Elf Sternberg

tl;dr: The hot sex scenes do not make up for a book whose moral anchors are non-existent. The author fails to live up to her premise because she doesn't understand what science fiction is *for*.

I really wanted to like Beyond the Softness of His Fur, by TammyJo Eckhart, but I'm afraid that any genuine pleasure out of this book was completely obliterated by setting. You see, the setting is sometime in the future, and our heroine, Emily, has received marching orders from her corporation that she must have "a pet": a biological, engineered furry companion with a limited mental capacity but an infinite capacity to absorb whatever abuse the owner wishes. Emily is a sexual sadist but so far only of the consensual kind. She selects Wynn, a pretty, male fox-morph built for her kind of pleasure, and the story sets off.

Wynn needs time at "the facility" to be "trained," to be oriented toward his new owner and his role for her, and the abuse heaped upon him because he's just "a stupid morph" is legion. Eckhart is trying to contrast people who are genuinely cruel, people who are "just doing their job," and consensual sadists like Emily (who, eventually, comes to recognize that something is very wrong about the utter one-sidedness of her relationship with Wynn), but she just can't.

Because her universe is probably the most poorly thought-out excuse for a sex story I've read in a while. It is, we are told, The Future. Our heroine is vaguely associated with an advertising corporation, but her role is so poorly sketched out it's only important as an executive role with which to ensnare her in something salacious. At one point she says there are "dozens and dozens" of other "elite pet genetics firms," but later says the one she buys from is but "one of four on the planet," yet if there's a world out beyond Emily's house, Eckhart hasn't thought much about it. There is no Internet.

I can stand Used Furniture; there are only so many ways to get around the universe, and making decisions about having or not having teleportation, wet nanotech, dry nanotech, artificial intelligence, humanoid robots, and what have you are "one from column A, one from column B" decisions every writer has to make. But when the used furniture comes from all over the place, and doesn't come together into a coherent whole, stories fall apart.

It's awful to force a character to say something she wouldn't normally say because you need it said to move the plot forward, without regard to the discipline of writing about people, not caricatures. It's just as awful to force a technology point, or a cultural point, without regard to the actual discipline of world building.

And the culture in this story is simply impossible. Somehow the re-emergence of blatant slavery, by dint of growing our slaves in test tubes and mentally stifiling them, seems to have happened without much of a cultural ripple; I wonder if the downtrodden are simply so downtrodden they're just grateