorphic novel to make it a must-read title.

		#3 / Mar 1990


	Title:	*Franky Furbo*
	Author:	William Wharton
	Illustrator:	The author
	Publisher:	Henry Holt & Company (NYC), Oct 1989

	ISBN:	0-8050-1120-X
		Hardcover, 228 pages, USD $50.00
	Availability:	Am / BN / Al / Pw

	ISBN:	0-8050-1157-9
		Trade paperback, 228 pages, USD $12.95
	Availability:	Am / BN / Al / Pw

   William Wiley is an elderly writer of children’s stories. His popular character is Franky Furbo, a magical fox who has adventures with humans and with animals on Earth and in outer space. But the fox is not fictional. In 1944, Wiley was a young American soldier participating in the attack on Monte Cassino during the Allied invasion of Italy. He and a German soldier were caught in an artillery barrage, and both were dying when Franky Furbo saved their lives. It took months for the clever fox to nurse them back to health, during which he told them his life story and helped the two to exchange memories to make them all friends. When Wiley returned to the Army, his insistence that he was saved by a talking fox got him a psychiatric discharge. Nobody believed him except for the girl that he later married. To save his own reputation, Wiley stopped insisting that Franky Furbo was real and turned the fox’s adventures into a series of children’s fantasies. So after forty years, Franky Furbo is a popular fictional character throughout the world, but only William Wiley and his family know that he is real.
   Except that they don’t. The novel begins with Wiley’s discovery that his wife has only been humoring him all this time. She loves him but she can’t believe in his delusion. Crushed, Wiley begins to doubt his own sanity. He has to admit to himself that he has deliberately simplified Franky Furbo’s adventures, because even he could not comprehend all that the fox told him—of being able to teleport around the world in an instant, to read minds, to speak all languages, to transmute himself into any shape or size. The only thing that Franky Furbo could not do was to understand why he was so different from other foxes. He had been obsessed with solving the mystery of himself. Now Wiley must also find out the answer, or admit to himself that he is crazy. The only source of information would seem to be the German soldier who Franky Furbo also saved—if Wiley can find him after over forty years.
   Franky Furbo is an unusual blend of themes. It is partly a pseudo-traditional young children’s fantasy, partly a novel of psychological self-analysis, partly modern science-fiction, and partly a sophisticated inspirational fantasy (a la Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull). The beginning is dangerously weak; a bit too cute and simplistic. But that turns out to be deliberate; the author is downplaying elements that will reappear more seriously later on.
   The novel is also a riddle right up to the climax as to whether Franky Furbo is a real or an imaginary character. There are clues throughout the story; for example, consider the author’s name, the protagonist’s name, and the meaning of the Italian word ‘furbo’. (At the risk of getting too cute myself, I will say that Wharton dares to go where Doc Smith only hinted at.) But most importantly, Franky Furbo and other anthropomorphic characters appear often enough through samples of Wiley’s children’s stories, through Wiley’s memories of the ‘real’ Franky, and in other revelations, that the reader will not feel cheated. Don’t let the bland opening put you off; Franky Furbo is definitely a novel that anthropomorphic fans (especially fox fans) will enjoy.
   A ‘prepub’ announcement in Library Journal last year stated that, “The story is something of a fairy tale, which may or may not explain why Steven Spielberg is now in the midst of filming it.” Nobody else seems to know anything about Spielberg filming Franky Furbo, so maybe the story was only optioned and then dropped. Or maybe it will still appear on the big screen someday.


	Title:	Catfantastic: Nine Lives and Fifteen Tales
	Editors:	Andre Norton and Martin H. Greenberg
	Publisher:	DAW Books (NYC), Jul 1989
	ISBN:	0-88677-355-5
		Paperback, 320 pages, USD $3.95
	Availability:	Am / BN / Al / Pw

   This anthology contains fifteen new stories, plus a brief introduction by Norton, written especially for it. All of them deal with cats in S-F or fantastic situations, and all are well written. Other than that, the editors have aimed at a wide variety of moods, styles, and treatments. There are grim dramas and comedies; adventures on distant planets and in wizards’ dens; tales told by the cats themselves and stories in which humans observe strange things that happen to cats. Some cats are normal; some stories reveal that humans have no idea what ‘normal’ means when dealing with cats. There are ghostly cats, magically enchanted cats, and scientifically bioengineered cats.
   The most anthropomorphized cats are the witches’ and wizards’ familiars, in Elizabeth H. Boyer’s Borrowing Trouble, Donna Farley’s It Must Be Some Place, P. M. Griffin’s Trouble, and Ardath Mayhar’s From the Diary of Hermione. Cats encounter, and in some cases save Earth from, interstellar or pandimensional vermin in Jaygee Carr’s Wart, C. S. Friedman’s The Dreaming Kind, Mercedes Lackey’s SKitty, Patricia Shaw Mathews’ The Game of Cat and Rabbit, and Ann Miller and Karen Elizabeth Rigley’s It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s … Supercat. (One of those is actually an old English folk tale in a S-F setting; see how quickly you recognize it.) There is a shared-world story, Wilanne Schneider Belden’s The Gate of the Kittens, which is set in Andre Norton’s Witch World universe; although Norton’s own story here, Noble Warrior, is a Victorian thriller with a nod to Kipling’s Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. There are stories in which cats are revealed as benevolent galactic guardians of inferior species (humans), as brave protectors of mistreated children, or as cupids who help their humans find romance.
   Technically, not all the stories in Catfantastic deal with anthropomorphic cats, but enough do to justify a review of it here. Besides, I hope that none of Yarf!’s readers will be so narrow-minded as to ignore a good story just because its cats happen to be ‘normal’. And several stories feature more than one anthropomorphized cat—not to mention anthro birds, mice, dogs, and even a sea serpent and a hobgoblin or two. The wide variety in Catfantastic means that not every story may be to your taste, but the majority of them should be.

		#4 / May 1990

Cover is of a later Puffin edition
	Title:	The Eleventh Hour: A Curious Mystery
	Author:	Graeme Base
	Publisher:	Harry N. Abrams, Inc. (NYC), Oct 1989
	ISBN:	0-8109-0851-4
		32 art pages + 7 text pages, USD $14.95
	Availability:	Am / BN / Al / Pw

   You may not instantly recognize the name Graeme Base, but you are almost certainly familiar with his alphabet book, Animalia, by now. “Unruly unicorns upending urns of ultramarine umbrellas”, and so forth. Published in America in 1987, it was a best-seller fine-art book for all ages despite its “children’s picture book” categorization. It established the young Australian artist’s reputation as a master of wonderfully rococo visual fantasy in the tradition of Brian Froud and Patrick Woodruffe, but specializing in anthropomorphized animals rather than on creatures of færie.
   Now Base has followed Animalia up with another art book in the same vein. The Eleventh Hour: A Curious Mystery is an ostensible children’s picture book with rhyming text. It is Horace Elephant’s eleventh birthday, and the wealthy young pachyderm organizes a sumptuous party for himself at his luxurious estate. A number of his animal friends spend the day at party and at play, only to be rudely confronted by a dramatic mystery in the evening. The reader is warned on the first page to watch for clues and hidden messages in each picture. The fact that some of these clues require the reader to be able to read musical notation, Morse code, mirror writing, rebuses, and Egyptian hieroglyphics, to name just a few of the different codes, emphasizes that this is much more than just a children’s book.
   But it is an art book for all ages. Young children can enjoy the lush paintings full of colorfully costumed animals without worrying about the puzzle. The main purpose of the mystery is to give older readers a justification (as if any justification were needed) to study the paintings especially closely, instead of breezing through the book—to consciously see all of the fine details hidden in each complex illustration. Horace is a very wealthy elephant, and his home is a palace rich in architecture and interior décor of all history from the temples of Karnak to the drawing rooms of Mozart’s patrons. The party costumes of Horace’s animal guests are a treat for connoisseurs of lavish clothing and jewelry.
   The solution of the mystery is given, with a listing and explanation of the hidden messages, in a sealed section at the back of the book. You had better check the copy of The Eleventh Hour that you pick up before you pay for it, because of eight copies at the bookshop where I got mine, only two were in fact sealed. The seal is a paper wafer designed by Base especially for this book. You will miss a minor but delightful bit of his art if your copy of the book does not have it.


	Title:	The Coachman Rat
	Author:	David Henry Wilson
	Publisher:	Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc. (NYC), Oct 1989
	ISBN:	0-88184-508-6
		171 pages, USD $13.95
	Availability:	Am / BN / Al / Pw

   This is the story of the rat that Cinderella’s fairy godmother transforms into a human coachman to take her to the Prince’s ball, and of what happens after the stroke of midnight. The coachman, Robert, reverts to his rat form but retains his human intelligence and speech. Neither rat nor human, yet both, he struggles to discover where he now fits into the societies of men and of rats—and he innocently brings tragedy and doom to all.
   The jacket blurb describes The Coachman Rat as “a brilliant and provocative” retelling of “the fantasy-horror tale” of Cinderella. I hadn’t known that Cinderella was a horror tale, but these are revisionist times. We must rely upon those who are wise enough to see beyond the surface to reveal to us the true meaning of things. (Such as all those helpful souls who pointed out that Disney’s The Little Mermaid is demeaningly sexist and an insult to womanhood.) How many orphans went hungry due to the taxes to pay for the Prince’s ball? What about all the wretches suffering in the royal dungeons while the Prince poses as the benevolent sovereign? Never thought about them, didya!?
   This “gripping fantasy” is more than just a retelling of Cinderella. There are equally strong portions of the Pied Piper legend and of the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror in it. Wilson blends them together very imaginatively. Yet the novel reeks of a self-conscious cleverness that stifles any real emotion. All of the characters are stereotypes, introduced one at a time and displayed to be seen for what they are before being activated to react against the other stereotypes. Amadea (Cinderella) is Goodness; the Prince is Nobility; Biggs the drunkard is Greed; Dr. Richter the scientist is Intellectual Pretension; Jenkins the scholar is Humanity; the scheming Devlin is Politics; John the palace guard is the Easily-Misled Masses—and Robert is Everyman, the Fool of the Tarot deck, an innocent who has the capacity and the opportunity to develop into anything, and who is molded through carelessness and callousness into a grim punisher. There are some witty lines, some convincing philosophical arguments, and some unexpected plot twists. But it remains a clever puppet play rather than a live drama. These puppets perform until all of their strings have been cut. Then it’s all over. Applause for the author, please.

		#5 / Jul 1990


	Title:	Carmen Dog
	Author:	Carol Emshwiller
	Publisher:	Mercury House (San Francisco), Mar 1990
	ISBN:	0-916505-70-2
		Hardcover, 161 pages, $15.95
	Availability:	Am / BN / Al / Pw

	ISBN:	0-916505-77-X
		Trade paperback, $9.95
	Availability:	Am / BN / Al / Pw

   Mercury House is strongly promoting this as “a feminist Animal Farm.” It is certainly feminist, but I see closer stylistic parallels with Pinocchio and with the classic Italian comic operas. The characters are deliberately histrionic; they posture exaggeratedly; the action takes place in a few locales that are described in the manner of artistically-stylized stage sets. There is the imagery everywhere of opera and of haiku; two very intellectual art forms. Carmen Dog is totally different in mood from the dramatic adventure narrative of Animal Farm.
   Females are changing throughout the world. Female animals are evolving into humans; female humans are devolving into animals. Pooch is a pedigreed golden setter who is the devoted pet of an upper-class couple, from whom she has picked up a passion for opera. Pooch finds herself taking on more and more of the household wifely chores, including minding the baby, as her mistress degenerates into a nasty snapping turtle. One day when the master is on a business trip, the mistress becomes too dangerous to stay around. Pooch flees with the baby into the streets of New York City.
   The world’s men are extremely annoyed. They are sure the females are doing this just to be contrary, to upset the natural order of male dominance. A doctor gets a government grant to perform electroshock research on the womanized animals. Among those caught and delivered to him are Pooch and the baby. (Pooch had managed to see a performance of Carmen before her capture and is now calling herself Pucci; she dreams of becoming an opera star.) The doctor shocks everyone, including the baby. His assistant is his dumpy wife, Rosemary, who seems kindly but is too passive to restrain him. (Besides, a good wife does not contradict her husband.)
   Pucci and the other animal-women escape. She hopes to find refuge with an operatic impresario, Valdoviccini, but he is, alas, more interested in her for reasons of lust than for her talent. The government decides that women are more trouble than they are worth. It constructs an Academy of Motherhood on Fifty-seventh Street:

Meanwhile, the animal-women are being gathered into a secret sisterhood, whose leader is none other than Rosemary. To keep the police from seizing Rosemary, many of the animal-women disguise themselves in Rosemary rubber-masks and frumpy housecoats. The police disguise themselves as Rosemarys to infiltrate the feminist movement. Rosemary advises the women to disguise themselves as policemen to infiltrate the military-industrial leadership. Soon New York is filled with badly-disguised Rosemarys and policemen rushing about. There is more, but it all ends in a grand climax in which everyone realizes that mankind and womankind should live in harmony as equals – “Neither Conqueror nor Conquered; Neither Victory nor Defeat”, as Pooch titles the grand aria in the opera she writes to commemorate the birth of this new world.
Carmen Dog is full of animal-women in various stages of hybridization: Chloe, the sexy Siamese cat woman; Mary Ann, the awkward duck(?)/swan(?) woman; Isabel, the murderous wolverine woman; and more. This is a different and a clever novel, but it may be too self-consciously literary and affected for the tastes of the average Furry fan.


	Title:	*BRIXOI*
	Author:	Tom Foster & Ken Fletcher
	Publisher:	Neo-Zagatine Press, Apr 1990
	ISBN:	—
		100 pages. $10.00 (incl. postage & handling)
	Availability:	Am / BN / Al / Pw

BRIXOI is a Neo-Zagatine publication of exactly 100 8¹/₂" x 11" pages, issued simultaneously by Ken Fletcher in Minneapolis and by Tom Foster in Memphis. Ken Fletcher and Tom Foster have been drawing funny animals for years in fanzines, and this is a sampler of their work. Some pages are drawn by Ken Fletcher. Some are drawn by Tom Foster. Some are drawn by both Tom Foster and Ken Fletcher. A lot of the art is brand new, while other pages are reprints of old fanzine covers, personal Christmas cards, convention flyers, and the like, going back to 1982 or 1971 or whenever. (The copyright date on page 31 is 30,000 B.C.)
The book? fanzine? folio? is divided into four sections: The Art of Getting Around; The Cartoon Artist; In Search of Frogsworth; and Miscellaneous Row. But there is no real continuity. BRIXOI is just a collection of (presumably) what Foster & Fletcher consider to be some of their best fanzine funny-animal drawing of the past couple of decades. Sober and drunken funny animals. Funny animals flying spaceships and driving Model Ts. Funny animals playing the piano or washing dishes. Funny animal carpenters and sheriffs and bag ladies and politicians and soldiers and mythological deities. 100 pages of funny animals. An inside-back-cover Afterword refers to this as “the first book of BRIXOI”, so maybe there are more coming. I can certainly remember some great funny animal drawings by Fletcher and/or Foster over the past twenty years that are not in this volume, so there is room for more.


	Title:	*Normal u.s.a.—chili maneuvers*
	Author:	Michael Jantze
	Publisher:	Harvest Moon (Los Angeles), 1988
	ISBN:	—
		200 pages, $7.50 + shipping & sales tax
	Availability:	Am / BN / Al / Pw

Do newspaper comic strips such as Berke Breathed’s Bloom County with a mixed human/anthropomorphic cast qualify for inclusion in an ‘Anthro Alert’ column? If you’re willing to stretch a point, you might want to read Normal u.s.a.—chili maneuvers, by Mike Jantze; Los Angeles, Harvest Moon, 1988. Normal began as a comic strip in the Cal State Northridge Daily Sundial in the mid-’80s, but this is a collection of new, unpublished strips that continue the lives and misadventures of his characters after Jantze graduated and the college paper dropped the strip. (It is part of an as-yet-unsuccessful development of Normal u.s.a. as a regular comic strip that Jantze is submitting to the newspaper syndicates.)
Normal u.s.a. has a mostly human cast, but there are a few delightful fantasy-animal characters, notably A. C., the beer-drinking armadillo whose relationship to the protagonists, Norm and Lynn, is halfway between a pet and a self-invited permanent house guest. (He cooks up a mean pot of chili.)

		#6 / Aug 1990

The Redwall Trilogy, by Brian Jacques. Illustrated by Gary Chalk.

Cover of the Philomel Books edition
		Title:	*Redwall*
		Publisher:	Philomel Books (New York), Mar 1987
		ISBN:	0-399-21424-0
			Hardcover, 351 pages, $15.95
		Availability:	Am / BN / Al / Pw

		Publisher:	Avon Books (New York), Mar 1990
		ISBN:	0-380-70827-2
			Paperback, 351 pages, $4.50
		Availability:	Am / BN / Al / Pw







Title:	*Mossflower*
Publisher:	Philomel Books (New York), Sep 1988
ISBN:	0-399-21549-2
	Hardcover, 431 pages, $16.95
Availability:	Am / BN / Al / Pw







		Title:	*Mattimeo*
		Publisher:	Philomel Books (New York), May 1990
		ISBN:	0-399-21741-X
			Hardcover, 448 pages, $16.95
		Availability:	Am / BN / Al / Pw

   The Redwall novels teeter between a juvenile and adult readership. The original British editions are published by Hutchinson Children’s Books, Ltd., but the U.S. paperback edition by Avon Books is packaged as an adult literary fantasy “in the glorious tradition of Watership Down”. The final novel has just appeared in hardcover, and the first has just been reissued in an ‘inexpensive’ mass-market edition.
   The trilogy is actually closer to an anthropomorphized version of Tolkien. Jacques’ world does not have magic, but his animal characters wear clothing, build their own houses and castles, and fight with their own swords and crossbows. Like Tolkien’s Hobbits, Jacques’ protagonists are peaceful yeomen (mice, moles, squirrels, rabbits, badgers) whose community is menaced by an army of carnivorous conquerors (weasels, rats, stoats, foxes) led by a truly evil commander. The woodland community must train itself to fight for its survival. One among them stands out as a warrior, and he must go on a dangerous quest while his mates try to hold the invaders back until he can return with aid.
   Redwall is the story of the castle-like monastery of that name, an abbey in the forested land of Mossflower. Matthias is a young mouse in training to enter its Order of healers and scholars. However, he is more fascinated by the legend of Martin the Warrior, the brave mouse who drove away Mossflower’s enemies generations ago. When Mossflower is invaded anew by the hordes of Cluny the Scourge, a rat who combines the attributes of Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan, Matthias proves to have the skills of leadership to rally a resistance against them. But Matthias is convinced that he must obtain Martin’s long-missing sword before he can be a true warrior, so he leaves on a long quest to find it, while his friends grimly defend Redwall Abbey during the increasingly desperate siege.
   Mossflower is Martin’s story. It is basically Redwall with the details reversed. Martin is a young Northern barbarian mouse who wanders into Mossflower, an animal community that had been conquered a generation earlier by the wildcat Verdauga and his mustelid ruffians. Verdauga has just been succeeded by his sadistic daughter Tsarmina, who is so murderous that she provokes the sullen Mosslanders into open revolt. Where Redwall was about vicious predators attacking the peaceful animals in their abbey, Mossflower is about the peaceful animals escaping into the woods and forming a Robin Hood-style peasant army to besiege the villains in their dark castle of Kotir. But the peasants fare badly against Tsarmina’s trained fighters, so Martin and two companions leave on a quest to find the legendary badger warrior, Boar the Fighter, and enlist his aid. Again the novel splits into two parallel stories, that of the heroic questors and that of the woodland animals battling to save themselves and their home.
   Mattimeo features three parallel stories. Slagar the Cruel, a fox injured in the battles of Redwall, returns about a dozen mouse-years later for revenge. He kidnaps the community’s children, including Matthias’ son Mattimeo, and takes them to be sold into slavery to he rats of the underground kingdom of Malkariss. Matthias leads a rescue party after the slavers. It has barely left Redwall when the abbey is attacked by an army of crows, magpies and rooks led by General Ironbeak. The novel shifts back and forth between the hardship of young Mattimeo and his playmates as they are dragged towards the evil rats’ kingdom; the adventures of Matthias and his warriors as they race to overtake the slave caravan; and the battles inside Redwall as its woodland defenders are forced down floor by floor into the cellars.
   The three Redwall novels bring to mind another comparison; the classical theatrical animated cartoon series such as the Road Runner and the Coyote, or Tom & Jerry. The first one is delightful, but watching three or more at the same time makes it overly obvious to what extent they are similar to each other. All three novels have the same types of characters who react in the same ways. All three involve an ancient prophecy that must be unriddled. All three have stylistic repetitions that, taken together, seem too unimaginative. Jacques’ novels were originally published a year or more apart, but now they are all available together. You will probably enjoy any one of them, but it may be a mistake to read all three too closely together.

	Title:	*It’s Raining Cats and Dogs… and Other Beastly Expressions*
	Author:	Christine Ammer
	Illustrator:	Cathy Bobak
	Publisher:	Paragon House (New York), Oct 1988
	ISBN:	1-55778-057-9
		Hardcover, vii + 247 pages, $19.95
	Availability:	Am / BN / Al / Pw

	ISBN:	1-55778-086-2
		Trade paperback, $9.95
	Availability:	Am / BN / Al / Pw

	Publisher:	Dell Publishing/Laurel Books (New York), Nov 1989
	ISBN:	0-440-20507-7
		No illustrations: viii + 279 pages, $5.95
	Availability:	Am / BN / Al / Pw

   The title tells it like it is. The Preface defines it further: “The nearly 1,000 terms in this book are arranged into nine general animal categories: cats, dogs, domestic fowl, farm animals, wild animals, birds, reptilians and amphibians, insects, and marine animals. They are roughly alphabetical within these categories, but the reader is advised to consult the complete index at the back of the book.”
   This is a brisk and chatty dictionary of animal-related expressions in modern English, such as blind as a bat. Cats and dogs are popular enough to merit chapters of their own. Other animals are clumped into broader categories. For some animals, such as the horse, there are three or four pages filled with phrases. For others, such as the ostrich, there is only a single term.
   The general format for each entry is to begin with a literary quotation which alludes to the animal (e.g., “Paulina her first husband made a stag.” Thomas Pecke, Parnassi Puererium (1659)); to define the origin of the animal’s name (from Latin, Old English, or whatever); to briefly describe the animal’s characteristics; and finally to cite the catchphrases, with an attempt to establish their origins or at least the period to which their earliest usages have been raced. Ammer also includes some negative information; for example, she reveals that the term crazy as a loon does not derive from that waterbird’s maniacal-sounding cry, but the other way about. The bird was called the diver until the early 17^th century, when people began to use the name loon because it sounded like a lunatic laughing. Phrases cited go back as far as the Old Testament and Æsop’s fables (which Ammer dates to 570 B.C.), and are as recent as current sports slang and comic-strip references.
   The book is designated by its publisher as ‘humor/reference’, indicating that it is equally appropriate for pleasurely browsing and for serious etymological study.
   There is a good index, making it easy to locate each term. In addition to the expressions and definitions themselves, here is interesting information on the evolution of animal names (e.g., hound was the general English word for all dogs until about 1050 A.D., then dog replaced it and hound came to mean specifically a dog used for hunting), and on the invention or creation of items with animal-related names such as hot dog and hobby-horses. There are even references to Warner Brothers’ Bugs Bunny and to Al Capp’s Skonk Works—which call attention to the only omission that I noted; there is no mention of a Mickey Mouse affair as a term of disparagement. (There is also no mention of E. C. Segar’s Eugene the Jeep, which popularly was the inspiration for the name of the U.S. military’s well-known General Purpose vehicle, but that could be justified on the grounds that the book does not include references to fantastic or mythological animals at all.)
   It’s Raining Cats and Dogs… is very comprehensive in its coverage. Ammer is a professional lexicographer with numerous dictionaries and similar educational books to her credit. The original edition came out in October 1988, but it is still available in bookshops. Now there is also a popular paperback edition, in Dell/Laurel’s The Intrepid Linguist Library series, which is priced more conveniently for a fan’s personal bookshelf. Note, however, that the Laurel edition does not contain the humorous cartoon illustrations of the Paragon House edition.

		#7 / Sep 1990


	Title:	*Skywater*
	Author:	Melinda Worth Popham
	Publisher:	Graywolf Press (St. Paul, MN), May 1990
	ISBN:	1-55597-127-X
		206 pages, $17.95
	Availability:	Am / BN / Al / Pw

   Skywater is a superb nature novel in the tradition of Jack London’s Call of the Wild. It follows a band of coyotes who are driven by the pollution of the ground water from their home territory in the Sonora desert near Yuma, Arizona. The coyotes are introduced through the eyes of an old retired couple, Albert and Hallie Ryder, who give them names based on brand products: Dinty Moore, Kodak, Boyardee, and the like. The novel uses these for convenience, but makes it clear that this is a deliberate human convention. The coyotes’ own awareness of their identities is more basic: The leader, the loyal follower, the challenger, the two females, the three-legged (injured) one, etc. The coyotes are anthropomorphized as little as possible, mostly just to give them a common goal—to search for the legendary Skywater, the home of all waters—and an awareness that it to their mutual advantage to seek this goal together, instead of living as loners as coyotes usually do.
   Popham convincingly puts the reader into a coyote’s mind, to see and think and be aware as a real coyote. The small amount of anthropomorphization is consistent with native American psychologies and beliefs. The leader, Brand X, thinks of the Moon in terms of his dead father’s white eye; the coyotes superstitiously regard undrinkable seawater as reserved for the spirits of their ancestors. But in general, Skywater presents the coyotes realistically rather than humanizing them to the extent, say, of Felix Salten’s Bambi: A Life in the Woods.
   The story takes a group of scruffy, look-alike, non-talking animals and succeeds in making each of them sharply individualized, capable of nonverbal communication, and sympathetic. It also realistically presents the dangers faced by modern Southwestern wildlife: Crossing busy highways, the large Yuma Proving Ground weapons test range, the inevitable result when large predators lose their fear of humans and come raiding for food in human communities. Popham shows that there are many people who are seriously concerned with wildlife preservation who nevertheless feel that coyotes are so prolific and are a menace to genuinely Endangered Species that they need to be cut back. It is because she presents all the ecological arguments in such an objective manner, and still comes out strongly in favor of the coyotes, that the ‘moon-callers’ stand out as such sympathetic characters. And it is because this is primarily an adventure novel and only secondarily an educational tract that readers will enjoy it whether they care about the Message or not. Seven coyotes against modern human civilization—do they really have a chance? Read Skywater and find out.
   Skywater is realistic enough that it may not be to the taste of those who prefer anthropomorphs who dress, talk, and act just like regular humans in animal costumes. Those who are intrigued by characters who mix their species’ individual traits with human-level intelligence will enjoy Skywater—and may find it a valuable reference for constructing coyotid Furry characters.


	Title:	*Shaman*
	Author:	Sandra Miesel
	Publisher:	Baen Books (New York), Oct 1989
	ISBN:	0-671-69844-3
		306 pages, $3.50
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About half of Shaman does not have any anthropomorphic characters, but it is a very good novel that you should enjoy anyhow. Ria Legarde is an unhappy citizen in an overly regimented and monitored future. She has dreams in which her consciousness visits parallel worlds, some better and some worse. Her mind is lured to an Earth that has trained ESP powers, and which has bioengineered otters to partnership with humanity. Ria becomes a close friend of Lute, an otter technician, and visits him often. There is a lengthy scene in which she is invited to the otter’s coastal community to join one of their festivals. Ria remains in mental contact with Lute when she must return to her own world, and the two work together to save her from PSI, the ‘thought police’.
Miesel extrapolates upon the otter’s natural playfulness and gregariousness to give her intelligent otter people a lively and impish personality, which is just as serious and practical as the drably-enforced ‘responsibility’ of Ria’s society. The otters’ own communal life-style is patterned after the extended families of the Polynesians.


	Title:	*Cathouse*
	Author:	Dean Ing
	Publisher:	Baen Books (New York), May 1990
	ISBN:	0-671-69872-9
		247 pages, $3.95
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Dean Ing’s Cathouse is in no way related to Michael Peak’s Cat House, reviewed in Yarf! #2.

   Cathouse consists of two novellas that were originally published in Baen’s The Man-Kzin Wars (June 1988) and Man-Kzin Wars II (August 1989). If you have those, you don’t need this. These are shared-world stories, set in Larry Niven’s Known Space universe. Niven established in his stories that mankind has repeatedly beaten the cat-like Kzinti in a series of violent space wars, but the instinctively warlike Kzinti won’t give up. In this new series, other writers are describing the events of the Fourth Man-Kzin War. Cathouse is fully understandable on its own, and Ing is more successful than some writers in depicting the Kzin as intriguing Furry anthropomorphs rather than just a savage alien enemy.
   Carroll Locklear is human scholar captured by a small Kzinti warship when the war breaks out. He is dumped on an unexplored planet for temporary safekeeping. Locklear discovers that the planet is actually a base of the Outsiders, mysterious aliens whom nobody has ever seen but who left their artifacts throughout the galaxy. The world is a prehistoric zoo, with specimens in suspended animation from both and the Kzin homeworld of 40,000 years ago.
   In the first story, Locklear has to awaken the ancient Kzin, reach an understanding with them, and manipulate ancient-modern Kzin rivalries to his advantage to gain his freedom. In the second story, Locklear is having his own problems with the Neanderthals whom he revives in the Earth biosphere, but these fade to insignificance when human space-navy mutineers come to the planet. Locklear has to return to the Kzin biosphere and get involved in their deadly politics again to win their help against the modern humans, who are the most viciously murderous of all.
   Ing shows the Kzin as tiger-like anthropomorphs with an intelligence that has evolved from feline traits. A key story development is the manner in which Locklear and some of the Kzin use their intelligence to rise above their conflicting instincts for their mutual advantage.


	Title:	Ratha and Thistle-chaser
	Author:	Clare Bell
	Publisher:	McElderry Books (New York), Apr 1990
	ISBN:	0-689-50462-4
		232 pages, $14.95
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   Bell’s Ratha series (Ratha’s Creature, 1983; Clan Ground, 1984) is set twenty-five million years in Earth’s past. Hominids have not yet appeared, but a clan of large, cougar-like cats have evolved to intelligence. They have developed a language and a tribal society, and they have learned how to herd primitive deer and horses for a permanent food supply. The cats protect them from other predators, and take care that their own appetites do not outmatch their herd’s breeding powers. However, the clan is far outnumbered by hostile wild felines, some of which are unintelligent and some of which are equally smart but unwilling to restrain their gluttony and would slaughter the whole herd for an immediate feast. Also, the cats of the clan have noticed that the offspring of mating within the clan are always intelligent, whereas the cubs of matings between themselves and wild cats may or may not be intelligent.
   Ratha is introduced in Ratha’s Creature as an adventurous adolescent who dares to question the traditions and beliefs of the clan. She is driven out to become an outcast. During her wanderings before she returns to the clan, she mates with an Un-Named cat; but when her cubs are apparently unintelligent, she sorrowfully abandons them. By the conclusion of the first novel, Ratha is the new leader of the clan of the Named, and the adventures in Clan Ground confirm her in this position.
   Ratha and Thistle-chaser is set three years after the first novel and two years after the second. It tells two parallel stories. One is of a crippled, solitary young cat who is obviously one of Ratha’s abandoned cubs. The second is of the clan, forced by a drought to search for a new pasture for the herdbeasts, who discover the seacoast. Ratha’s daughter has already staked out her lonely home here, surviving on shellfish and fish trapped in tidal pools. The wild cat’s intelligence is erratic, but to what extent is this actual feeble-mindedness and to what extent is it due to growing up as a truly feral child? Whatever the reason, is she an equal of the clan? Intelligence aside, what psychological and emotional scars does she bear that might prevent her friendly adoption by the clan? And can Ratha, now accustomed to leadership, afford to acknowledge that she made a mistake? Ratha’s two old clan friends, Thakur and Fessran, watch with growing unease as stubbornness and misunderstandings on both sides appear to lead toward an unavoidable and tragic conflict.
   Bell’s intelligent cats are attractive creatures. They are plausibly anthropomorphized, with consciousness laid over their feline attributes rather than replacing them. In fact, it is difficult to read these books without being subtly depressed because Ratha’s people are not alive today—i.e., their fight for survival as told in these stories must have ultimately failed.
   If you have read the first two novels, you will enjoy this one. If you have not, you should start with Ratha’s Creature. In addition to giving the full background of Ratha and her cubs, it is a more satisfying story. Ratha’s actions seem more like her own decisions. In Ratha and Thistle-chaser, there is more of a feeling of the author’s manipulation of the story. It soon becomes clear that Ratha and Thistle-chaser are going to stubbornly avoid listening to reason and refuse to see each other until a Dramatic Confrontation at the climax of the novel. It is well-handled when it comes, but it is expected.

		#8 / Nov 1990


	Title:	The Cold Moons
	Author:	Aeron Clement
	Illustrator:	Jill Clement (pictures & maps)

	Publisher:	Delacorte Press (New York), Apr 1989
	ISBN:	0-385-29694-0
		Hardcover, xiii + 333 pages, $16.95
	Availability:	Am / BN / Al / Pw

	Publisher:	Dell Laurel (New York), Jul 1990
	ISBN:	0-440-550331-0
		xvi + 314 pages, $8.95
	Availability:	Am / BN / Al / Pw

   This is basically Watership Down with badgers instead of rabbits. It is more than a bland imitation, however. Badgers were protected in Britain until 1975, when they became identified as carriers of tuberculosis which was spreading to other animals, notably the domestic cattle population. A policy of killing infected badgers was applied so broadly that by the 1980s there was a serious danger of the total extinction of wild badgers in Britain. It was against this background that The Cold Moons was first published in Wales in 1987, to rally public and environmental support for the badgers.
   Bamber, the sole survivor of a badger group gassed by humans, wanders into the larger community of Cilgwyn. His warning shocks its badgers, who react in various ways. Eldon, the complacent leader, hopes that it is a false alarm which they can ignore. Buckwheat, a council member, feels that they must migrate to a new home immediately. Palos, who seeks Eldon’s position, tries to turn the disagreement to his advantage. The arrival of the humans with their poison gas and hunting dogs forces the badgers to flee before they are fully ready. Their long trek across Wales is beset with hardships, tragedy, and heroism. During its long course, the badgers gradually come to rely upon two younger, stronger guides. Beaufort, Buckwheat’s son, is urged by his father to accept more responsibility; but while Beaufort is dutiful enough, he at first lacks the spark of leadership that the badgers desperately need. Kronos, Palos’ son, is an even worse schemer than his father, and he plots to trick the badgers into accepting him as a benevolent leader who will soon reveal himself as a sadistic dictator. The Cold Moons tells of the badgers’ search for a new home as they struggle against three enemies: the natural dangers of their trek; the deadly sabotage of Kronos which threatens to destroy them before Beaufort can grow into leadership; and the pursuing governmental badger extermination units.
   This is good enough to merit a favorable recommendation, but it is still close enough to Watership Down to make comparisons inevitable, and it does not match the literary genius of Richard Adams’ classic. The Cold Moons is told in a narrative format; there is not a line of dialogue in it. For example:

   By presenting the entire novel in this third-person, voice-over manner, Clement mutes its intensity. The characters seem like historical figures rather than living people whom the readers can care about.
   In both novels, the story continues beyond the point that the reader expects to be the end of the book. But Adams makes General Woundwort’s attack against the rabbits’ new home into an exciting extension of the story, whereas Clement’s surprise addition seems weak and anticlimactic. Both novels radiate their authors’ obvious love of nature, but Clement pushes his message too deliberately, to the extent that The Cold Moons has a Disneyish ‘all animals are friends; only Man the Hunter kills’ air of propaganda aimed at the uneducated animal-loving urban public.
   But these are quibbles. You may be annoyed by certain aspects of the novel, but you will not feel that you wasted your time by reading it.

		#9 / Dec 1990


	Title:	Rememory
	Author:	John Betancourt
	Publisher:	Popular Library/Questar (New York), Oct 1990
	ISBN:	0-445-21045-1
		197 pages, $4.95
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   This is a cross between Blade Runner and Total Recall, a fast-moving cyberpunk thriller set in a depressing future. The story, full of violent crime and political terrorism, is forgettable. What is memorable is the glimpse of new bioengineered societies that combine aspects of racial minorities, religious sects, and urban super-gangs.
   There is superpollution to the degree that nose filters are needed to breathe in the streets. Aircars fly through the skies, but it costs $500 for three hours at a parking meter. Individual police forces have been absorbed into the SecurNet, a Gestapo that ruthlessly enforces national public order. Major government offices have become hereditary, although the pretense of democracy is still maintained.
   People are dropping out of this society through bioengineering. It began a couple of generations earlier as cosmetic surgery. It has evolved into the rejection of a human race, which no longer offers anything to the individual, and the development of new artificial species that promise family and brotherhood. New ghettoes have formed for peoples such as the techs, proud of all their mechanical implants; the glitterfolk, pleasure-seekers who flaunt flashing electronics and neon body-parts; and especially the animalforms such as the catmen, the dogmen, the penguinmen, and others who have turned themselves into their chosen totem animals.
   Slasher, Hangman, and Jeffy are three catmen criminals who specialize in robbing dogmen, the rivals of the cats. As the novel follows them, it flashes past intriguing details of the catmen and dogmen societies, with passing references to other animen. There are bodyshops such as Animen-R-Us, where humans can get themselves converted. Conversion used to be an individual adult choice, but now that animal communities have developed, parents have their children converted as soon after birth as possible. Catmen and dogmen can transform themselves at will, were-animal style, between a human bipedal posture and an animal quadrupedal stance. Animen adults have enhanced muscles and steel claws; children have plastic practice claws. Bioengineered body forms establish the basic feline or canine structure, including head-shape, fangs, claws, tail, and so on; but the skin and body-fur are easily interchangeable. A catman can appear as a tiger, a leopard, a cougar, a cheetah, a man-sized Siamese cat, or just about any other feline almost as easily as a human can change clothes. There can also be hybrids, such as a dogman smuggler with the head of a Doberman and the body of a wolf or a husky.
   Rememory is worth reading for these glimpses of animan life, and for the semi-pathetic, semi-psychotic movement among the animen to deny their humanity and proclaim their adherence to their free animal nature, at the same time that they are developing their own political corruption and their own brutal Gestapo, the Shadowcats. The plot is for those who enjoy lots of blow-’em-up, shoot-’em-down action, chase scenes, and cynical double-crosses.


	Title:	*The Foxes of Firstdark*
	Author:	Garry Kilworth
	Publisher:	Doubleday (New York), May 1990
	ISBN:	0-385-26427-5
		371 pages, $18.95
	Availability:	Am / BN / Al / Pw

O-ha is a young vixen in Trinity Wood, an ancient forest near the English coast. She chooses a mate, A-ran, who “changes his name to A-ho to reflect her family name as was traditional among foxes.” They are happy until he is killed as the result of a fox hunt. O-ha grieves for several months, during which men come to tear up the forest and build a new suburban community; and an American fox, Camio, escapes from a big city zoo into the countryside. After a stormy courtship, the two mate and Camio persuades O-ha to start a den in the town’s new scrap-yard instead of fleeing with other wildlife into the receding forests.

The last half of the novel describes the foxes and their cubs growing up in a world of garbage dumpsters, pest-control poisons, and animal-rights activists. There are still many dangers to keep a fox’s life short. The most fearsome is O-ha’s old enemy, Sabre, the literally-bloodthirsty hunting dog of the local manor lord. Fox-hunting may have become passé, but Sabre is obsessed with killing the only fox who ever eluded him—and her whole family. He gets loose from the manor just as O-ha’s and Camio’s cubs become old enough to leave home. The conclusion is tense and imaginatively twisting.
It goes without saying that there are many similarities between The Foxes of Firstdark (first published in England in 1989 as Hunter’s Moon) and other novels in the Watership Down tradition. There are also refreshing differences. Instead of migrating ahead of man’s advance, the foxes adapt to coexist with humans in a suburban environment. The now-obligatory animal languages and religious myths are developed (and Kilworth does an excellent job of it), but it seems that these are not species-wide nor fixed. The American Camio is unfamiliar with the British foxes’ customs, and a generation gap develops between the parent foxes and their cubs. There is a semi-naturalistic species typecasting—since the protagonists are foxes, dogs tend to be antagonists—but there are both friendly and unsympathetic characters among all the animals, developed consistently with their species’ traits. The Foxes of Firstdark is a worthwhile addition to the serious talking-animal wildlife literature.


	Title:	*Midnight’s Sun: a Story of Wolves*
	Author:	Garry Kilworth
	Publisher:	Unwin Hyman (London), Sep 1990
	ISBN:	0-04-440683-5
		317 pages, £12.95
	Availability:	Am / BN / Al / Pw

   The two novels are a matched pair. There is no direct connection between them, but they share a common background. Kilworth’s different animal species have realistic predator/prey relationships, but they are aware of each other’s cultures and there are some overlapping similarities. To make a rough human comparison, an inhabitant of a Catholic country might be hostile to an inhabitant of a Protestant country, but they would share a general familiarity with each other’s beliefs, and know more about them than they would about Judaism, Islam, or Buddhism. So Kilworth’s wolves do not associate with foxes or coyotes or other canids, but their folk myths share many elements. The wolves have their own tales of Firstdark, and some of their myths seem similar to the foxes’ myths but from the wolves’ point of view. None of the canids are very familiar with the customs of other species such as the felines, the ursines, and so on; but what glimpses there are of them in both novels are consistent. (Kilworth indicates the differences between animal languages by having the canids speak English and its dialects; the felines speak French; the birds speak German; and presumably the rodents, mustelids, and others have their own tongues.)
   Aside from this common background, the two novels are quite different. The first is about foxes in England who adapt from life in the wild countryside to coexisting with humans around the fringes of expanding urban areas. Midnight’s Sun features wolves in their traditional open territories. The locale is presumably northern Canada or Alaska. There are humans around (they seem, through the wolves’ eyes, to be identifiable as resident natives, ‘civilized’ naturalists/scientists, and ‘civilized’ hunters), but the wolves have no interests in co-existing with them and prefer to avoid them as much as possible.
   These statements are all generalizations. The novel contains many exceptions, all well justified. One of the main themes is how the protagonist reacts to events and confrontations that are ‘out of the natural order of things’.
   Midnight’s Sun is a dramatization of the natural history and sociology of wolves as lived by one individual, Athaba. Athaba goes through just about every role that wolves normally live: Cubhood, young adulthood, loyal pack hunter, outcast, loner, father, leader. In a brief Author’s Note, Kilworth speculates on possible similarities between the psychology of wolves and primitive men. The novel draws a rough parallel between wolf-pack behavior and the speculative social behavior of prehistoric man.
   The wolves are organized for the welfare of the pack. They are not supposed to waste time on anything besides hunting and teamwork. This is generally a good rule because life is harsh and food is uncertain. A lone wolf is vulnerable but the pack is strong. Faulty teamwork can result in packmates getting killed while attacking dangerous prey such as elk. Yet absolute reliance upon tradition robs the pack of flexibility which may become essential for survival when new problems arise.
   Athaba has more imagination than the average wolf. This is both an asset and a liability, in different situations. He goes through several dramatic shifts in his status among the other wolves. His different adventures are too closely interrelated to describe in a plot synopses without giving away some surprises, but he leads an exciting life. It’s obvious that he will survive until the end of the book, but the reader is kept guessing about the fates of other characters: Athaba’s parents; Ulaala, his mate; his cubs; Skassi, his enemy; the strange human with whom he is stranded alone for weeks.
   There was no hint in Hunter’s Moon that Midnight’s Sun was coming, so it’s a wild guess as to whether Kilworth has any more animal novels planned. But he has left room to write about other canids from coyotes to dingoes, not to mention the other animal types. If Kilworth can keep up the level of quality in these two adventures, let’s hope that he has a long series ahead of him.

Title:

Galen the Saintly

Author:

G. Raymond Eddy

Publisher:

Lightpen Press (Carrollton, OH), quarterly from Aug 1990

ISBN:

—

24 pages, $2.50 per issue

Availability:

Am / BN / Al / Pw

G. Raymond Eddy has been creating anthropomorphic religious comic-art stories since at least 1984 for several fanzines and small-press magazines. He has decided to start his own imprint, Lightpen Press, “to provide a centralized location” for his stories. Galen the Saintly is a 24-page, 5.5" x 8.5" black-&-white comic book, published roughly quarterly. #1, A Gold One for the Wall, appeared in August 1990; #2, The Angelskates, in December 1990; and #3, The Masquerade, is scheduled for May 1991.

   Eddy has described himself as active in Christian church work. Galen, his cheerful mouse angel, is happily more reminiscent of the heroes of Horatio Alger (who was also a Christian minister) than of those modern comic-art religious tracts that try to scare you into salvation. Galen is friendly, intelligent, hard-working, a positive thinker, and always helpful. In these first two issues, he is the guardian angel of a human radio disk jockey and a ‘normal’ anthropomorphized mouse. Both are amiable but weak-willed, in need of a Big Brother role-model to keep themselves morally straight.
   Both stories use the same plot gimmick. Galen becomes so friendly with his wards that he allows them to borrow an angelic gimmick—a tape of heavenly music, in the case of DJ Raffy Johnson, and a pair of super-skates, in the case of Augustus P. Sharpcheddar. Both misuse them (innocently, in Raffy’s story, and deliberately, like a spoiled brat, in Gus’s), and Galen has to cover up for them and take the gimmicks back before any serious damage is done. In the first issue, Galen is the only animal character amidst a human cast; in the second, there are humans, anthropomorphized-animal mortals and angels, and normal ‘dumb’ animals.
   The stories are pleasant but very lightweight. The story similarity of the first two issues is unfortunate; I hope that #3 will show more originality. Galen is a strong character who is forced by his role as a guardian angel to remain passive until his naïve charges make a mistake, and then diplomatically correct them. This makes him a great social worker but a rather bland story protagonist. Because Eddy is keeping the stories gently humorous, they are shallow and vague as to background. There is no explanation of why a heavenly mouse is appointed as the guardian angel of a human in one story and of a mouse in the second; or why he is no longer the G.A. of Raffy in the second. (I got the idea from my own long-ago Sunday-School lessons that a Guardian Angel assignment was for the lifetime of the designated mortal.) In The Angelskates, Galen has to keep saving an anthropomorphized, clothes-wearing mouse from a ‘natural’ alley cat, and I couldn’t help wondering why the cat wasn’t equally anthropomorphized—although Eddy would have faced a large batch of new problems if it had been intelligent. (As long as the cat is a dumb animal, there is no issue of whether it’s being ‘good’ or ‘evil’ by following its instincts.) Criticisms such as this may be taking the stories too seriously—but if they aren’t worth taking seriously, then are they worth $2.50 per issue? Galen himself is likeable enough to make this comic worth reading. Issue #2 notes that #3 may look different, since Eddy’s art will be inked by Larry Blake.


	Title:	Sleepers: Part 1
	Author:	Vito Bianca & Kevin Vetrone
	Publisher:	Rock Soup Studio (Wappinger Falls, NY), 1990
	ISBN:	—
		57 pages, $7.95
	Availability:	Am / BN / Al / Pw

   This large, album-format graphic novel is a goulash of every politico-thriller clichè of the past two decades. German war criminals who infiltrated into the U.S. after World War II have organized a hidden Fourth Reich that is almost ready to take over America. Meanwhile, Japanese ultra-nationalists who are behind the modern Nipponese economic imperialism are about to openly buy up America. Simultaneously, Soviet Commie hardliners who want to discredit Gorbachev are plotting an ominous mission in the U.S. At the same time, a corrupt politician is favored to win the next presidential elections. And don’t forget Organized Crime. All of these groups are about to make their bids for power, and it looks like the only question is which dictatorship America will fall under—if it isn’t destroyed first in the crossfire between the rival gangs.
   Who can stop this? FBI agent Mac Talons, that’s who. But Talons is a wise guy, a loose cannon; always on the verge of expulsion because he refuses to fit the FBI’s approved image. The Bureau has tolerated him up to now because he’s always gotten results. But will the Bureau believe that all these fantastic plots are real? Can Talons, alone, fight ninja assassins, Mafiosa, Nazis and more?
   This funny-animal thriller contains lots of cynical humor and obviously-exaggerated suspense. So quibbles about realism aren’t very pertinent. The beginning is slow and heavy with bulging speech-balloons full of exposition. But once the story starts moving, there’s lots of action and reasonably witty smart-ass macho dialog. It does end with a cliffhanger. Art is good; spelling is variable.


	Title:	*BRIXOII*
	Author:	Tom Foster & Ken Fletcher
	Publisher:	Neo-Zagatine Press, quarterly from Apr 1990
	ISBN:	—
		100 pp/volume. $10.00 (incl. postage & handling)
	Availability:	Am / BN / Al / Pw

   In Yarf! #5, I reviewed BRIXOI as 100 pages of funny-animal art that Tom Foster and Ken Fletcher had drawn together. “A lot of the art is brand new, while other pages are reprints of old fanzine covers, personal Christmas cards, convention flyers, and the like, going back to 1982 or 1971 or whenever. […] Funny animals in the past and in the future. Sober and drunken funny animals. Funny animals flying spaceships and driving Model Ts. […] An inside-back-cover Afterword refers to this as ‘the first book of BRIXOI’, so maybe there are more coming.”
   Indeed there are. It turns out that BRIXOI is Volume 1 of The Brixoi Chronicles, which will be published four times a year, in an edition of 100 copies. BRIXOII has just been published; it will be followed by BRIXOIII, BRIXOIV, and so on. The cost is $10.00 per volume; they do not say whether subscriptions are available.
   BRIXOII is also 100 pages, divided into four sections. However, this volume contains more new pages than reprints, and the contents are more pertinent to the named sections. The Imaginators (A Brixoi Tours Special) consists of a Time-Travel Plus tour “of unpronounceable geographies and geographic personalities who have escaped the mundane and traded it for the exotic commonplace”. Send In the Frogs is 32 pages of frog cartoons, dominated by a short story, Frank Frog, Beale Street Detective. This indicates that The Brixoi Chronicles will be more than just an archive of Foster’s & Fletcher’s old funny-animal at with a few new items. It will showcase their current work. Order a sample volume and see how you like it.

		#12 / May 1991


	Title:	Catfantastic II
	Editors:	Andre Norton & Martin H. Greenberg
	Publisher:	DAW Books (New York, NY), Jan 1991
	ISBN:	0-88677-461-6
		318 pages, $4.50
	Availability:	Am / BN / Al / Pw

   Catfantastic (reviewed in Yarf! #3) was evidently popular, because here is Catfantastic II. It contains eighteen more brand-new fantasies about cats; and they’re all magical or anthropomorphic pusses this time.
   The stories are all enjoyable, although there is not quite as broad a range of settings and moods as was in the first volume. There are no pure comedies, and only a few that are wryly humorous adventures. There is a preponderance of mood pieces about cats who are the loyal companions and protectors of lonely old women, frightened young girls, and friendly but doddering old wizards.
   But there are stories that are dramatically different. Clare Bell’s Bomber and the Bismarck describes how a highly unusual cat was responsible for the sinking of the Third Reich’s prized battleship. Elizabeth H. Boyer’s Nordic The Last Gift tells how the ancient jotun, Skrymir, creates cats and kittens to amuse his lonely housemaid; and how the vain hero, Airic, foolishly gives them the jotun’s last gift for mankind. In Patricia B. Cirone’s Papercut Luck, a paper-cat good-luck charm comes to life to save a peasant girl’s family as the Mongols besiege Canton. And in Elizabeth Ann Scarborough’s The Queen’s Cat’s Tale, Queen Guinevere’s cat relates how it was really Morgan le Fay, disguised as a cat, who was responsible for the fall of Camelot.
   Nine of the eighteen stories are by authors who were in the first anthology. Three of those are sequels to their earlier stories, so if you enjoyed the original adventures of Marylois Dunn’s Cat, Ardith Mayhar’s Hermione, or Andre Norton’s Thragun Neklop, you can read their further exploits in Dunn’s Shado, Mayhar’s Hermione at Moon House, and Norton’s Hob’s Pot. The other stories are independent tales, set in worlds of high fantasy or modern American metropolises; in dignified mansions and raucous carnivals and bleak animal shelters; featuring ‘ordinary’ cats and cat-goddesses. If you liked Catfantastic, you’ll like Catfantastic II, II … er, too.


	Title:	Buffalo Gals And Other Animal Presences
	Author:	Ursula K. LeGuin
	Illustrator:	Margaret Choclos-Irvine
	Publisher:	New American Library/ROC (New York, NY), Oct 1990
	ISBN:	0-451-45049-3
		236 pages, $4.50
	Availability:	Am / BN / Al / Pw

   If you missed this when it came out as a Capra hardcover in 1987 or as a Plume trade paperback in 1988, here it is in a mass-market edition. Don’t miss it this time!
   LeGuin’s ‘animal presences’ are not the usual anthropomorphic stories. This collection consists of eleven introductions, the same number of short stories, and twenty-one poems. But that’s misleading. What is a ‘story’? Some of these are traditional romantic adventures with a plot and characters, yes. Others are more like essays, or entries for very technical scientific journals. Anthropomorphism is carried to plants and rocks—not plants and rocks that speak to us with human voices, but the question of how we should go about attempting to communicate with plants or rocks.
   This collection contains science-fiction, fantasy, anthropological fiction, and poetry. In the lead novelette, the award-winning Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight, a young Anglo girl is lost in the desert and is taken care of by the local animals. They are anthropomorphized in the style of pre-Anglo Amerind animal personifications, and the young girl undergoes quite a culture shock. May’s Lion, toward the back of the book, is somewhat similar. LeGuin relates an incident (a farmwife in the Napa Valley is confronted by a mountain lion that has wandered from the hills) in two different ways: as a modern American woman would perceive it, and as a pre-Anglo Amerind woman would have perceived it. A story? A lesson in cultural anthropology? You decide.
   Not all the tales deal with the ‘soft’ sciences. Schrödinger’s Cat seems to be traditionally anthropomorphized, since it features a talking cat and dog. But it is really an anthropomorphized demonstration of quantum mechanics. Direction of the Road anthropomorphizes perspective—and if you know of any other story by any author that has successfully done this, please let me know about it.
   Buffalo Gals is a different anthropomorphic book. It is highly imaginative, and it will make you look at commonplace things in a totally new way. Read it!


	Title:	The Abandoned
	Author:	Paul Gallico
	Publisher:	International Polygonics, Ltd. (New York), June 1987; 2nd ptg., Mar 1991
	ISBN:	0-930330-64-1
		256 pages, $5.95
	Availability:	Am / BN / Al / Pw

   Paul Gallico (1897-1976) wrote many popular stories that featured animals, such as The Snow Goose. Only three were anthropomorphic fantasies: The Abandoned (1950); Thomasina, The Cat Who Thought She Was God (1957); and Manxmouse (1968). The Abandoned is the best of these; ironically, it’s the only one that hasn’t been made into a movie. So it’s good that the novel is being kept in print.
   Unfortunately, the last edition that was easy to find was the Avon paperback, which went into several printings in the 1970s. International Polygonics picked up The Abandoned in June 1987 and has just reissued it, with a very attractive cover by Quay. There is also a matched edition of Thomasina. But International Polygonics is a small publisher, and its quality paperbacks are hard to find except in comprehensive, ‘real’ bookstores. The big shopping-mall chain bookshops don’t carry them.
   The Abandoned are those cats who do not live with human companions and must survive as alley strays. In particular, those abandoned are Peter Brown, an 8-year-old London boy who is transformed into a cat’s body after an accident, and Jennie Baldrin, a street-wise tabby who teaches Peter to be a cat. Gallico had a sharp eye for the behavior of cats, and The Abandoned may be the best novel ever written for rationalizing and explaining their habits.

   There are many of these lessons throughout the novel.
   The Abandoned is also the story of Peter’s life as a cat in the slums of London and Glasgow, and of his and Jennie’s experiences as ship’s cats in getting to Glasgow and back again. It’s a mixture of fantasy-adventure for older children and a romance for adults, as Peter matures emotionally in his husky tomcat’s body from a frightened child under Jennie’s motherly guidance into her lover and protector from other toms. The setting of London rebuilding after the wartime bombing is a bit dated today, but the characterizations of cat personality types are timeless. This novel is worth looking for if you haven’t already read it. Or, since it’s ‘literature’, ask your public library to get it.
   (Interestingly, animation historian John Canemaker quotes a forgotten review of a Felix the Cat cartoon from the November 20, 1922 issue of the New York Daily News in his new, and excellent, study, Felix: The Twisted Tale of the World’s Most Famous Cat (Pantheon, April 1991). The 1922 review, by ‘P. W. Gallico’, who was just beginning his writing career, raves about how great the Felix cartoons were and concludes, “We’re for five reels of Felix and only one reel of other folks.”)

		#14 / Jul 1991


	Title:	The Little Fox
	Publisher:	Celebrity Home Entertainment (Woodland Hills, CA), 1988
	Catalog number:	CHE 3022
		80 minutes, $14.95
	Availability:	Am / BN / Al / Pw

   In Yarf! #7, an uncredited animated cartoon character appeared on page 33. Although animated cartoon funny-animals are invariably anthropomorphic, Yarf! hasn’t devoted much attention to them. I wondered what response this would get. None, it turned out. In fact, most readers didn’t recognize that this fox cub was from an animation model sheet rather than by one of Yarf!’s regular artists. Of those who did recognize the movie character, most knew him only as the star of The Little Fox, one of those previously-unknown animated features that appear in the video rental shops. And nobody knows where they come from.
   This seems unfair, especially in this case. The Little Fox may be unknown in America except to those who have seen it on the Disney Channel, or on Celebrity Home Entertainment’s 1988 Just For Kids video release. But in Hungary, where it was made, it was so popular that the government commemorated it on a set of postage stamps.
   The American video industry is paranoid about identifying any movies as ‘foreign films’, for fear that the public will avoid them as being arty rather than entertaining. Celebrity Home Entertainment tried to have it both ways with The Little Fox, publicizing its popularity without saying where it was popular. “Award Winning Animated Feature” appears on the cover. What award? “Based on a best-selling book”, says the back cover. What book? The movie’s credits have not been removed, but they have been shifted to the back of the tape. “Produced by Pannonia Film Studio, Budapest. Directed by Attila Dargay. Screenplay by Attila Dargay, Istvan Imre, Ede Tarbay. Music by Peter Wolf.”
   Unless I blinked when I shouldn’t’ve, the American credits do not mention the best-selling book. It’s Vuk, by István Fekete (1900-1970), a forestry engineer who was Hungary’s most popular author of children’s nature novels around the middle of this century—Hungary’s version of America’s Ernest Thompson Seton or Germany’s Felix Salten. Vuk is Fekete’s novel about an orphaned fox cub who grows up to get revenge upon the farmer who killed his parents by avoiding all the farmer’s traps and watchdogs and stealing his prize poultry. The novel is a best-seller in Hungary, but it has apparently not been translated into English. (The Hungarian Embassy and a Hungarian bookshop in New York City say that none of Fekete’s books have been published in English, but the Los Angeles Public Library has Fekete’s Thistle (Bogancs), about a puli sheepdog puppy, published in English in Budapest in 1970, so I hope that Vuk will turn up in English, too. Judging from Thistle and from Fekete’s reputation as an author of ‘true life’ nature novels, I suspect that the movie is anthropomorphized much more than the book is.)
   Pannonia Film Studio is Central Europe’s largest producer of animation. Attila Dargay (1927- ) has been associated with it since it was separated from Hungary’s nationalized motion-picture industry in the 1950s to specialize in cartoon and puppet animation. (It is completely independent today.) Dargay has directed several features for Pannonia, but Vuk was the first to feature a total animal cast. The characters show his art style, just as Chuck Jones’ cartoons show his art style. Vuk was released in 1981. It became the biggest box-office grossing film in Hungary that year, and in 1982 it won Dargay the “Author’s Prize” at the National Feature Film Festival in Pècs. The set of seven Hungarian postage stamps was released on November 11^th.
   The translation of Vuk into The Little Fox, by Robert Halmi in 1987, is faithful. The movie is complete. Vuk, a peasant’s name in Southern Hungary and the Northern Balkans, has been changed to the more American-sounding Vic, and there are a couple of other similarly-minor changes, but most of the movie is unchanged even when the jokes may be too obscure for American audiences. In an early scene, after Vic’s first successful raid on the henhouse, the farm dogs gather to decide whom to blame for letting the fox get away. They sniggeringly decide to tell the farmer that the German shepherd was at fault. The emphasis is more meaningful if you realize what the average Hungarian’s opinion of Germans has been since the Nazi occupation during World War II. It’s an enjoyable film, and Yarf!’s readers should know for whom the credit is due for Dargay’s portrait of Vuk/Vic in Yarf! #7.


	Title:	Zone Yellow
	Author:	Keith Laumer
	Publisher:	Baen Books (New York, NY), Dec 1990
	ISBN:	0-671-72028-7
		247 pages, $4.50
	Availability:	Am / BN / Al / Pw

   Keith Laumer is best-known for his many Retief stories, but he first made his reputation as a notable s-f author with his 1962 novel Worlds of the Imperium, with its striking imagery of an endless series of alternate earths, all parallel in time but diverging gradually in physical resemblance. Brion Bayard, from our world, is kidnapped into another which has the technology to travel between all the earths, to prevent a would-be dictator from creating a trans-universal empire. In the 1965 sequel, The Other Side of Time, Bayard encounters a force of travelers from so far away that they’re no longer even human, but are more like one of the monkey peoples in the (later) Planet of the Apes movies.
   Twenty-five years later, Laumer has returned to the Imperium. Bayard’s earth is invaded by new dimension-travelers from still farther, where simians never evolved and the intelligent species has grown from the rodents—rats, in particular. Ylokk rat-soldiers pour in mass waves through transfer portals in all the largest cities, catching humanity by surprise. Defense is difficult since the Ylokk are so intermixed with terrified civilians. Governments are reluctant to order heavy firepower against their own cities and peoples. Colonel Bayard and two soldiers embark in a shuttle on a ridiculously-hopeless three-man retaliation against an entire non-human world…
   And what was a s-f pseudo-high-tech military thriller turns into a fairy tale. The mysterious Ylokk aren’t intelligent rodents with an alien civilization, but outright funny-animal rats. There’s a Ruritanian good rat monarchy with a rat king and queen and Lord Privy Seal and dukes and barons and fancy-dress sentries, who live in a beautiful pale-green jade palace “replete with crenellated towers, slim spires, flying granfallons, and ominous fire-slit openings”. The royal family’s armorial bearings are sable, a griffin or, on a bend argent, three mullets of the first, if you’re interested in how closely it parallels our society. It sounds like Ozma’s palace in the Emerald City, inhabited by the cast of The Nutcracker and the Mouse-King. Bayard and his companions, with the aid of a mysteriously helpful Ylokk general, learn rat-language in what seems like about 15 minutes, and are immediately rescuing a cute rat princess from the evil rat-communists (called the Two-Law faction, but it’s obvious who Laumer is parodying) who have overthrown the monarchy and launched the invasion of the human earths, to kidnap the ‘monkey-men’ to be the rats’ slaves. The royalists are peace-loving and will happily call off the invasion if they are restored to power, and you can take it from there, I’m sure.
   Zone Yellow is fun on an anthropomorphic level, with its rats in royal purple robes and gingerbready Eastern European villages (their currency is called zlots; remind you of any European money?). In comparison with the other two Imperium novels, it’s almost embarrassingly simplistic—and ethnocentric. The entire rat-citizenry sullenly dislikes its rat-communist bosses, but it takes a human (read ‘American’ since Bayard started out as a U.S. government official in the first novel) to inspire them to fight for their freedom.


	Title:	Who P-P-P-Plugged Roger Rabbit?
	Author:	Gary K. Wolf
	Publisher:	Villard Books (New York, NY), Aug 1991
	ISBN:	0-679-40094-X
		255 pages, $17.00
	Availability:	Am / BN / Al / Pw

   This is the authorized sequel to Disney’s 1988 hit movie. Gary Wolf is also the writer of Who Censored Roger Rabbit?, the novel upon which the movie was based, but you can forget about that. This mystery’s title emphasizes Roger’s distinctive stutter created for the Disney movie. The cover shows the official Disney visualizations of Roger, Jessica, and Eddie Valiant. The jacket blurb advertises that this novel stars “the characters from one of the most popular and innovative movies of all time”. The back cover features a rave review by “Michael D. Eisner, Chairman of the Board and CEO, The Walt Disney Company”. And the first page of the story flaunts references to Uncle Walt and to the Roger Rabbit short cartoons, Tummy Trouble and Roller Coaster Rabbit. The only thing that the packaging lacks is a banner headline: “This Is Not Literature; This Is Disney Merchandising”.
   That grump out of the way, the story is enjoyable. Curiously, it doesn’t match up with the setting of either the first novel or of the movie. It shows a new alternate universe altogether. The date is “1947, more or less”, but there are characters from the 1930s through the 1950s walking about together. David O. Selznick is just beginning to shoot Gone With the Wind, and it is to be a comedy with all Toon stars. Toons usually speak in word balloons, as they always did in Wolf’s original book, but they can speak aloud when they have to, as when they are acting in movies. There are brief references to the new creations of the Disney movie, but they are effectively offstage or ignored: no Benny the Cab or other inanimate-object Toons, no Doris or Judge Doom, no Toontown with its own laws of physics. Eddie Valiant casually mentions that it’s now common for bullets to have been dipped in Dip, and all of a sudden Toons are just as vulnerable as the humans to death by gunshot.
   The most significant change is that the social and physical distinctions between humans and Toons have been blurred. In his earlier novel, Wolf used Toons as metaphors for the discriminated-against minorities of the 1930s and ’40s. Here, they are the minorities of the 1990s despite the ‘1947’ date. Roger Rabbit is no longer the equivalent of a Stepin Fechit; he’s a Bill Cosby or a Danny Glover. Jessica Rabbit is the social equal of Mae West or Rita Hayworth. There are still Toon neighborhoods but they’re not slum ghettos. Eddie Valiant’s sister is married to a Toon detective in the L.A.P.D., and Eddie has three Toon nephews who dress and act the way you would expect from Toon triplet nephews. Several human characters have distinctly Toonlike names, such as UCLA linguistics Professor Ring Wordhollow and Tom Tom LeTuit, chief of the Cuban secret police. And, possibly from associating with Toons so much (but more likely because this is a comedy-mystery), the whole human cast acts in a much zanier and more Toonlike manner then it did in the previous novel or in the movie—including Eddie and such notables as David O. Selznick and Clark Gable.
   The plot is a repetition of the formula of the first novel. Roger Rabbit is one of the finalists under consideration for the starring role of Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind. But the gossip tabloids are headlining a torrid romance between his wife Jessica and Clark Gable, and the scandal could ruin his chances. So Roger hires cheap private eye Eddie Valiant to prove that there’s really nothing going on. Instead, Eddie finds evidence that Jessica is pregnant with Clark’s baby. Then one of the other Toon actors trying out for Rhett Butler is murdered and Eddie is framed. Is Roger trying to eliminate his competition and set up a fall guy? Are Jessica and/or Clark trying to keep Eddie from talking about them? Was the murdered Toon really blackmailing Selznick, and what secret is the movie mogul hiding? Are Toons passing themselves off as humans, and vice versa?
   This is a genuine murder mystery, but it’s treated much more lightly than in the original Roger Rabbit novel. The dialogue contains more witticisms, and they are humorously sarcastic rather than bitterly cynical. The background atmosphere of the hopelessly oppressed Toon minority is almost gone. The mystery is wrapped up neatly but not as ingeniously, and Wolf is sloppier in tying up all the loose ends. More importantly, since the reader is constantly aware that this is an authorized Disney story, there’s never any real suspense as to whether Jessica is Bad or things just look that way.
   Fans will enjoy several new funny-animal supporting characters, such as Delancey Duck, publisher of the sleazy Toontown Telltale, and Large Mouth Bassinger, the ritzy publicity agent who decorates his office in a maritime motif. The ‘About the Author’ note states that Wolf is already at work on his third Roger Rabbit novel.


	Title:	Rats and Gargoyles
	Author:	Mary Gentle
	Publisher:	Viking/A Roc Book (New York), Apr 1991
	ISBN:	0-451-45106-6
		416 pages, $18.95
	Availability:	Am / BN / Al / Pw

   Rats and Gargoyles and Humans and Katayans. Katayans are just like Humans except that they have long, whiplike tails with a tuft of fur at the end. They all inhabit a weirdly magnificent city which is the real star of this novel. No name is necessary; the city dominates the world. It is a mélange of the greatest cities of Renaissance Europe with their Cathedrals, their Palaces, their Universities, their wide plazas for gaudily-dressed militia to drill in, their canals and harbors, their thieves’ quarters and dungeons and catacombs and networks of sewers providing secret passages everywhere. And above all, their deadly court intrigues.
   In this city, this world, the Gargoyles are supreme gods. The Rats are the nobility and the army. The Humans are lower-class merchants and laborers. The Katayans are from the countryside, and the social status of the few Katayans who live in the city has not been settled yet.
   Everyone is plotting against everyone else. The Rats are scheming against each other, the Gargoyles, and the Humans. The Humans are divided against each other, the Rats, and the Gargoyles. There aren’t enough Katayans in the city to have a faction, and nobody is sure whose side the individual Katayans are on. The Gargoyles remain contemptuously aloof, occasionally idly destroying a building or transforming a victim into something hideous just to remind everyone of their power. But one of the Gargoyles is bored—and insane—and it decides upon a sadistic plan to amuse itself which will probably destroy the world.
   The book contains reproductions from numerous illustrated 16^th- and 17^th-century treatises on astrology, numerology, Hermetic science, and other fields of learning that were suppressed by the Church. They are the laws of physics and nature upon which this world exists: the crystal spheres of the heavens, Rosicrucianism, Masonic science, and the like. These elements are introduced slowly, so the reader does not need a background familiarity with them. They are gradually added together until a fantastically new natural universe has been constructed for the apocalyptic climax of the novel.
   In her Acknowledgements, Gentle also credits the works of Alexandre Dumas. His influence is most evident in the scenes featuring the Rat nobility, which will feel familiar to fans of The Three Musketeers and Twenty Years After:

   There are many fascinating characters of all species in Rats and Gargoyles. Those among the Rats include Plessiez, the scheming Bishop; Charnay, his earthy henchwoman; Desaguliers, the harried Captain-General of the King’s Guard; and the King/s of the city him/themselves (eight pampered Rats permanently joined by their knotted-together tails).
   Rats and Gargoyles is not totally anthropomorphic, but there is more than enough in it to captivate the attention of Yarf!’s readers.
   This novel was originally published in July 1990 in Britain. The sequel, The Architect of Desire, has just appeared there (July 1991), but it features only the human characters.

		#18-9 / Jan 1992

2007 note: #18-19 was the only combined issue of YARF!


	Title:	K-9 Corps
	Author:	Kenneth Von Gunden
	Publisher:	Ace Books (New York, NY), Feb 1991
	ISBN:	0-441-09128-8
		229 pages, $3.95
	Availability:	Am / BN / Al / Pw

   This first volume in a new series of galactic exploration-team adventure novels is enjoyable reading. Ray and his talking scout dogs (shown in Jim Thiesen’s cover painting as Great Danes or Mastiffs, although Von Gunden avoids describing them except to frequently refer to them as “huge” or “immense”) are intelligent and likeable. So is almost everyone else except for the villains. The story reeks with macho good fellowship, dramatic action against the ferocious wildlife of frontier planets, and trailblazer versus bureaucrat conflict. A reference to telepathic smaller and more independent scout cats that served with special teams (pg. 81) hints at other anthropomorphic characters who may be introduced in the sequels.
   The writing and the action are generally good, on a scene by scene basis. The overall story, unfortunately, doesn’t make a lot of sense. Ray and his nine dogs are one of a number of scout teams that hire their services to corporations or to the Federation’s Planetary Colonization Bureau, to check out newly-discovered worlds and to verify whether they are suitable for terraforming and human settlement. It is implied that humans (and their bioengineered dogs and cats) are the only intelligent life in the known galaxy. Ray and his pals, and several more scout teams—a total of 137 explorers and scientists—are disturbed at the beginning of their new assignment because their contract to investigate Chiron virtually orders them to ‘discover’ that the planet has no intelligent life, and to ignore all evidence to the contrary. (Saying Dances With Wolves should let you guess the rest of the story.) Okay, this assumes that the government would be naïve enough to expect scientists and explorers—notoriously anti-authoritarian types—to “not notice” intelligent natives just because they’ve been ordered not to, even when the natives are throwing spears at them and trying to burn their base camps. Actually, the government isn’t that naïve, because it’s posted a military commando team to liquidate any explorer who disobeys the orders and mentions natives in his reports. Presumably the other scouts won’t notice this, or will blame the natives who they aren’t supposed to have noticed. Hmmm, just what kind of place is this Federation? Well, despite being a single galactic government with no apparent enemies, it seems to be heavily armed. Why? The military has to defend itself against the judiciary, while the judiciary has secret agents licensed to kill who are spying on the military, and both are scared to death of the executive… It’s an interesting galaxy, as long as you don’t mind some big lapses in logic.
   There’s one that relates directly to the dogs. Although they are described as equal in intelligence to humans—and Von Gunden does a fine job of showing them to be that smart, yet still possessing canine personality traits which make them distinct from humans—they all talk in a mild Bizarro English. “If Ray say so, we work with them, sure enuff.” “What we do?” “Is fun to chase antelopes once more.” “No, I on way to see Ray when saw you here. Thought I tell you first.” This leads to a touching moment on the next-to-last page when the dogs ask Ray to teach them better English. That’s a nice bit of character development, except that if you think about it, there’s no reason why the dogs shouldn’t have spoken normal English from the beginning. Nobody taught them to talk funny; their dialogue is just written that way. But Beowulf and the other dogs are such appealing mutts that readers must forgive the flaws in the writing for the opportunity to meet them.


	Title:	K-9 Corps: Under Fire
	Author:	Kenneth Von Gunden
	Publisher:	Ace Books (New York, NY), Aug 1991
	ISBN:	0-441-42494-5
		250 pages, $3.95
	Availability:	Am / BN / Al / Pw

   K-9 Corps II is more of the same. This time Ray Larkin, Beowulf, Grendel, Gawain, Tajil, and others—some of the same dogs as in the first novel, and some replacements for casualties, are sent to join the military compound on the planet Hephaestus in guarding the Federation prisoners sentenced to the ruby mines there. Simple—except for the riots of the miners, the attacks by the native predators, the treachery among the troops—and the very dangerous powers of the rubies themselves, rare gems capable of increasing the psi-powers of any sentient life… (back cover blurb)
   The dogs still talk funny. The independent scout cats make their appearance. They are more aloof and snotty, and their grammar is much more sophisticated, but otherwise they’re on a par with the dogs. The two teams get along like the Army and the Navy; there’s a lot of interservice rivalry during peacetime, but they work together smoothly once the action starts.
   One interesting change is that, as a result of the political fallout from the events in the first novel, it is revealed that the Federation government has been suppressing news of other intelligent species in the galaxy. So in the three years between the two novels, galactic civilization has evolved from humans-only to looking like the cantina scene from Star Wars.


	Title:	The Enchanted Cat (illustrated)
	Editor:	John Richard Stephens
	Publisher:	Prima Publishing & Communications (Rocklin, CA), Oct 1990
	ISBN:	1-55958-045-3
		246 pages, $12.95
	Availability:	Am / BN / Al / Pw

   This trade paperback has the look of a lavish literary/art anthology for cat lovers. But in addition to the poems about cats, and the writings by Hemingway and Poe and Twain and Kipling and Montaigne about cats, and the reproductions on almost every page of paintings of cats by such artists as Goya and Picasso and Toulouse-Lautrec and Renoir, there is an extensive coverage of the relationship of cats to fantasy. This includes cats in religion (cats as gods in various cultures), cats in folk tales, and cats in contemporary fantasy literature. This is a superb reference book for all who are interested in cats in mythology and folk culture through the ages, although it stops short of modern anthropomorphics.
   The typography and design of The Enchanted Cat suggest the gift books of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Although there are selections up through the 1980s, the emphasis is upon the works of Victorian and Edwardian authors and artists such as Arthur Rackham, Lewis Carroll, John Greenleaf Whitttier, Beatrix Potter, and their contemporaries. The editor seems to have an aristocratic disdain for modern popular culture. There are a few 19^th century cat cartoons by A. B. Frost and Theophile Steinlen, but the only 20^th century cat cartoons are book or magazine illustrations by George Herriman, Charles Addams, and Edward Gorey—with the exception of a single panel with a cat from Winsor McCay’s intellectually-acclaimed Little Nemo in Slumberland. You won’t find Krazy Kat, Felix the Cat, Sylvester P. Pussycat, or Garfield here.
   Here are some of the items which I found interesting: many photographs of Egyptian drawings and sculpture of divine cats or gods posing as cats; a 1799 star chart of the constellation Felis, part of an attempt by French astronomers J. E. Bodé and Joseph de Lalande to arrange stars they had discovered into new constellations (there was no public interest in the new constellations of stars invisible to the naked eye); an Italian version of Puss in Boots that predates Perrault’s more famous version by about 150 years; testimony from the July 1556 mass trial of “certain Wytches at Chensford in the Countie of Essex” that describe how witches receive cats from Satan to be their familiars; a spell cited at a 1665 witch trial to turn a witch into a cat and back again; the famous compilation of cat paintings of 19^th century artist Louis Wain, which grow increasingly abstract as Wain became progressively insane; and tidbits of folklore scattered throughout the book, such as that, for about twenty-five years in the mid-19^th century, the native guards at the Government House in Poona, India, saluted and addressed any cat seen near the front door after dark as “your Excellency” on the off-chance that it might be the reincarnation of Governor Sir Robert Grant, who died there in 1838. The Enchanted Cat contains plenty of material that will intrigue the readers of YARF!


	Article:	*The History of the Olympic Mascot*
	Author:	Andy Wodka
	Source:	The Olympian, Feb 1991 (vol. 17, no. 6), pp. 50-52
	Availability:	Am / BN / Al / Pw

   The modern international Olympic Games have become world-famous since 1896. But suddenly, since the 1980 Olympics in Moscow, it seems that every Games has to have its own anthropomorphic mascot. Wodka’s brief article in the official magazine of the United States Olympic Committee tells how this tradition developed over the past twenty years. The first mascot was actually adopted by the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich (Waldi the Dachshund), but the mascots did not capture the public’s attention until the 1980 and 1984 Games were so heavily promoted by Misha the Bear and Sam the Eagle.
   The article lists and describes all eleven of the Summer and Winter Games mascots from Waldi to Cobi, the avant-garde dog mascot of the 1992 Summer Games in Barcelona. In most cases the designers are credited and some production history is given. For example, the Soviet government put a committee of artists to work to design its mascot, and created a whole biography for him that was generally considered unnecessary and ignored. (Misha the Bear’s full name is Mikhail Patapych Toptygin.)
   The Olympic mascots have become omnipresent every four years on posters and enameled pins, but it’s difficult to find much background information about them, or about how the characters’ designers and names are selected. This article should answer most questions. Unfortunately, there are only a few illustrations, and they are of some of the best-known, recent mascots. A look at the earlier and more obscure characters would have been more interesting.

		#21 / Jul 1992


	Title:	Horse Fantastic
	Editors:	Martin H. Greenberg & Rosalind M. Greenberg
	Publisher:	DAW Books (New York), Dec 1991
	ISBN:	0-88677-504-3
		314 pages, $4.50
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DAW Books’ two Catfantastic anthologies must be successful, because now we have Horse Fantastic to the same formula. These are seventeen brand-new stories about fantastic horses: ghostly horses, demonic horses, talking horses, horses of the gods, extraterrestrial horses, horses that turn into people and people that turn into horses, horse statues that come to life, Biblical horses, and more, including one tale each of a unicorn and a pegasus. There are horses in urban New York City, horses on the racetrack, horses on the rodeo circuit, horses in primitive cultures, and horses in a variety of mythical lands. Mercedes Lackey has a new short story in her Kingdom of Valdemar setting, Stolen Silver; and Mary Stanton’s The Horse Boy brings her Courts of The One Hundred and Five to ancient Baghdad.
However, Horse Fantastic is more tenuously related to anthropomorphic literature than is Catfantastic. That series features more stories in which the cat is the protagonist or the motivator, or is characterized with human intelligence. Most of these Horse Fantastic stories feature humans as their main characters, who have some personal problem created or solved by an encounter with a benevolent or a malevolent magical horse. The horse may be the catalyst but most of the reacting is done by the human. Nancy Springer’s The Most Magical Thing About Rachel is the only story among the seventeen in which anthropomorphized horses play more than a bit role. Unless you choose to shelve Horse Fantastic along with Catfantastic as a set, you will have a hard time justifying keeping this in your anthropomorphic library. It is enjoyable reading, but it’s mostly not morph fiction.


	Title:	Cats in Space, and Other Places
	Editor:	Bill Fawcett
	Publisher:	Baen Books (Riverdale, NY), May 1992
	ISBN:	0-671-72118-6
		407 pages, $4.99
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   If anyone doubts that felinoids are the preferred animals of most s-f writers, just consider how many anthologies of cat s-f & fantasy stories there are compared to those which feature any other animal. Cats in Space contains sixteen stories and one poem, written from 1939 (A. E. van Vogt’s Black Destroyer) to the present. A couple appear to be published here for the first time, but most are reprints.
   Three (Fritz Leiber’s Space-Time for Springers, Ursula K. LeGuin’s Schrödinger’s Cat, and Cordwainer Smith’s The Game of Rat and Dragon) have already been included in Jack Dann’s & Gardner Dozois’s 1984 anthology Magicats!, but the other fourteen are new to an animal-theme s-f anthology.
   The book is divided into two sections. ‘Cats’ contains ten stories and the poem, about normal housecats or derivatives of them, such as the bioengineered, talking, space-going Kim in Fritz Leiber’s Ship of Shadows. ‘Alien Cats’ contains six stories about interstellar felinoids such as C. J. Cherryh’s hani, Anne McCaffrey’s Hrrubans, and Larry Niven’s kzin (in a story by Greg Bear & S. M. Stirling, The Man Who Would Be Kzin).
   The stories are mostly science-fiction, although there are a few magical fantasies. The second part cheats a bit in that Cherryh’s Chanur’s Homecoming is not really a story. It’s Chapter 12 from her novel of the same title. It’s dramatic, but if you haven’t already read the novel, you won’t have any idea as to what’s going on except that two factions of cat-people are shooting it out for control of a space station. It starts and ends on cliffhangers. It’s understandable that Fawcett would want to include something about the hani in this book, since they are one of the most charismatic felinoid alien species in all s-f, but this fragment is merely confusing by itself.
   A couple of other stories are also cheats in that the cats are very minor characters. David Drake’s Bullhead is a fantasy about an early 19^th-century frontiersman warlock who happens to have a talking-cat familiar in his cabin. The cat, who talks with a hillbilly accent, appears in only two brief scenes in the forty-page story. (The warlock’s talking mule has a much larger role.) Robert A. Heinlein’s Ordeal in Space uses a kitten trapped on a 35^th-floor window ledge to force the ex-spaceman protagonist to reminisce about the space trauma that wrecked his career, and force him to overcome his fear of heights. The cat itself is barely in the story. As usual, this criticism is not aimed at the quality of the stories; they are fine. They are just not really cat stories.
   But since they are good reading, and since the book does contain many good short stories about anthropomorphized cats (and a few other animals), it is definitely recommended. Other highlights besides those named are Cordwainer Smith’s The Ballad of Lost C’mell and Fredric Brown’s Mouse. Morph fans will also appreciate Dean Morrissey’s humorous cover painting of two alley cats about to blast off in a rocket ship constructed out of junk. If this ever becomes available as an art print, it will be on most morph fans’ walls within weeks.

		#22 / Jan 1993


	Title:	The Ancient Solitary Reign
	Author:	Martin Hocke
	Graphics:	Illustrations by Shirley Barker; map by Ursula Sieger
	Publisher:	Trafalgar Square (North Pomfret, VT), Jul 1990
	ISBN:	0-246-13469-0
		358 pages, $21.95
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   This British anthropomorphized nature novel features owls. Young Hunter is hatched into a woodland Barn owl community where a peaceful adolescence gives him the feeling that he is living in a settled, serene world—the “ancient, solitary reign” of Barn owl society from time immemorial. Alas, his world is just about to become engulfed by every disaster known to British owldom.
   Man’s spreading urban development destroys the forest. The Barn owls are squeezed into the same territory as the Tawny owls and the Little owls, forcing the species into conflict for living space. Reckless hunters render the remaining woods unsafe. Dangerous pesticides make eggs infertile. The Barn owls dissent among themselves over how to react to these threats. Winger, a fanatically socialistic owl, stirs up enough discontent against the conservative council to replace them as the leader. But are his revolutionary ideas really solutions, or will they lead the owls into greater peril? Hunter is a reluctant hero whose sense of duty leads him into one adventure after another against his community’s enemies. But the greater his successes are, the harder he is pressured to support one faction or the other. It begins to seem inevitable that Hunter’s greatest danger will come from the Barn owls’ own politicians.
   Barn owls are by nature more solitary than most British mammal or bird species. This has made it a challenge to bring them together in a community that is anthropomorphic enough for interesting character interaction, yet still depicts their particular attributes with realism. Hocke’s society of the ancient solitary reign is imaginative enough that it is intriguing even if not entirely convincing. The story keeps introducing new surprises every few pages, which are individually dramatically justified but eventually prime the reader to feel, “It’s about time for the plot to swing in another unexpected direction,” and it does.
   The Barn owl’s normal dialogue is good, but an unfortunate attempt to distinguish between the other owl species and classes by assigning them different accents is much too artificial. They read like parodies of upper- and lower-class British accents and American accents. And while the dialogue is usually clever, it is not always convincing. Hunter is introduced with his brother and sister as fledglings in the nest. They take for granted being fed by their parents, until the day that their mother tells them that they must start to learn the way that Barn owls live “by a process we call education.” Hunter’s sister asks whether this education will consist of only theory or actual practice. That’s a pretty sophisticated question for an infant.
   Still, considering how many novels are populated by characters who act unbelievably stupidly, it’s a change to find one where the characters seem to be more intelligent than they should be.
   Hocke also tends to lapse into florid prose, especially when concluding a chapter. “But [Hunter] did not want to disturb Steeple or his mother and knew that he must gather all his strength to face yet another journey fraught with the danger and excitement that had so quickly become the essence of his hitherto sheltered and innocent young life.” This is ironic considering that one of the more ridiculous owls is the pompous and posturing Bardic, whose sonorous epics of Barn owl history put everyone to sleep.
   Despite these small flaws, The Ancient Solitary Reign is a suspenseful and often brutal drama which incorporates most of the instincts and attributes of Barn owl life. This Trafalgar Square imprint is not so much an American edition as an American marketing of the original May 1989 British edition by Grafton Books.

		#23 / Mar 1993

These novels are all sequels to novels reviewed in previous issues of Yarf!


	Title:	The Children’s Hour
	Author:	Jerry Pournelle & S. M. Stirling
	Publisher:	Baen Books (New York, NY), Nov 1991
	ISBN:	0-671-72089-9
		316 pages, $4.99
	Availability:	Am / BN / Al / Pw

   This new “novel of the Man-Kzin Wars” takes place forty-two years after the ferociously predatory tiger-like kzin conquered the human colony world of Wunderland, and began using it to launch invasion fleets against the Solar System. A commando mission is finally sent to Wunderland, to sabotage the latest kzinti fleet and, if possible, to start or support a human resistance movement against the kzin overlords. Good guys and bad guys are found on both sides. The commandos’ assassination target is a charismatic ‘noble enemy’ kzin commander who is more admirable than many of the human low-life types that the commandos have to work with.
   The Children’s Hour was first published as two separate stories in the Man-Kzin Wars anthologies, as was the previous novel reviewed in Yarf! The two halves of Cathouse were better integrated into a single novel. The Children’s Hour remains two obviously separate stories stuck together, with a completely new alien menace, the thrint, appearing unexpectedly halfway through the book to threaten both the humans and the kzin.
   Morph fans will be intrigued by the portrait of the kzin sociology, and how the kzin rulers on Wunderland interact with their conquered human servants. The giant felinoid warriors were originally described by Larry Niven as so touchy, proud, and viciously argumentative that it seemed unlikely that they could work together to build an interstellar civilization. Jerry Pournelle & S. M. Stirling have developed a plausible description of how the kzin culture works. The title refers to the revelation as to how the kzin raise and train their feral young. The telepathic, mind-controlling thrint are also fascinatingly non-human, but they are not depicted in as much colorful detail.


	Title:	Catamount
	Author:	Michael Peak
	Publisher:	New American Library/Roc Books (New York, NY), Mar 1992
	ISBN:	0-451-45141-4
		282 pages, $4.99
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   Peak’s second fantasy is again set in the dry foothills around San Diego, California. Sarena, the young puma who was a supporting character in Cat House, is a major character here, but the rest of the cast is brand new.
   Catamount repeats Peak’s formula of switching between three simultaneous stories, two starring animals and one featuring humans; all of them blending animal-fantasy mythology with realistic Southwestern zoology. Sarena is a lone mountain lion wandering through the semi-arid countryside. Pumas are naturally solitary predators, but Sarena has never seen another of her species. She is now old enough to seek a mate. She gains an unlikely companion when she meets Lanakila, a bald eagle driven far from his natural territory. The two team up for their mutual advantage.
   Eight large dogs escape from a kennel where guard dogs are trained. They form a wild pack led by Grash, a German shepherd. Peak gives a sympathetic picture of the potentially dangerous but bewildered dogs trying to live off the land. But there is not enough game for them and the better-adapted coyotes. It appears as though the dogs are either headed for a tragically fatal confrontation with Sarena and Lanakila, or they will be forced to raid suburban back yards and eat pet dogs and cats, which is sure to bring the police and their eventual extermination. Peak keeps the reader guessing whether this fate can be avoided.
   Laura Kay is a reporter for the San Diego Union who covers a report that the California Department of Fish and Game is about to issue 250 permits for trophy-hunting of mountain lions, and that animal-rights activists plan to disrupt the Department’s meeting. She also gets involved with the story of the feral dog pack terrorizing the foothill suburbs, and she learns that Fish & Game is also after some ruthless poachers. As she investigates these stories, she becomes romantically involved with Keith Gallatin, a rock-star environmental activist who has a more-than-natural rapport with animals. Peak makes a pretense at presenting the environmental issue sympathetically but objectively. But it’s clear that the worst of the animal-lovers are merely embarrassingly overenthusiastic but harmless, while the pro-hunters and NRA activists all come across as gun-nut sadists who just love to blow away innocent wildlife and endangered species.
   Catamount is simplistic as propaganda, and Peak resorts too often to dei ex machina to get his protagonists out of the desperate situations into which he casts them. But there are some interesting anthropomorphic characters, even among the villainous coyotes.

		#24 / May 1993

These are more sequels to novels reviewed in past issues of Yarf!


	Title:	Mariel of Redwall
	Author:	Brian Jacques
	Illustrator:	Gary Chalk
	Publisher:	Hutchinson Children’s Books (London, UK), Oct 1991
	ISBN:	0-09-176405-X
		387 pages, £12.99
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   This fourth Redwall novel also follows its author’s formula. We learn that Redwall, the forest abbey where all animals live in peace, is near the seacoast. Mariel, a tomboyish young mousemaid, is brought to Redwall for healing after she has escaped from Gabool the Wild, the dread Lord of Terramort Island, King of the Searats, Warlord of all Rodent Corsairs, Captain of Captains (pg. 5). Gabool’s pirates captured her father’s ship and killed or tortured everyone, and Mariel is determined to return to Terramort and slay Gabool in revenge. Meanwhile, Gabool is going mad and has begun to kill his own officers, whom he suspects of plotting against him. Greypatch, captain of the Darkqueen, decides to desert with his rat-crew, give up the sea, capture Redwall, and live as robber barons with the peaceful animals as their slaves.
   Once again the novel splits into two parallel adventures, one involving a heroic quest and the other set at Redwall. Mariel is joined by the handsome mouse warrior Dandin, the witty rabbit troubador Tarquin, and the stolid young hedgehog Durry Quill. They have numerous near-fatal escapades with quicksand bogs, treacherous toads, a giant lobster, and similar dangers as they decipher the cryptic map that shows the way to Terramort. Meanwhile, Greypatch’s scurvy gang is a laughable menace when compared to the evil armies that besieged Redwall in the earlier novels, but it is now many generations after the days of Martin the Warrior. The current inhabitants of Redwall are totally unfamiliar with having to defend themselves. Abbot Bernard quickly bars the strong walls against the swaggering rats, but how long can the naïve animal peasants and children stand against the sadists who know all the tricks of dirty warfare?
   Mariel of Redwall stands on its own better than the third novel did, and it is a good one with which to start the series. But it does have a couple of annoying aspects. Nobody expects the villains to win, but the ghost of Martin the Warrior keeps appearing so often to help the heroes that there is virtually no suspense. And you need a thick dictionary of British dialects to follow the dialogue, what with the “Harr, shiver me timbers, matey” speech of the searats, the “I say, old chap, wot ho, pip pip, wot bally rot” of the rabbits, and the “Hurr aye, doant ‘ee worrit, owd lad” of the moles and hedgehogs.


	Title:	K-9 Corps: Cry Wolf
	Author:	Kenneth Von Gunden
	Publisher:	Ace Books (New York, NY), Feb 1992
	ISBN:	0-441-42495-3
		250 pages, $3.99
	Availability:	Am / BN / Al / Pw

   K-9 Corps III reads as though it were written by Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes fame. It opens with space scout Ray Larkin, his human partner Ake Ringgren, and their talking bioengineered scout dog team buying a fancy luxury space yacht with the treasure they found in the second novel. They are just blasting off to return to Earth when they are attacked by a government battle cruiser and five single-pilot fighters, with all atomic cannon and lasers blazing! Oh, no! So there’s this spectacular space battle with the spaceships zipping and zooming around each other, shooting rays and missiles and space torpedoes; and of course the troopers’ shots all miss while our heroes’ shots are all dead hits. Better yet, the space yacht turns out to have anthropomorphic weapons! Its robot missiles and torpedoes must’ve been programmed by a fan of centuries-old Earth movies like Dr. Strangelove and Dark Star. They spout lines like, “I am proud to report that I am fully operational and prepared to execute my instructions,” and, “Open wide, Mama, this cowboy’s home from the range!” as they home in on the Federation’s fighters. (Don’t ask if there’s any reason for this battle; just lookit how exciting it is!)
   That’s in the first two chapters. The story goes downhill from there, after they arrive back on Earth and immediately have to fight all the military warlords and the killer punk biker gangs and the crime bosses who rule the cities, and the giant crocodiles and slavering bears in the sewers under the ruins of New York City, and the carnivorous multi-trunked elephant-squid, and the…
   And the scout dogs still talk funny. Somehow their “We love you, Ray! You our Man! We die for you!” dialogue isn’t as endearing as it was in the first novel. It’s gotten old; it’s a schtick that’s worn out and needs to be replaced by something fresh. An endless succession of battles with increasingly exaggerated menaces isn’t it.

		#25 / Jul 1993


	Title:	K-9 Corps: The Last Resort
	Author:	Kenneth Von Gunden
	Publisher:	Ace Books New York, NY), Jan 1993
	ISBN:	0-441-42496-1
		252 pages, $4.99
	Availability:	Am / BN / Al / Pw

   This fourth volume in the K-9 Corps series is the best so far. It’s still nonstop action with little depth, but the drama flows more smoothly and plausibly.
   Ray Larkin, Ake Ringgren, and their team of genetically enhanced talking scout dogs are wandering through 24(?)th-century galactic civilization, which is reeling after the interstellar civil war that led to the fall of the corrupt Terran Federation. The Last Resort begins with the team accidentally saving the life of one of the galaxy’s richest businessmen. In gratitude, he offers to take them as guests to Neverland, the most luxurious, adventurous, exclusive, and expensive resort planet imaginable, which he owns. Can you say Westworld and Jurassic Park, boys and girls? It’s obvious to the experienced team that something is wrong on Neverland even before they land. However, they assume it’s just some minor larcenous enterprise of dishonest employees, which they can easily expose. But it turns out to be much more deadly than that. Soon Our Heroes are fleeing from a planetful of robotic war machines, scientifically resurrected carnosaurs, licensed-to-kill secret agents, and take-no-prisoners commando teams, all out to exterminate them before they can escape offplanet to reveal what they have learned. (But no ninjas. How did he miss throwing in ninjas?)
   Seriously, the progression of the mystery from light-hearted detective work to Oh shit, we’re in real trouble! discovery is nicely handled. The action is choreographed less implausibly than in the third novel, so that it seems like a handful of Good Guys really might stand off a planetful of professional killers.
   More importantly, the dogs—Beowulf, Frodo, Mama-san, and the rest—have an improved role. In the first three novels, they seem to do little more than hero-worship their human ‘pack leaders’ and blindly obey orders. In The Last Resort, they seem more confident. The humans and dogs talk more as social equals, with the dogs joining in the macho good-buddy joshing between Ray and Ake. This gives them a stronger and more likeable personality, and better presents them as individuals rather than interchangeable extras. Also, their bizarro-speech is downplayed, so that it seems more like a colorful accent than an indication of a lack of education or an inferior status. These are encouraging developments. Let’s hope that Von Gunden continues to expand on them.


	Title:	The Nine Lives of Catseye Gomez
	Author:	Simon Hawke
	Publisher:	Warner Books/Questar (New York, NY), Oct 1992
	ISBN:	0-446-36241-7
		216 pages, $4.99
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   Simon Hawke likes to surprise his readers. This novel is a spin-off of his six-volume Wizard of… series, which began with The Wizard of 4^th Street in 1987 and may have ended with The Wizard of Santa Fe in 1991. It is set in the 23^rd century, which looks like today’s world except that magic has replaced technology. In the first novel, a group of sorcerous vigilantes comes together to battle a cult of foul necromancers who prey on humanity. The necromancers scatter, and the good wizards have to track them down individually in London, Hollywood, Paris, et cetera. In The Wizard of Santa Fe, they seemingly kill the final necromancer, although there are still some loose ends. One item that did not appear to be a loose end was the appearance of a tough alley cat with magically enhanced human intelligence and speech, who helps the wizards. Catseye Gomez was a colorful character, but his role was not large enough to make the novel stand out as ’morph fiction.
   Now Gomez is back, starring in a novel of his own. He’s wandered from Santa Fe to Denver, where he immediately gets involved in a mundane murder mystery. Because Gomez is a Mickey Spillaine fan. It seems that 20^th-century popular literature is still big in the 23^rd century, and Gomez’s hero is Mike Hammer, the tough-guy private eye. So he’s not about to stay uninvolved when an investigative reporter is murdered—a reporter who owns a sexy calico cat whom Gomez is interested in.
   Gomez and Princess are by no means the only talking animals in the novel. The 23^rd century is full of intelligent dogs, horses, and other pets magically enhanced for rich owners. (Also unicorns and some grotesquely ‘cute’ fantasy hybrids that shouldn’t have been tried.) But the intelligent animals are now demanding civil rights. New social problems are being created. Can a pet bring suit against an abusive owner? If an owner tires of an intelligent pet and throws it out, what should happen to it? You can’t just put an intelligent animal to sleep at the local pound (well, you legally still can, but not even the most callous bureaucrat would dare order that), and the city can’t feed them indefinitely. Can you even lock up or neuter an intelligent animal against its will? The reporter was investigating the newly-formed Equal Rights for Animals (ERA) movement, which is trying to get a bill onto the Colorado ballot in the next state elections, when she was car-bombed. Is someone involved with the movement guilty? Or did the reporter have other enemies who are trying to use the ERA as a scapegoat? The police are investigating, but no PI worth his trench coat would leave a case like this to the bulls, especially when an alley cat can go places and snoop where no human can.
   The Nine Lives of Catseye Gomez is more than a regular murder mystery with a talking-cat investigator. The ERA angle gives it a much wider ’morph connection. The background depicts how human urban society is being modified by the presence of intelligent, but not otherwise anthropomorphized, animals in its midst. For example, many of the animals are cynical over the fact that, whether they win legal rights or not, they’ll always be dependent upon humans’ goodwill for their homes and meals, since animals without hands can’t do much for themselves. Gomez is one of the few talking animals who is willing to revert to ‘wild’ nature to preserve his independence, eating garbage from trash cans and killing mice to devour them raw, instead of getting nauseated by anything cruder than packaged pet food.
   However, Hawke does have a writing problem that makes the novel hard to start. He always begins each story in a series with a summary of what has gone before. Since Catseye Gomez is the seventh set in his magical 23^rd century, the book opens with a tremendous expository lump. The plot doesn’t really start to move until page 36. Stick it out, because it’s worthwhile reading after that point.

		#26 / Sep 1993


	Title:	Son of Spellsinger
	Author:	Alan Dean Foster
	Publisher:	Warner Books/Questar (New York, NY), Apr 1993
	ISBN:	0-446-36257-3
		376 pages, $5.50
	Availability:	Am / BN / Al / Pw

   Fans of Foster’s Spellsinger series can rejoice! Six years after The Time of the Transference, which Foster had said would be the final Spellsinger story because he had used up the plot potentials of that funny-animal world, a seventh novel has finally appeared.
   (Curiously, the advance publicity for this novel, including photographs of its cover in ads just before its release, clearly showed the title as Son of a Spellsinger. Did somebody at Warner Books decide at the last minute that the obvious allusion was too risqué?)
   The first six Spellsinger novels related the adventures of Jon-Tom Merriweather, a young human wanna-be rock singer who was magically transported into a world shared by humans and talking, clothes-wearing funny animals. Because music has magic powers, Jon-Tom was drafted as the reluctant aide to Clothahump, the turtle wizard, who sent him to combat various menaces that threatened to destroy or enslave this whole world. Jon-Tom made several friends (notably Mudge, the rascally otter) and formed attachments (notably Talea, a human girl). In what was originally the final novel, he decided to remain in this world instead of returning home.
   Since The Time of the Transference was intended to be the last story, Foster wrapped up all the loose ends and closed it with a happily ever after finale. To keep from reneging on this, Son of Spellsinger takes place eighteen years later, and it stars the children of Jon-Tom and Talea, and of Mudge and his wife. Jon-Tom’s son Buncan, and Mudge’s son and daughter Squill and Neena, are restless adolescents, bored with the lazy life that their parents are content with. When a sloth merchant comes to tell about a legendary fabulous treasure to which a dying fox mercenary gave him a clue, the adults aren’t interested in leaving home to help find it. Buncan, Squill, and Neena see this as their opportunity to have an Adventure, and they sneak away to make the most of it.
   Son of Spellsinger features the same sort of picaresque wanderings as in the previous novels. The human and otter teenagers are constantly in danger as they travel from one new animal community to the next. The menaces that they encounter include a band of hound robbers, a woodchuck wizard, a mink nobleman who kidnaps and tries to ravish Neena, a tribe of murderous meerkat desert raiders, and an evil religious cult (the species is supposed to be a surprise) that is conducting unholy experiments to create new kinds of animals to be their zombie slaves. The three teens also meet new friends: Gragelouth, the sloth merchant who is slow but not stupid; Snaugenhutt, a once-mighty rhinoceros warrior who has become a drunken bum; and Viz, Snaug’s exasperated tickbird squire who has been trying to reform him.
   The novel is fun. Unfortunately, it does not quite measure up to its predecessors. The changes that Foster has made in his formula have weakened it. The earlier novels thrust Jon-Tom, Mudge, and their various companions into desperate quests to save the world. It’s true that this began to feel very stereotyped by the end, but it did give the stories a greater thrill of impending doom than the misadventures of three teen runaways just bumming around. Although the three are often in personal deadly danger, there is always the feeling that they can end their problems just by turning around and going home. Jon-Tom was a more likeable protagonist for the reader to identify with than his shallow, know-it-all, rebellious son. Squill and Neena are more frenetic versions of their otter parents; but while Mudge was often rash, he was not completely foolhardy. Finally, Foster has tried to update the musical magic by making Buncan, Squill and Neena wanna-be rap singers. The problem here may be with me rather than the novel, because I don’t pretend to like rap music, but somehow Foster’s rapping doesn’t seem as convincing as his rocking.
   However, these flaws are only minor and in comparison with the other Spellsinger books. Son of Spellsinger is still delightfully entertaining.


	Title:	Forests of the Night
	Author:	S. Andrew Swann
	Publisher:	DAW Books (New York, NY), Jul 1993
	ISBN:	0-88677-565-5
		284 pages, $3.99
	Availability:	Am / BN / Al / Pw

This is an incredibly suspenseful thriller. To oversimplify for the sake of an easy comparison, it’s like BladeRunner with the future society’s Replicants replaced by ’morphs—from the viewpoint of the ’morphs. It depicts a mid-21^st-century America full of new slang, new high-tech crimes, and new world tensions, but also some very old hatreds and passions. There’s always going to be a downtrodden minority, and this time it’s the ’morphs. But is this just basic human nature, or is somebody deliberately manufacturing a suicidally explosive clash here?
Swann (the name in the copyright statement is Steven Swiniarski) does an excellent job of presenting a future that has evolved enough to be exotic, but is still familiar enough to be comprehensible. Cryptic references seem at first to be just to build up the colorfully futuristic ambience, but they gradually connect to clarify each other and advance the plot. The clearer it is, the more ominous it becomes.

   American ghettos are filled with ‘moreaus’, most of whom are ex-soldiers biodesigned to fight in a spate of foreign wars about twenty-five years earlier, who poured into the U.S. during peacetime until immigration of non-humans was shut off. Nohar Rajasthan is a young, American-born, cynical private investigator of tiger stock. He has played it safe by handling cheap moreau cases exclusively, and not getting involved in ‘pink’ (human) affairs. Then a mysterious client offers Nohar more money than he can afford to refuse, to look into the murder of the campaign manager of an influential Ohio Congressman, who has inexplicably brought pressure to have the police investigation shelved.
   The murder-mystery aspect of the novel is well developed. Nohar is led to increasingly dangerous complications, such as a rat street gang pushing a new, scientifically sophisticated deadly drug; and interference from both local and federal investigators who have their own rivalry, one of whom is an illegally biogenetically-altered human. But the deadliest twist of all is entirely Nohar’s own fault, because he knows that a moreau must never, never get emotionally involved with a pink woman.
   The story is well worth reading on this level alone. ’Morph fans will also appreciate all the tossed-off glimpses of what this moreau society is like, such as a rabbit-owned bar named Watership Down.

If there are any essential novels for a ’morph fan’s library, Forests of the Night is one of them.

		#27 / Nov 1993


	Title:	Dinotopia; A Land Apart from Time
	Author:	James Gurney
	Illustrator:	The author
	Publisher:	Turner Publishing (Atlanta, GA), Sep 1992
	ISBN:	1-878685-23-6
		159 pages, $29.95
	Availability:	Am / BN / Al / Pw

   Artist James Gurney is well known in the SF field for his cover paintings to SF and fantasy paperback novels. He is also known to the readers of National Geographic Magazine for his artistic recreations of lost civilizations. Now he has combined both his specialties in a tour de force which is deservedly a national best-seller. Dinotopia evokes the 19^th-century literary wonder of Vernean SF, illuminated with the artistic splendor of a Doré or a Rackham.
   Dinotopia is written as the travel diary of Professor Arthur Denison, a Victorian-era explorer who is shipwrecked with his young son Will on a large unknown island. They find a civilization of humans and dinosaurs living in harmony. Since this is a fictional travel diary, the emphasis is less on story or action than on Prof. Denison’s scholarly notes and sketches. There are full-color paintings on virtually every page, including numerous double-page panoramas of Dinotopia’s forests, cities, and street scenes.
   Some among the general public may superficially consider Dinotopia little more than a variant of Alley Oop or The Flintstones, with better art. ’Morph fans should be aware of the significant difference that this is not a land of humans with domesticated dinosaurs, but a society in which humans and intelligent dinosaurs live as equal partners. There is apparently some debate as to whether Dinotopia should be considered anthropomorphic, because the dinosaurs are not designed as funny animals. There are degrees of anthropomorphism. Suppose that you were developing a world in which most* mammals were equally intelligent and willing to live and work together; humans, horses, dogs, elephants, deer, pgs, etc—but were not otherwise any more anthropomorphized than they are in reality. How would you design a common language for so many different mouth forms and vocal chords? What would a written alphabet look like that must be used by many species with hooves or paws but no hands? What would houses, public buildings, furnishings, or sanitary facilities look like for so many different body types? This is certainly a scenario that should interest Yarf!’s readers.
   Gurney’s human-dinosaur civilization is richly and intriguingly depicted, eve if its practicality seems idealistically utopian. Denison’s diary runs from November 1862 until, apparently, late 1866. It covers four years’ worth of touring the small continent’s forests, farms, cities, schools, government buildings, industries, health facilities, transportation and communication networks, cultural events, and so forth; but there is not one word about the less pleasant social services—police, courts, prisons, armies. Can everyone among all the species, even the intelligent Tyrannosaurii, be so reasonable and good-natured? There is not even a fire-fighting agency mentioned, despite one city, Volcaneum, being located next to an apparently active volcano; and another, Treetown, being totally constructed of wood.
   Although this is a pseudo-scientific journal, there are some personalities in it. Prof. Denison is happily willing to spend years compiling his notes, which he vaguely expects to eventually bring back to Boston’s learned societies. Will, twelve years old when they are shipwrecked, is growing up to become a Dinotopian. A romance develops between him and Sylvia, a teen-aged human native; and he dreams of becoming a Skybax rider, one of the elite couriers who fly upon pterosaur partners between the island’s cities. The first person whom the Denisons meet is a young female Protoceratops, Bix, “one of the few dinosaurs who can ‘speak’ human languages.” (That is, one of the few saurians whose vocal chords can produce human speech. The humans and dinosaurs have become accustomed to each other’s languages, and Bix helps the Denisons to comprehend the meanings within the reptilian grunts and squeaks.) Bix becomes the Denisons’ friend and personal guide. Most other individuals, human or saurian, are met only in passing, such as “a distinguished Stenonychosaurus named Malik, the timekeeper for all of Dinotopia.”
   Dinotopia describes the Victorian present of this fabulous land. A sequel, The World Beneath, scheduled for fall 1995 publication, will present Prof. Denison’s findings in the island’s subterranean caverns, which (it is hinted) contain the secrets of man’s prehistoric arrival upon Dinotopia and the development of this unique civilization. Gurney’s imaginative tale may not be standard funny-animal fiction, but it is definitely of interest to intelligent fans of anthropomorphics.

* Only ‘most’, not all, since there should conveniently be some dumb animals for the carnivores to feed upon without disturbing their intelligent neighbors.

   The editors of Yarf! have suggested that it would make a nice change of pace from the usual book reviews to begin 1994 with a preview of the ’morph comics scene for this year. Okay! The ’morph comics publishers have been contacted, and here are their replies.
   ’Morph comicsdom is, broadly speaking, mirroring the general comics industry. There are the Big Two publishers—Antarctic Press and MU Press—and a number of other publishers with only a couple of ’morph titles each.
   The larger of the Big Two is Ben Dunn’s Antarctic Press, in San Antonio. Antarctic is producing more anthropomorphic titles than any other publisher, and it also has a large line of manga-influenced comics. Antarctic’s ’morph comics fall into two categories: those edited by the publisher, and those packaged by outside editors.
   Those edited directly by Antarctic Press include primarily their short-story anthology titles. Furrlough, Wild Life, and Genus usually contain from four to six items per issue. These comprise short stories, episodes of serials, collections of pin-up pages, or previews of new Antarctic comics and other ’morph-related news, such as flyers for the ConFurence convention or ads for ’morph cartoonists’ art-print folios. This has the disadvantage of filling the issues with lots of advertising, but the advantage of making these comics a good survey of the entire ’morph marketplace.
   Furrlough is Antarctic’s flagship title, with thirteen issues to date. It began as a venue for ’morphic military stories, and it still contains a preponderance of these, although its policy has broadened to include ‘high adventure’ tales of all sorts. There have been theme issues for fantasy and for space opera. Editor Shon Howell says that he personally would like to schedule more theme issues, but the creators are happier when they have total freedom to write and draw whatever they want instead of being constrained to work within a particular theme. Furrlough’s most popular series is Ted Sheppard’s Stosstrupp, following the exploits of a German sniper platoon on the Russian front in a new Eurasian war in 2028 A.D. Joe Rosales started a Roman Legion series set during the last days of the Roman Republic in Furrlough’s early issues which was extremely popular, but Rosales hasn’t had time to finish any new stories since issue #6—a situation which his fans hope will soon change.
   Wild Life and Genus have been typecast as Antarctic’s comedy short-story titles, although it’s more accurate to say that they cover everything that won’t fit into Furrlough. There’s certainly nothing comical about Kjartan Arnôrsson’s Mink in Genus, a black magic/horror serial. But it’s true that most of the stories in these two titles revolve around light, humorous situation-comedy scenarios. Wild Life contains the more G- and PG-rated fare, while Genus gets the stories involving more mature situations. Wild Life has had four issues to date, and Genus has had three.
   Up to now, Furrlough has been bi-monthly and the other two have been quarterly. Antarctic is increasing the frequency starting in 1994; Furrlough is now monthly, and the other two are bi-monthly. Furrlough has also just reprinted its first issue, and a Furrlough Annual is in the works. Also, Antarctic published a one-shot, Hit the Beach, during summer 1993 which was similar to Wild Life and Genus. This sold well enough that there will be two issues of Hit the Beach during 1994, a swimsuit issue in July and (tentatively) a lingerie issue around the end of the year. Finally, Antarctic has a definitely-adults-only short-story title, Velvet Touch, which featured humans only during 1993. It may get some ’morph stories that are considered too strong for Genus during 1994.
   Those of Antarctic’s titles that are put together by creator-editors may be totally creator-produced, such as Steve Gallacci’s Albedo, or the creator may assemble the main contents and leave a few extra pages for Antarctic to fill with its advertising. Gallacci’s Albedo, featuring his popular Erma Felna, EDF military-political space-opera saga, has been Antarctic’s top-selling title up to now. Gallacci originally published Albedo under his own Thoughts and Images imprint; when it moved to Antarctic, it started over as Volume Two. It has just switched from black-and-white to color printing, and is beginning again as Volume Three, Number One. Antarctic is also publishing Command Review, the collected reprints of the Erma Felna stories without the other contents of Albedo. #4 recently appeared, and future issues should come out approximately quarterly.
   Albedo was Antarctic’s top-selling title, but Paul Kidd’s and Mike Sagara’s Tank Vixens has just shattered that record. Albedo has been selling around 4,000 copies per issue recently; the first issue of Tank Vixens, just out, having received orders for just over 6,000 copies. Tank Vixens was designed as a spoof on ’morph fandom’s three favorite hang-ups: sexy furry women, military action with big guns, and gonzo humor. Even the advertising in the issues is satirical. Kidd and Sagara designed Tank Vixens as a bi-monthly two-issue mini-series, although they have ideas for sequels if the title is popular—which it already seems to be.
   Mike Curtis’ Shanda the Panda is a soap opera featuring Shanda Bruin, the young manager of a movie theater in Cedar Rabbits, and her friends and associates—their lives, loves, and personal problems, including enough adult situations to make this a Mature Readers title. Shanda has had problems in finding a regular artist, but the current plan is that Michele Light will draw every other issue while other artists fill in the issues between hers. Curtis reportedly has his stories outlined up through issue #50 or so (the latest out is only #4).
   Carole Curtis (Mike’s wife) is the writer of Katmandu, drawn by Terrie Smith. This is an exotic melodrama set on a desert planet inhabited by warring cat-peoples, with romantic entanglements between the enemy species. Katmandu is scheduled as “at least” a three-issue mini-series (#2 has just appeared), which may be extended if sales warrant it.
   In Fred Perry’s Gold Digger, young fun-loving nympho human archaeologist Gina Diggers and her adopted sister Cheetah (actually a were-cheetah) roam the world looking for ancient treasures, most of which turn out to have ancient supernatural curses on them. In the earliest stories Cheetah appeared in her human guise most of the time, but by now she seldom bothers to turn back from her natural appearance as a furry cat-woman with a body-builder’s physique. Also, they have discovered so many hidden tribes of other animal peoples, both friends and enemies (and all with very sexy bods) that, at the moment, the ’morphs usually outnumber the human cast. Even the supernatural demons are usually furry. Gold Digger started out as short stories in Antarctic’s pre-’morph anthology comic, Mangazine, graduated to a four-issue mini-series, and now has its own monthly title that is up to #7.
   ’Morphs and manga mix in Antarctic’s bi-monthly American edition of Japanese fan-cartoonist Satoru ‘Ganbear’ Yamasaki’s Fantastic Panic. This is a light-hearted sword-and-sorcery romp in which the main characters are ’morphs based on the twelve animals of the Oriental Zodiac. Shon Howell says that Fantastic Panic is still coming out in Japan, so there’s no telling how long this title may run.
   In addition to these scheduled titles, Antarctic Press is always looking for new ’morph ideas, including either reprints or new material. Antarctic published a two-issue mini-series during 1993 of John Nunnemacher’s Buffalo Wings short stories from Yarf!, and Nunnemacher is now continuing this series in Wild Life. Dan Flahive started Space Wolf as a four-issue mini-series that was interrupted after #2 due to a medical emergency in his family; one hopes that Flahive will be able to finish the series during 1994. Kurt Wilken has a one-shot tentatively scheduled for March or April—Aztec Amazon Animal Women, consisting of theme short stories rather than a novel. Mike Curtis and Terrie Smith are preparing an outer-space series, Nautilus, which won’t start until the latter half of 1994. Other titles are in negotiations and it’s too soon to talk about them.
   During 1993, Shon Howell was Antarctic’s sole editor of its ’morph titles, with the assistance of several stalwarts such as Joe Rosales and Matt High. The workload has grown to the point that Joe Rosales has just been made the full editor of Wild Life and the titles being written by Mike and Carole Curtis, and they hope to get another assistant or two. It’s evident that Antarctic Press has a major commitment to publish anthropomorphic comics.
   The second of the Big Two ’morph publishers is Edd Vick’s MU Press in Seattle. Up through fall 1993, Vick was publishing a variety of comics (mostly but not exclusively ’morphic) almost single-handedly, with some assistance by Chuck Melville after he moved to Seattle in 1991. In late 1993, Vick made Melville the full editor of almost all of MU’s comics, but he also split the company into two imprints. MU Press is now the imprint for anthropomorphic comics exclusively, and the non-’morph titles are coming out under a new imprint, AEON Press, which Vick edits. Vick remains the publisher of the overall company.
   MU’s constant problem has been that most of its comics are labor-of-love projects by cartoonists whose daily jobs do not allow them enough spare time to draw them on a regular schedule. Dwight Decker’s popular swashbuckling melodrama, Rhudiprrt, Prince of Fur, has seen only two issues since 1991, #7 and the just-published #8, due to the resignation of the original artist and the sidetracking of more than one new artist by ‘real life’ commitments. Chicago animator Will Faust, the penciller of #7 and #8, has just become its sole artist. He will attempt to draw three or four issues of Rhudiprrt a year single-handedly, but his regular job of animating TV commercials often requires him to put in a twelve-hour day, so don’t be surprised if he continues to fall behind schedule.
   This problem has even overtaken Chuck Melville’s own Champion of Katara, a sword-and-sorcery three-issue mini-series. Melville wrote and drew the first two issues shortly after he settled in Seattle, but his increasing editorial work at MU has kept him from finishing the final issue. Frustrated readers of the first two issues can be reassured that #3 should definitely be published by summer 1994.
   That problem should not affect Vicky Wyman’s five-issue Xanadu mini-series, Xanadu: Across Diamond Seas, which has just begun monthly publication. Wyman’s story was completed over a year ago, so it’s just a matter of printing it each month through May. At least two more Xanadu sequels are probable if Diamond Seas and the recently-collected original novel, Xanadu: The Thief of Hearts, sell well enough.
   Of MU’s other ongoing ’morph titles, Cathy Hill’s Mad Raccoons is an annual scheduled for publication in time for the San Diego Comic-Con each August. The 1994 issue will be #4. Wild Kingdom, MU’s erratic and erotic ’morph anthology, will appear whenever they get enough short stories to fill an issue. The hope is that #3 will be out in May or June, and #4 by the end of 1994. Wild Kingdom #1 is currently in its third printing, by the way. Unfortunately, MU’s pin-up tile, Beauty of the Beasts, has not sold well enough to continue past last summer’s #2. A few pin-up pages will probably be added to each issue of Wild Kingdom, but it looks as though textless pin-up pages alone are not strong enough to sell a comic book.
   The Furkindred shared-world albums are being redesigned for a standard 32-page comic-book format, since the 100+-page graphic-album package and the increased production time that each required (#2 was published over a year ago) have tended to inhibit sales. The next title out will be a one-shot comic, Furkindred: Let Sleeping Dogs Lie, written by Dean Graf and drawn by Terrie Smith. This is a sequel to their short story, Just Another Day on the Farm, in the original Furkindred anthology, which was the most popular single story in this shared-world project so far. Chuck Melville describes the plot as, “Ian and Morgan, two human astral travelers who are stuck in furkin bodies, travel across the hostile Acostan southlands in search of an ancient treasure that just might mean a way home for them…” Sleeping Dogs should hit the comics shops in May or June, and it will be promptly followed by what would have been the third album, Furkindred: Ferret’s Wheel. This will appear as a five-issue monthly mini-series, probably beginning in early summer. The contributors will include Roy Pounds II, Dan Kaufman, Mark Ashworth, Gerald Perkins, Chuck Melville, Heather Hudson, and Gus Norman, among others. Ferret’s Wheel will lead directly into the fourth story-arc, starting the war between the Mathoka and the Acosta and their allies which has been developing since The Furkindred began; however, this next mini-series will not start until all of the contents are on hand, to ensure that there will be no delays between issues once publication has begun.
   In addition to these ongoing series, MU has many new titles in preparation. Individual schedules will vary with the individual artists, but in general MU will try to arrange these as mini-series of no more than three or four issues, and will wait until the series are completed before announcing them, to avoid the problem of excessive lateness between issues.
   The first issue of Lou Scarborough Jr.’s Dance of the Radio-Men should be published just about now. This is an offbeat mini-series scheduled for six to eight monthly issues. “Rachel Plympton is a television line producer for a superhero program who, in the process of saving her show and studio from being sold out from under her, herself becomes a ‘super-hero’. The series deals with the idea of imagination as both commodity and survival for the humans known as Teerithians. Rendered in traditional animation techniques, this is the first original concept-animation comic,” says Melville. This is a rather marginal ’morph title; it is set on Teerithia, an Earth-like planet whose people look roughly like the generic funny-animal background characters in Carl Barks’ Duck universe.
   Writer Paul Kidd is preparing Cyberkitties as a monthly mini-series of at least three issues, starting in June. Each will contain two to four stories, each drawn by a different artist. Chuck Melville, Tom Milliorn, Eric Blumrich, Toivo Rovainen, Pat Shuttlesworth, Monika Livingston, Mike Raabe, and Phil Morrissey have signed up so far. The Cyberkitties are Morgana, Alex, and Tammi, three cat-ladies who run The Cat-Byte Detective Agency and Pizza Delivery service in twenty-first-century corporate-controlled Seattle. Cyberkitties will commit satirical mayhem on cyberpunk (especially as depicted in the Shadowrun FRP games), vampire fandom, New Age shamanism, Political Correctness, pop-culture snobbery, street samurai, and whatever else Kidd and the artists decide to skewer.
   Steve Gallacci is working on two projects for MU. One is Birthright, a series of three graphic albums collecting his three-volume interstellar political melodrama which appeared in Fantagraphics’ Critters in the late 1980s. At the moment, Gallacci is checking into whether the original negatives can be obtained from Fantagraphics or Fantagraphics’ printer after so long. If they can, this will save considerable time and money. If they cannot and the original art must be re-photographed, Gallacci may take the opportunity to revise some pages that he was unhappy with, and the project will take longer in production.
   The second is Beatrix (working title), tentatively scheduled as a three-issue mini-series ‘by Steve Gallacci and Friends’. Readers of Gallacci’s Albedo and MU’s Wild Kingdom have already seen a couple of short stories featuring Beatrix Farmer, a young single rabbit-woman trying to find a steady job and boyfriend. Bea’s mundane problems become fantastic when prankish aliens turn her into a super-heroine, dressing her in a flashy invulnerable costume that she can’t ever take off. This event will be the focus of the book-length second issue, which is being drawn by Taral Wayne. The first issue will reprint the first two stories, with two or three others set before Bea gets her super-dress. The third issue will explore how being stuck inside an invulnerable costume affects Bea’s social life, as developed in another three or four short stories. The writers and artists include Gallacci, Taral Wayne, and Fred Patten for sure, with a couple of others currently expressing interest. Gallacci wants to have at least the first two issues completed before publication is scheduled, so don’t look for Beatrix before late ’94 or early ’95.
   Even though Chuck Melville’s Champion of Katara #3 is months behind schedule, plans are in the works for at least two future Katara mini-series. Melville has recently finished a separate novel in the Rowrbrazzle apa, Felicia: Melari’s Wish. This took five years to serialize. Melville will redraw a couple of the early pages to make the overall art style more consistent, and repackage the installments to fit into a standard comic-book format. MU should start its publication in late 1994. Melari’s Wish introduced the fox-sorceress Felicia, who was so popular with Rowrbrazzle’s readers that Melville found himself having to answer many questions about her background. Figuring that the general public will also want to know more about Felicia, Melville is writing a second, three-issue monthly mini-series, Felicia: Sorceress of Katara, to relate her early years. The artists for Sorceress of Katara will be Mike Raabe and Diana Vick, and the current plans are to publish this first, leading in to the later events in Melari’s Wish. Sorceress of Katara may begin in ate summer or early fall.
   Another series reprint from Rowrbrazzle is Vixen’s Keep, drawn by Mark Wallace and written by several of his friends in the Society for Creative Anachronism under their SCA court names. Medieval weaponry and clothing styles are guaranteed to be accurate. The Keep is an academy run by a determined feminist noblewoman to train ladies in the jousting arts, to prove that a lady can be more in this male-dominated aristocratic society than just a fainting damsel who needs her knight’s protection. Vixen’s Keep will be a single graphic album containing several short stories, some completely drawn by Wallace and others penciled by him and inked by Margaret Carspecken. Phil Morrissey will draw the cover. Publication is tentatively set for June or July.
   Several years ago, Steel Tiger Press published two issues of Menagerie, an anthology comic book. The most popular thing in it was a ’morph s-f adventure serial, Scarycat and Mousekanaut, written by Paula Shoudy and drawn by Mike Raabe. The two chapters won enough fans that there have been requests to continue the story with another publisher ever since Menagerie disappeared. The problem has been that neither the original art nor the negatives for the first two chapters were kept for a reprint, and no other publisher wanted to pick up a serial in mid-story. It has finally been agreed that Mike Raabe will both write and draw a one-shot which will summarize the first two chapters and complete the adventure. MU hopes to publish this Scarycat and Mousekanaut one-shot around summer 1994.
   Two mini-series which should start around the end of 1994 are The Adventures of Kitty Malone, by John Speidel, starring his feline adventuress who has appeared in short stories in various ’morph comics over the past decade; and Stellar Babe, by Phil Morrissey, relating the misadventures of his sexy space cadet who has only appeared in pin-up art until now. It has not been decided how many issues each of these may run.
   Edd Vick and Chuck Melville say that this includes all of MU’s plans for 1994 which are reasonably definite at this point. Paul Kidd has two more series that are nearing completion in the scripting stage: Fangs of K’aath, a 30-issue graphic-art serialization of his Arabian Nights-style text novel (MU’s recent Princess Karanam and the Djinn of the Green Jug one-shot was excerpted from Fangs); and Hive, a 12-issue melodrama set in a society of anthropomorphic bees, modeled upon medieval Japanese court intrigue. But they are having trouble finding artists for these. The problem is that Kidd wants both titles released as ongoing monthly comics, not broken up into several mini-series. MU is frankly not in a position at present to pay any artist to draw the number of issues in advance that are necessary to guarantee that these titles will come out reliably for at least several months, once they begin publication. (Are there any angels out there?) Finally, two as-yet-untitled one-shots are currently being negotiated: a story by Mike Kazaleh (an actual story, not a selection of art pages like Kazaleh’s other recent one-shots); and a collection of material by William Van Horn.
   Even though MU Press is much smaller than Antarctic Press, it still has dynamic plans to increase its production of anthropomorphic comics during 1994.
   One of the oldest ’morph-community independent publishers is Jim Groat, with his GraphXpress. Its stability always looks shaky, but it is coming up on its tenth anniversary soon. GraphXpress is currently publishing only one title, Red Shetland, a parody of sword-and-sorcery in general and of Marvel’s Red Sonja in particular. Groat says that Red Shetland #8 will probably be published in February 1994, and he hopes that #9 will be out in time for the San Diego Comic-Con in August. Number 8 is being scripted and drawn by Red’s co-creator, Richard Konkle, and it will conclude the current story-sequence in which Red, the mercenary warrior-maid, has been hired by the aristocratic Lady Mizbich to find the latter’s kidnapped husband. Number 9, written by Groat and Konkle and drawn by Terrie Smith, will start the sequence in which Red finally “is humbled by the steed who is my better” (which will release her from her vow of chastity)—and it’s not who most fans expect it will be.
   A tenth anniversary is also coming up for Stan Sakai’s Usagi Yojimbo, now appearing as a bi-monthly color title from Mirage Press. Sakai says that volume 2, #5 through #8 are scheduled for the first half of 1994. The current story-line features separate 20-page tales set during Usagi’s wanderings as a lone ronin through the medieval Japanese countryside. It will probably be another few months before Sakai starts planning the return of some of the regular supporting class, or another adventure spread over several issues. But there will be a three-issue serial, Battlefield, in the backup stories describing the rabbit ronin’s early life. Issues #6 through #8 ( March—July) will tell how Young Usagi reacted upon getting his first taste of warfare.
   The interstellar adventures of Usagi’s distant descendant, Space Usagi, are about halfway through their planned run. Space Usagi was designed as three three-issue bi-monthly mini-series, to be published by Mirage in rapid succession. Space Usagi II: White Star Rising #2 and #3 are currently finishing the middle sequence, and Space Usagi III #1 will begin in late spring or early summer. The overall adventure encompasses the betrayal of Space Usagi’s Shirohoshi (White Star) clan and the seizure of their castle by the villainous Kajitori (Firebird) Empire, and Usagi’s efforts to organize a popular resistance against the Kajitori and to train his murdered lord’s son, Prince Kiyoshi, to rally the clan to victory. Sakai says that there are discussions about making Space Usagi a regular ongoing comic book, after the third mini-series has ended, although if it has to be produced continuously, other writers and artists may be brought in to help share the workload.
   “How do you define an anthropomorphic comic?”, is as subjective a question as, “How do you define science fiction?” Opinions vary with personal tastes. Many fans don’t count the titles that feature only one or a small group of ’morphs living in an otherwise-human world. That would eliminate Biker Mice from Mars, Buster the Amazing Bear, Cerebus, Dinosaurs for Hire, Dream Weavers, and the original, Mirage-published Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
   But Archie Comics’ monthly Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures, a spinoff of the TV cartoons, has taken on a ’morphic life of its own. Credit goes to editor/writer Dean Clarrain, who has been developing an intricate and reasonably mature independent story line within the constraints of producing a kids’ funny-animal book, and to several other writers and artists (notably regular penciller Chris Allan) who know the fine distinction between funny animals and ’morphs. Over the past couple of years, an increasing group of animal characters has overwhelmed the original human supporting cast: Katmandu, the four-armed Himalayan tiger-warrior (good guy); Al’Falqa, the Saudi hawk-chieftain (good guy); Armageddon, the hyper-evolved shark-warlord from the future (villain); the Mighty Mutanimals (team of heroes); and numerous others—notably Ninjara, the female fox-ninja. Ninjara was introduced in TMNTA #28 while having been naïvely allied with a villain in Japan. The Turtles invited her to return with them to visit America. By issue #56 (the present), Ninjara seems to have become a permanent resident of the Turtles’ and Splinter’s New York sewer home, and she has discreetly but definitely become Raphael’s lover. Chris Allan often draws Ninjara in a manner that proves the adage that properly-designed clothes can be sexier than nudity. New details are slowly being given about Ninjara’s past and her heritage among a tribe of kitsune (Japanese fox people), which adds even more to TMNTA’s ’morphic atmosphere.
   About fifteen issues ago, the Turtles received a time-travel cry for help from their own future selves, in a late 21^st-century Earth far gone in ecological disaster. Their future selves would not reveal their personal futures to the present Turtles, but it was obvious that they had been severely battered (Raphael has lost an eye), that Splinter was no longer around, and that some tragedy had separated Raph and Ninjara. This has cast a somber mood over the present Turtles, and created an ongoing subplot in which they are constantly wondering whether there is anything they can do to change the future and avoid their own doom. This theme will feature prominently in the stories for 1994.
   Well-known cartoonists in our field who have worked on stories for TMNTA (including its spinoffs such as the quarterly TMNTA Special, or various three-issue mini-series like TMNT Presents: Donatello and Leatherhead), either recently published or due in 1994 include Mike Kazaleh, Ken Mitchroney, Garrett Ho, Bill Fitts, Mark Bodé, Gary Fields, Milton Knight, and Stan Sakai. Readers who assume that Archie’s TMNT Adventures is just another mindless juvenile funny-animal comic like Archie’s Sonic the Hedgehog or Harvey’s Woody Woodpecker should give it a try.
   Golden Realm Unlimited published its first comics around the middle of 1993, including the anthropomorphic Tall Tails #1, written by Jose Calderon and drawn by Daphne Lage. This takes place in the Kingdom of Lifdell, a fantasy land with a traditional D&D-style cast (warriors, wizards, healers, thieves, bards, etc.) battling the evil Trolls. Well, actually, the story seems to be starting with the old super-hero plot gimmick of Let’s Have the Heroes Mistakenly Fight Each Other, but presumably they’ll get back onto the track of the real villains soon. Golden Realm’s titles all also follow the current marketing trend of coming in three editions; a regular Readers’ Edition ($1.50 in Tall Tails’ case), a higher-quality Collector’s Edition with a different cover ($2.75), and a Gold Edition “limited to 500 copies, signed and numbered by the artists and writer and is sealed with a Certificate of Authenticity” (inquire for price).
   Daphne Lage has apologized for all of GRU’s second issues being late, which was due to their finding out the hard way how much work is involved in self-publishing independent comics, and how long it actually takes for the money to come in. “In a nutshell, there wasn’t enough money to print on schedule and we had to wait until we sold enough first issues before we could go to presses with the second.” This has caused missed deadlines, the need to delay further for resolicitation, etc. Tall Tails #2 should be out around now, and “the third issue will not be expected to ship until March 1994 at the earliest. We are hoping, with this policy” (waiting until a new issue is completely ready to be printed before announcing a publication date and soliciting orders), “to be able to come out on a regular monthly schedule (bi-monthly at worst).” Lage also sent information about GRU’s Dream Weavers, but that’s one of the titles featuring only a small group of ’morph super-heroes in an otherwise human universe (not counting all of the interdimensional horrific demons).
   Miami cartoonist Juan Alfonso has been producing a cute but naughty adult small-press booklet, X-Tra Spicy Tales, for the past couple of years. He is now upgrading it to a regular comic-book format, for publication by the independent Conquest Press. The new X-Tra Spicy Tales #1 will debut in February, with a 28-page story featuring the Cute Bears, X-rated parodies of the Care Bears. Number 2 will come out in time for the San Diego Comic-Con in August. Alfonso has also just published in December an eight-plate X-Tra Spicy Tales Portfolio of ’morph orgies in various fantasy settings.
   This concludes the news from those who replied to the request for information for this preview. As to other comics worth looking for—well, there are several whose publishers are not happy at having them categorized as ‘’morph comics’, but they are popular with most ’morph fans.
   Gladstone’s ongoing publication of the Disney comic books is making available again many classic stories by Carl Barks and Floyd Gottfredson and his writers, and excellent new stories by William Van Horn, Don Rosa, and some of the European Disney writers and artists. Gladstone is beginning Don Rosa’s epic 12-issue Life of Scrooge in Uncle Scrooge, which will take two years to complete. (This may be somewhat controversial, because there has been gossip that Carl Barks is not happy with the detailed life-story that Rosa has written for his character.) Readers also won’t want to miss the first American publication of a series of wonderfully witty and wacky fantasy tales starring Mickey and Goofy, written by Cal Howard and Greg Crosby and drawn by Jaime Diaz more than a decade ago for foreign sales. These were originally intended for publication as 44-page albums, but most (starting with Don’t Call Me Tut) will be serialized over three issues of Donald and Mickey.
   Reed Waller and Kate Worley’s ‘Omaha’, the Cat Dancer; Martin Wagner’s Hepcats; and Jeff Smith’s Bone. ’Nuff said, okay? All transcend mere ’morph popularity. They have been getting rave reviews throughout the comics field ever since they began, and if they aren’t enjoying the massive sales of the psychotic costumed heroes, they nevertheless seem to be financially secure enough that their publication is assured throughout 1994 (barring personal emergencies befalling the creators, like Reed Waller’s recent cancer—which, it seems, was caught in time).
   On the other hand, what about the comic-book spinoffs of current trendy TV cartoons featuring animal characters, which are theoretically aimed at the discerning satire-appreciating public rather than the kiddies? When asked for information about Marvel’s The Ren and Stimpy Show comic book, Mike Kazaleh said, “Well, I guess you can include Ren and Stimpy if you want to, although I don’t really think of them as funny animals. They’re drawn as animals, yeah, but they’re more like funny things. Martians, maybe.” It turns out that there’s not much to say about them, since there is no continuing story line. You know what to expect if you like Ren and Stimpy, and you’ll get more of it during 1994. As for Matt Groening’s new Bongo Comics’ new Itchy and Scratchy Comics, ‘Bart Simpson’s Favorite Cartoon!’, the ‘carnage-crammed’ first issue parodies Tex Avery-type cartoon violence with 28 pages of nothing but “bone-crushing anvils, hostile bulldogs, angry bee swarms, red-hot pokers (…) runaway steamrollers, skull-smashing falling safes, even eyeball-pecking canaries!” inflicted upon long-suffering Scratchy cat by the fun-loving Itchy mouse. It’s too early to tell whether this ‘satire’ title will feature this one-track formula forever, or (we hope) more varied plots will appear.
   Is that it? Other new publishers have released one or two ’morph titles during 1993, but they did not reply to the request for information about their 1994 plans. These include Sun Comic Publishing’s Tom Katt #1 (by John Dean), and Bugged-Out Comics’ Zog the Frog #1 (by Stanley White). There may be others that were overlooked in this survey; if so, our apologies for not contacting them. The independent comics field is unfortunately littered with tiny publishers who get out one or two issues and then disappear. (Remember the glossy color flyers at the 1991 San Diego Comic-Con for Studio 91 Creation’s Mogobi Desert Rats, which turned out to be considerably artistically superior to the black-and-white #1 issue? Did that ever get past #1? What’s happened to Randy Zimmerman’s third attempt, as Massive Comics Group, to publish his Tales from the Aniverse?) Let’s hope that Zog the Frog and any other new titles are doing well and they will continue during 1994. And there will probably be two or three more brand-new publishers who appear with first issues this year. Keep an eye out for them, because the next Bone or Usagi Yojimbo or Xanadu may be among them.

		#29 / Apr 1994


	Title:	Magicats II
	Editors:	Jack Dann & Gardner Dozois
	Publisher:	Ace Books New York, MY), Dec 1991
	ISBN:	0-441-51533-9
		213 pages, $3,99
	Availability:	Am / BN / Al / Pw

   Here are still more fantasy short stories about cats! Yarf! has already reviewed DAW Books’ two Catfantastic anthologies, but Ace Books’ Magicats series is actually older. The first volume was published in June 1984.
   These anthologies are similar in that both are devoted to short stories about bizarre cats, or cats in bizarre situations. But there are differences between them. Catfantastic features brand new stories written especially for that series. Magicats consists of reprints—the best SF and fantasy cat tales written over the years. Catfantastic stars domestic pusses, while Magicats is open to felines of all species. Housecats do predominate, but mountain lions, tigers, and jaguars are also present.
   There is also a subtle distinction in emphasis. Each of the Catfantastic stories is a short adventure fantasy in which a cat is the lead or pivotal character. Doubtlessly the authors were influenced toward this slant by being asked to write for an anthology featuring cats. Each Magicats story contains a cat, but the cat may be incidental rather than the main focus. These stories were not all written with a cat foremost in the author’s mind. The focus in some is on the message (the horrors of war), or on the human characters (the animal rights movement), or on the genre (comedy or murder mystery). These stories contain cats who may be vividly presented and may be central to the action, but they do not seem to be necessarily cats. They could have been dogs or some other animal just as easily. So Magicats and Catfantastic are not simply duplicates of each other. Each series has a different ‘flavor’ to it.
   The dozen stories in Magicats II span the three decades between 1961 and 1991, with the exception of John Collier’s 1940 A Word to the Wise. They are all excellent reading, although only three of the twelve really have anthromorphized cats: the Collier anecdote, Fritz Leiber’s Kreativity for Kats, and Pamela Sargent’s The Mountain Cage. Two are about human were-felines: Lucius Shepard’s The Jaguar Hunter and Avram Davidson’s Duke Pasquale’s Ring. Three are fantasies featuring ordinary cats: Isaac Asimov’s I Love Little Pussy, Ward Moore’s The Boy Who Spoke Cat, and Tanith Lee’s Bright Burning Tiger. (Well, Lee’s fiery tiger is hardly ordinary, but it is not anthropomorphic.) The last four stories not only feature normal felines, they are not even fantasies. Michael Bishop’s Life Regarded as a Jigsaw Puzzle of Highly Lustrous Cats is surrealistic stream-of-consciousness of a psychotic who is obsessed with cats; Ursula K. LeGuin’s May’s Lion is a sociological essay showing how women from two different cultures would perceive a cougar; and Lilian Jackson Braun’s The Sin of Madame Phloi and R. V. Branham’s The Color of Grass, the Color of Blood depict life (and death) in modern American homes from a housecat’s point of view.
   From the specific aspect of anthropomorphism, the Catfantastic series will be of more interest to readers of Yarf! than Magicats. But if you like good writing, fantasy, and cats—anthropomorphized or not—then you will have to read both series.


	Title:	Turning Point
	Author:	Lisanne Norman
	Map:	Michael Gilbert
	Publisher:	DAW Books (New York, NY), Dec 1993
	ISBN:	0-88677-575-2
		267 pages, $3.99
	Availability:	Am / BN / Al / Pw

’Morph fandom has a reputation that is practically synonymous with furry eroticism. Well, it’s not just ‘us’ any more. Here is an inter-species romantic space opera that lets it all hang out and is proud of it. A human woman meets a felinoid alien—a handsome, studly, furry hunk of a cat-man—and:

   Carrie Hamilton is a repressed young woman on a male-dominated world. Not only does the colony planet Keiss have a strongly patriarchal society, but it has recently been conquered by brutally militaristic aliens, the Valtegans. Keiss’ menfolk are fighting a guerrilla war to regain their freedom, but Carrie is considered too delicate to help. She has an uncontrollable telepathic talent that makes her overly susceptible to the pain and stress felt by others, a liability in combat situations. Her father and brother are arranging to marry her to the town’s richest and most arrogant lout, smugly sure that they are acting in her best interests and that her opinions are not worth listening to.
   The first time that Carrie stands up to them is when she finds an injured cougarlike forest cat, and insists on nursing it. Only Kusac isn’t a wild animal. He’s a member of another alien race that’s also at war with the Valtegans. His spaceship was shot down on a reconnaissance mission, and he was too badly injured to keep up with his felinoid shipmates as they escaped into the forest. Kusac is the Sholan team’s telepath, so he quickly senses how good-hearted Carrie is.
   Turning Point is skillfully composed as a light adventure space opera, but it’s not hard to see all the wish-fulfillment clichés beneath the surface action. Everyone else is frightened of the fierce animal Kusac appears to be; only Carrie senses his inner nobility. Kusac uses his telepathic powers to train Carrie to control her own gift, helping her to grow from a confused girl into a strong woman. As she nurses him back to health, he gradually turns from a wild animal who is her loyal protector into (once he drops his telepathic disguise) a handsomely humanoid cat-man; the beast becomes the Beast to her Beauty. He next rescues her from her impending forced marriage, as they use their combined telepathy to find and join the other Sholans. When one of the more paranoid cat-men attacks Carrie, Kusac fights a spitting, clawing animal battle to protect her. Carrie is the only one who can bring the mutually suspicious Sholans and the human guerrillas together to fight the Valtegans as allies. And when the macho guerrillas want to send her back home to safety, it’s Kusac who demands they let her show that she can fight just as well as a man.
   The romantic theme runs overtly throughout the action. True love becomes reinforced by their telepathic link into an unbreakable bond. Both the Sholans and the humans have trouble accepting the inter-species romance, but they are proud to openly display their affection. Let it serve as a model for future human-Sholan friendly relations. The novel ends abruptly, with Carrie’s family convinced to welcome Kusac as a son-in-law, and the two lovers about to journey to Shola to break the news to his family. There is obviously room for a sequel, to tell what happens to Carrie as the only human on a planet of cat people. Is one coming?

		#30 / May 1994


	Title:	The Weigher
	Authors:	Eric Vinicoff & Marcia Martin
	Publisher:	Baen Books (Riverdale, NY), Nov 1992
	ISBN:	0-671-72144-5
		313 pages, $4.99
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This SF novel does a fine job of establishing an alien culture that seemingly shouldn’t exist. The novel is narrated by Slasher, a razor-fanged, bloodthirsty carnivore on a distant planet that is discovered by Ralph and Pam Ayers, a husband-wife pair of human explorers. The Ayers do not take a major role until about ninety pages into the story; the opening is devoted entirely to establishing Slasher’s lively, vivid daily life.

   Slasher is Coalgathering’s town Weigher, the closest thing this society has to a civic official. She acts as an arbitrator in any disputes whose participants are willing to settle them peacefully rather than take them to the town’s challenge lawn, where disagreements are fought until one litigant is dead. Only Weighers who are strong enough to enforce their rulings are respected, so Slasher must maintain her reputation as the potentially deadliest fighter in town as well as its wisest balancer of fairness. Since she is getting past her physical prime, she is resigned that it will probably be only another few seasons before she is fatally replaced by a younger and more agile challenger.
   All this is changed when two strange monsters float down from the sky and introduce themselves as people from another world who want to study this one. Partly because they are immediately challenged by an enemy of Slasher’s, she keeps them from being instantly killed. She also realizes that they may be able to offer new viewpoints that will help with some problems that she has been having with some of Coalgathering’s more troublesome inhabitants.
   By this point, the reader is probably wondering how such ferocious, vicious animals could ever coexist long enough to form any society. This is practically the first thing that Ralph and Pam Ayers start asking:

Unfortunately for Slasher’s people, they were lone predators before they were social animals. The instincts for communal living and cooperation are comparatively weak. The evolution into townships with populations in the low hundreds has already reached about as far as it can go before people start growing murderously irritable through overcrowding and too many differences of opinion. Slasher can intellectually understand that her world has only another few generations before it suicidally self-destructs. But she still embodies her species’ instincts. Her attempts to arrogantly force Coalgathering to adopt improvements based upon the humans’ knowledge sparks a conservative rebellion that forces her and the Ayers into a humiliating exile. Humiliating to her, that is; the two humans are fascinated by their involuntary trek across this world, looking for a new community to settle into. And Slasher must settle the turmoil between her individualistic ego and her understanding of the need to promote cooperation rather than dominance, for her world’s good as well as her own.
Ken Kelly’s cover painting for The Weigher shows Slasher and her people as a cross between shaggy large wolves and grizzly bears. Some of the situations imply that they may be more lean and lithe than this, and their tails are definitely prehensile enough to be significant aids in a fight:

Since The Weigher is told from Slasher’s viewpoint, the reader is in the midst of the anthropomorphic action at all times. Vinicoff & Martin develop an elaborate and fascinatingly appealing society, considering how bloody it is. There are scenes depicting these carnivores’ feral courtship, family life, education, commerce, shipping, and even religion.

		#31 / Jul 1994


	Title:	Animal Brigade 3000
	Editors:	Martin Harry Greenberg and Charles Waugh
	Publisher:	Ace Books (New York, NY), Feb 1994
	ISBN:	0-441-00014-2
		276 pages, $4.99
	Availability:	Am / BN / Al / Pw

   This anthology features seven stories about teams of human and animal partners in dramatic situations on interstellar worlds. The creatures range from ’morphs to intelligent aliens to well-trained domesticated beasts. Four of the stories are reprints; three are written especially for this anthology.
   Unfortunately, this concept works better in theory than it does in actuality. For starters, over 40% of the book is filled with the 113-page Dragonrider, by Anne McCaffrey. This was the second Pern story in Analog SF, the sequel to her Weyr Search. The two together comprise Dragonflight (1968), the first novel in McCaffrey’s classic series about the human Dragonriders and their intelligent native dragon partners who protect the world of Pern from the deadly Thread-like spores of a neighboring planet. That novel is certainly worth reading, but in its entirety. Why read Part 3 and Part 4 without Parts 1 and 2? And if you don’t read Dragonrider, almost half of Animal Brigade 3000 is wasted.
   On the Tip of a Cat’s Tongue, by Karen Haber, introduces private detective Willem Seaton to a rich client who talks through her cat.

   The imagery is striking of the detective who reports to a stately woman whose voice comes from her pet cat as it wanders through her office. And the mystery is a clever one. But the cat seems to be more of an unusual prop than a character.
   Exploration Team, by Murray Leinster (1956), puts two humans, three giant Kodiak bears and a cub, and a bald eagle on a hell-world where every native life form is ferociously deadly to mankind. The eagle is merely well-trained, while the bears (Sitka Pete, Sourdough Charley, Faro Nell, and her cub Nugget) are giant, bioengineered mutations. “There was need, on my home planet,” the frontiersman Huygens explains to Colonial Survey officer Roane, “for an animal who could fight like a fiend, live off the land, carry a pack and get along with men at least as well as dogs do. […] the bears want to get along with men. They’re emotionally dependent upon us! Like dogs.” (p. 156). There is constant drama as the humans and bears trek through the jungle to the rescue of colonists who had relied on robots to keep them safe from the hellish sphexes, the night-walkers, and other monsters. There’s also some humor as the slightly stuffy Roane learns how to get along with the 12-foot-tall, two-ton, slobberingly friendly Teddy bears. The story was written for an earlier generation, however. Today’s readers may not be totally receptive to the clever concept of settling a planet by killing off all the native animals and replacing them with nice, safe mammals bred to love humans.
   All the Angles, by Jack Nimersheim, is the first story here with a real ’morph character. In fact, it’s narrated by Thom Cat, the feline partner of Jerry Jones, a professional team of human and enhanced animal. ‘Professional’ what? Thom spends so much time arrogantly boasting about how clever he is that the little details never get described. Thom’s story is about how he and Jonesy hired out as mercenary secret agents to the Deimos government which was losing a rebellion against Mars, and he personally won the war for little Deimos. In one scene, Thom is briefly mistaken for a normal cat (until he starts mouthing off), so presumably he is not very physically different from one. But in another scene, “Withdrawing the laser knife from my neck pouch, I cut through the fine mesh in less time than it takes to tell you about it;” implying that he has hands instead of paws. The story would be more enjoyable if it had less back-patting dialogue and more details about the characters and action.
   The Undecided, by Eric Frank Russell, is the oldest story (1949). A Terran spaceship crashes on a distant planet. The crew of eight must defend themselves from the hostile local military until they can repair their ship and blast off. Although the Terrans talk telepathically among themselves, the story is told mostly from the point of view of the aliens. Sector Marshal Bvandt slurged in caterpillarish manner across the floor and vibrated his extensibles and closed two of the eight eyes around his serrated crown and did all the other things necessary to demonstrate an appropriate mixture of joy, satisfaction and triumph. (p. 193). Bvandt and his aides grow increasingly frustrated as their attempts to capture or destroy the mystery spaceship are stymied by its unknown inhabitants, who each seem to be of a completely different species. The sluglike locals wonder (as the reader is obviously supposed to) whether its crew is composed of amorphous shapeshifters, or maybe the master races of several different worlds of a space empire. But since this story is in Animal Brigade 3000, the reader will guess from the beginning that the Terrans consist of one human and several different intelligent animals (dog, cheetah, owl, etc.) who have evolved into a society of mutual equality. (Yeah, but it’s still the human who’s the captain.)
   Schurman’s Trek, by Roland J. Green, is set on a planet where human scientists are helping to establish a colony of bioengineered elephant ’morphs, the Hathi, during an interstellar war. When the planet is attacked by the enemy, human Roberta Schurman and Hathi Clan-Mother Drina have to lead the nervous elephant people on a long, dangerous trek to safety. This is the best story in the anthology for depicting a ’morph culture that mixes the instincts and attributes of its base species with human intelligence.
   Harry Harrison’s 1967 The Man from P.I.G. was written at the height of the James Bond/Man from U.N.C.L.E. craze, and is a humorous s-f variant on that theme. A newly-colonized planet appears to be haunted; its harried Governor calls the Patrol for a top-notch Secret Agent to save them; and all that he gets is an amiable farmboy with a herd of squealing pigs! But this is Bron Wurber, the Man from P.I.G. (Porcine Interstellar Guard). His boars and sows are better-trained than the best attack dogs. Harrison plainly studied up on swine, and he works a lot of data about the different breeds and their abilities and capabilities into this adventure, as Bron’s detective work brings him and his herd under attack by the evil alien empire’s saboteurs and their criminal human hirelings. There are no ’morphs here, though; only domesticated animals.
   So Animal Brigade 3000 is a mixed bag. There are only three stories featuring real ’morphs, and one of those is more annoying than enjoyable. Three other stories are worth reading, although they are about trained animals rather than ’morphs. And the longest in the book, Dragonrider, cannot be recommended as long as McCaffrey’s Dragonflight is easily available instead.

Cover of the deluxe edition
	Title:	Fur Magic
	Author:	Andre Norton
	Illustrator:	Alicia Austin
	Publisher:	Donald M. Grant, Publisher (Hampton Falls, NH), May 1993
	ISBN:	1-880418-20-7
		173 pages, $18.00
	Availability:	Am / BN / Al / Pw

	Deluxe edition
	ISBN:	1-880418-19-3
		173 pages, $65.00
	Availability:	Am / BN / Al / Pw

   This juvenile fantasy featuring Native American themes was originally published in 1968. Norton was a Guest-of-Honor at the 1992 World Science Fiction Convention in Orlando, FL, and this lavishly illustrated edition of Fur Magic was intended to commemorate that occasion. Unfortunately, production difficulties postponed it for so long that it was not published until the middle of the following year. But it is available now, and the delays have not affected the quality of the book.
   Cory Alder is an urban child spending a Summer vacation at his dad’s Army buddy’s ranch in Idaho. But what was supposed to be a treat has turned into a severe emotional trauma. The shy boy has discovered that he is terrified of real horses and of the great outdoors.
   Cory’s ‘Uncle Jasper’ and their ranch hands are Nez Perce’ Indians. From their conversation, Cory picks up the native myths of the beginning of time, when the Old People, the animals, lived in tribes and conducted their affairs as the Indians themselves later did. Then the Changer (Coyote to the Nez Perce’; Raven or other animals to different tribes) created humans, and the world turned upside down. According to the legend, the Great Spirit exiled the Changer for his meddling. He has been trying to get back and correct his mistake ever since, by using his trickery to make mankind destroy itself so the animals will rule the world once again. Uncle Jasper comments sardonically that, considering what the world news says about the way humanity is headed, that’s not so hard to believe.
   As Cory wanders about the ranch, he stumbles over the hidden medicine bundle of Black Elk, an ancient medicine man who follows the old ways. The shaman insists that Cory must purify the bag by holding it in a stream of strangely-scented smoke. The smoke makes Cory dizzy; when he recovers, he is in the body of Yellow Shell, a beaver warrior in the days of the Old Ones.
   Most of Fur Magic is the story of Cory as Yellow Shell of the beaver tribe, who was on a scouting mission against war parties of the vicious mink tribe. Cory has Yellow Shell’s memories but his own mind. The frightened human child is no match at first for the seasoned animal warriors. He is led by an otter brave to the otter tribe’s village, where he learns that the old ways are beginning to change. The minks have grown bolder and are now in alliance with the crows, who are spies of the Changer. The Changer is the enemy of the Old People, for they know that in his arrogance he is about to make a new animal (man) who will enslave all the other Peoples. The otters’ shaman recognizes that Cory/Yellow Shell is two spirits within one body, and this is a wrongness which only the Changer himself can alter. The medicine otter lets Cory join two emissaries who are being sent with a peace pipe to the tribe of Eagle, where he may find advice on how the Changer can be persuaded to aid him. Thus the boy begins a quest to return to his own body and world, learning self-reliance and courage in the process.
   Fur Magic is more successful as a broad panorama of this mythic America inhabited by the animal tribes, than as an adventure story. Cory is the only major character; all others are met only in passing, and are gone within two or three pages. There is practically no dialogue. Yellow Shell was on a lone scouting mission when Cory entered his body; no other beavers are encountered, and Yellow Shell does not know the languages of any of the other animals whom they meet—they communicate only briefly through sign language. There are several hints that Cory is being invisibly guided and protected during his quest (But time was important. He could not be sure how he knew that, only that it was so.), which removes any real dramatic suspense. What is left is the spectacle; the landscape of the pure American wilderness, inhabited by animals dressed as Indians and following indigenous customs.
   This is why the novel excels through Alicia Austin’s artwork. Austin is an award-winning fantasy artist who specializes in paintings and allied graphics depicting animals wearing the clothing of their lands’ native peoples—North America, Africa, the Arctic Circle, etc. This is exactly what Norton has described in Fur Magic. The characters are not anthropomorphized to the usual funny-animal extent; they are large but otherwise normal animals who are wearing little more than ceremonial body paint, and carrying a buckskin or turtleshell pouch and a spear or two. Austin shows these in ten full-color plates—one for each chapter—and forty black-&-white illustrations; practically one for every other double-page spread. The book, like all of the Donald M. Grant fine editions, is printed on top-quality paper and has sewn binding within sturdy blue cloth-covered boards. This is a novel that you can be proud to display on your bookshelf.

		#32 / Sep 1994


	Title:	Adventures of the Rat Family; A Fairy Tale
	Author:	Jules Verne
	Translator:	Evelyn Copeland
	Illustrator:	Felician Myrbach-Rheinfeld
		Introd. by Iona Opie; Afterword by Brian Taves. Part of The Iona and Peter Opie Library of Children’s Literature
	Publisher:	Oxford University Press (New York, NY), Dec 1993
	ISBN:	0-19-508114-5
		71 pages, $14.95
	Availability:	Am / BN / Al / Pw

This curiosity is the first English publication of Jules Verne’s only children’s fairy tale, and (presumably) his only story featuring talking animals. It originally appeared in the Christmas holiday (January 1891) issue of Le Figaro illustré, with illustrations by Felician Myrbach-Rheinfeld which are reprinted here in sepia. Thematically, Verne’s tale resembles those of Perrault or Madame de Beaumont, although Verne’s is brisker and wittier. Verne obviously had fun packing the story with as many puns as he could think of, which are enumerated at length in an academic nine-page Afterword by Verne expert Brian Taves.
The tale demonstrates Verne’s passions for intellectual concepts and for the theater. It mixes magic with the scientific theory of evolution and with Oriental philosophies of reincarnation, which were then in vogue; and it is constructed like a traditional stage extravaganza. The members of the Rat family are the familiar exaggerated character stereotypes of Commedia dell’ arte; the exotic locales (such as “Ratopolis, a very pretty city… [its] boulevards, squares, and streets, are lined with magnificent cheeses in the form of houses”, seem suspiciously like stage sets; and at the climax, when the wicked magician Gardafour loses and vanishes toward the Nether Regions, the illustrator literally shows him dropping through a trap door which has opened beneath his feet.

   In this ‘age of fairies and magicians’, evolution has been simplified into five broad categories: mollusks, fish, birds, quadrupeds, and humanity. Theoretically, one moves up or down this ‘ladder of creation’ depending upon whether one has been good or evil. This transmigration of souls is carried out by the various good fairies who monitor our deeds. Unfortunately, there are also wicked fairies and greedy magicians who do not hesitate to manipulate this evolution for their own profit.
   The Rat family is a household of pleasant and industrious rodents who have earned their right to humanity; as has daughter Ratine’s loyal fiancé, Ratin. However, Ratine’s beauty has been noticed by haughty, spoiled Prince Kissador, who demands that she submit to his pleasures. When she refuses, Kissador orders his unscrupulous hired magician, Gardafour, to regress her and her family back to mollusks. Meanwhile, Ratin has achieved his transformation into a man, and he hurries to the good fairy Firmenta to plead for justice. Firmenta is an old rival of Gardafour, and she speedily recommences the Rats’ advancement towards manhood. But Gardafour and Kissador are too spiteful to accept defeat gracefully. They keep sneaking up every time Firmenta’s back is turned, and trying anew to capture Ratine.
   I’m not sure how Adventures of the Rat Family looked to late 19th-century readers, but it seems marvelously quaint and dated today. Despite much talk about how kind and sympathetic and devoted to aiding the deserving needy Firmenta is, it seems clear that she is really delighted at the opportunity to thwart her old enemy Gardafour. The Rat family are little more than pawns in the struggle between these two spellcasters, while Ratin hides behind Firmenta’s skirts, wringing his hands, and Prince Kissador scowls and makes ugly faces. (Firmenta is most definitely the type of fairy who would enchant the Beast’s entire household because she feels he needs to be punished.) Verne’s writing style here was floridly archaic even in his own day, and some of the scenes may have been deliberately burlesque, such as Ratin’s histrionic pledge (as a handsome, impeccably-dressed young man) of undying love to the oyster that Ratine has become. The story continues only because Firmenta blithely assumes that she has decisively won each time she defeats Gardafour, leaving him to creep back for another try. But she is, after all, only a woman; and as Verne says on the final page, “Ah! Women! Women! Beautiful heads often, but brains, none at all!”
   Oxford University Press’ publicity says that this rediscovered tale “is certain to become a children’s classic.” With lines like the above? I don’t think so. But Verne clearly intended this story to be an old-fashioned comedy for adults as much as a thrilling adventure for the little ones. While we may not laugh at quite the same things that the 19th century Parisian public did, there are still enough chuckles in the tale (and in our observation of what the last century’s intelligentsia passed as P.C.) that it is worth reading today.


		Title:	Majyk by Accident
		Author:	Esther Friesner
		Publisher:	Ace Books (New York, NY), Aug 1993
		ISBN:	0-441-51376-X
			282 pages, $4.99
		Availability:	Am / BN / Al / Pw







Title:	Majyk by Hook or Crook
Author:	Esther Friesner
Publisher:	Ace Books (New York, NY), May 1994
ISBN:	0-441-00054-1
	262 pages, $4.99
Availability:	Am / BN / Al / Pw

Esther Friesner’s “sensationally silly series”, to quote the blurb on the second novel, starts out only marginally anthropomorphic but it grows more so. If you can imagine Disney’s Aladdin with a Furry Genie, you’ve got the general idea. Friesner has been doing this plot much longer than Disney has—her first novel, Mustapha and His Wise Dog, in 1985, featured a sarcastic talking dog with an otherwise human cast in an Arabian Nights locale. Her new Magyk series has a setting that’s more Grimm Brothers’ European than Middle Eastern, but the main fantasy character—Scandal, the cat—is very close to the Robin Williams Genie in his personality.
Orbix is a comically stereotypical fantasy world, with wizards, barbarian warriors, dragons, and the whole lot. But no cats. Until one wanders there from our world, emerging through a rathole in the kitchen of the Academy of High Wizardry run by Master Thengor, the greatest magician on this world. Thengor is dying of old age, and his control over Orbix’s raw Majyk is starting to slip. The cat is discovered by Kendar Ratwhacker (the narrator), the clumsiest student at the Academy. He is so incompetent that he has been assigned to the humiliating, unMajykal duty of roaming the castle with a club and whacking any rats that he finds. Since nobody on Orbix has ever seen a cat, Kendar assumes that this is just a funny-looking rat. He is chasing it through the Academy when they blunder into the cloud of now-highly-unstable Majyk. The resulting explosion demolishes the Academy, leaves most of the Majyk stuck onto Kendar (making him the new most-powerful wizard on Orbix, except that he hasn’t the slightest idea of how to control it), and bestows intelligence and speech upon the cat, who appoints himself Kendar’s fast-talking guardian since the nerd obviously needs a keeper.

Most of the ‘weird words’ are actually pop cultural references, such as the one above about an M.I.T. grad. Scandal’s running patter is full of “He’s dead, Jim!” and “Hasta la vista, bay-bee!” one-liners, which Kendar just shakes his head over and doesn’t even bother to try to understand after the first few minutes. This series’ ‘silly’ humor is based primarily on incongruities such as Nixon jokes and Jackie Gleason/Honeymooners lines in dragon-haunted forests or troll-filled sleazy taverns. How are you supposed to react to a barbarian warrior maid who combines the body of Marvel Comics’ chain-mail-bikini-clad Red Sonja with the personality of Elmyra in Tiny Toon Adventures?
Despite Kendar’s comment about animals not normally talking on Orbix, it turns out that plenty of them do on the other side of the planet. They only meet one of these, for a couple of brief paragraphs, in Magyk by Accident:

   In Magyk by Hook or Crook, circumstances take Kendar, Scandal, and a new set of companions around this Big Bend on a magical mission of mercy. It seems that the other side of Orbix is not entirely anthropomorphized. Humans and talking animals in the kingdom of Wingdingo (capital city: Loupgarou) have been coexisting in an uneasy proximity. Now evil human King Wulfdeth has usurped the throne and is oppressing the citizens, especially the talking-animal peoples, and our two heroes have to restore the peace.
   For the setting, just imagine any deliberately hokey movie swashbuckler such as The Crimson Pirate or The Black Falcon with ’morphs as the oppressed peasantry and humans as the haughty nobility. The majority of the gags are ovine, since the locals whom Kendar and Scandal first meet are sheep. There are crews of wooly pirates snarling, “Arrrh, matey!”, in ships with names like the Bawdy Bellwether and the Golden Fleece, or taverns like the Frisky Ewe. Their dialogue is topheavy with lines like (just before a sword-fight), “D’ye fancy we’re lambs fer the slaughter?”
   Loupgarou has plenty of other inhabitants, such as wolf merchantmen and some furry female courtesans of mixed species. Unfortunately, these are only seen briefly in passing. Every time that Kendar and Scandal are about to meet some of these others, they get whisked into a confrontation with the human villains. Our heroes spend most of the novel bouncing between the evil humans in the castle, and the rebel sheep in the countryside. Majyk by Hook or Crook contains a few delightful scenes and double entendres, but readers will also be frustrated by the number of near-misses with other interesting-sounding characters and places whom Kendar and Scandal do not see (such as a reference to one of the main seaports, Port O’ Morph). Readers will also have to decide for themselves what their appetite for bad puns, movie-&-TV trivia references, and similar sheer silliness is.

		#33 / Dec 1994


	Title:	A Night in the Lonesome October
	Author:	Roger Zelazny
	Illustrator:	Gahan Wilson
	Publisher:	William Morrow/AvoNova (New York, NY)

	Hardcover edition, Aug 1993
	ISBN:	0-688-12508-5
		280 pages, $18.00
	Availability:	Am / BN / Al / Pw

	Paperback edition, Sep 1994
	ISBN:	0-380-77141-1
		280 pages, $4.99
	Availability:	Am / BN / Al / Pw

   I like Gahan Wilson’s cartoons. But I think that he was the wrong choice to illustrate this pseudo-1930s horror-mystery-comedy. Roger Zelazny implies in his wry dedication that his goal is to evoke the spirits of Weird Tales at its classic Lovecraftian heights, blended with the fog-shrouded England shown in those famous horror movies which introduced the Vampire, the Monster, and the Wolfman. Illustrations, slightly exaggerated, in the realistic pen & ink style of The Strand and similar popular fiction magazines of the 1890s, and of the 1930s horror-pulp illustrators, would have been more appropriate than Wilson’s ghastly-giggly squiggly cartoons.
   On the other paw, Wilson’s reputation instantly identifies a book as delivering a particular kind of dark-horror humor. In that sense he was the best possible choice, for that is exactly the mood of A Night in the Lonesome October.
   This whatdunit-thriller takes place during an October of an unnamed late-Victorian year. There are 31 chapters, one for each day. A group is gathering in London and the nearby countryside to play a deadly, supernatural game, upon which the fate of the world rests. This is not a contest between Good and Evil. The whole cast might be considered Evil; but, for their own reasons, some of these players want to save the world while the others want to destroy it. Some names are slightly disguised, but the reader will recognize the Serial Killer, the Vampire, the Witch, the Graverobbers, the Mad Russian Monk, the Druid Priest, the Scientist with his Monster, the Clergyman Turned Demon-Worshipper, and others—not to mention the Great Detective, who is investigating this secret meeting of unusually suspicious characters.
   But only half of the players are humans. Each has a talking-animal familiar, and it is through the cast of familiars that the mystery is related. The narrator is Snuff, the hound who is the partner of the Ripper. Others are Graymalk, the cat; Nightwind, the owl; Needle, the bat; Cheeter, the squirrel; Quicklime, the snake; and more. Like the humans, each of the animals must figure out who is to be trusted, what information is reliable, which clues are real and which are setups for deadly traps. It can be as fatal to reject a genuine offer of friendship as to be overly naive. Stupid animals do not survive in this game, so most of these familiars are adept at clever dialogue loaded with cynical double meanings and subtle misdirection. The players must also take each others’ physical attributes into consideration in planning useful alliances. Snuff has a good nose and strong jaws, while the avian familiars can get a good view of the entire countryside, and Quicklime or Bubo the rat can investigate small, enclosed places. Some of the animals also have supernatural powers of their own, which may or may not be obvious.
   This is about all that can be said without spoiling part of the creepy puzzle. Zelazny is a master at starting out with situations that are intriguing enough to hook the reader even though they are bewilderingly mysterious, and are only gradually revealed. However, it is immediately clear that this is the animals’ tale. The focus is upon them. The human players are seen through their eyes. Also, the familiars are not mere pets. Each has a strong individuality. and some are loyal to their human partners while others are more interested in looking out for themselves.
   The story starts slowly, as the players come together and cautiously, politely, sound each other out. Then the eldritch game begins. Who will survive until October 31st—and who will survive what happens on All Hallows Eve?
   A Night in the Lonesome October is a highly unusual, imaginative, and sardonic thriller. It smoothly blends the stereotypes of classic horror fiction with the formalized moves of a game of Clue—with monsters and talking animals in the roles of Col. Mustard and Mrs. Peacock.


	Title:	Samurai Cat Goes to the Movies
	Author:	Mark E. Rogers
	Illustrator:	The author
	Publisher:	Tor/Tom Dougherty Associates Book (New York, NY), Oct 1994
	ISBN:	0-312-85744-6
		286 pages, $10.95
	Availability:	Am / BN / Al / Pw

I’m sorry, but my tolerance for *Concentrated Cute* was overwhelmed by halfway through the first chapter.


		Title:	Emperors of the Twilight
		Author:	S. Andrew Swann
		Publisher:	DAW Books (New York, NY), Jan 1994
		ISBN:	0-88677-589-2
			283 pages, $4.50
		Availability:	Am / BN / Al / Pw







Title:	Specters of the Dawn
Author:	S. Andrew Swann
Publisher:	DAW Books (New York, NY), Aug 1994
ISBN:	0-88677-613-9
	284 pages, $4.50
Availability:	Am / BN / Al / Pw

These are the second and third novels in Swann’s trilogy which began with Forests of the Night (reviewed in YARF! #26). That was a superbly-written, although grittily-depressing, political murder mystery set in a mid-21st-century society in which bioengineering has become common. America’s ghettos are filled with ‘moreaus’, animal-peoples who are mostly descendants of super-soldiers made to replace humans in armies of twenty to fifty years earlier. They have become the new lower class. Bioengineering of improved humans is illegal in most nations, but that has not stopped various security agencies who want their own super-agents. Most of this background was gradually built up in the story of Nohar Rajasthan, a cynical tiger private investigator who handles cheap but safe cases for the moreau community, until he is pre


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		#13 / Jun 1991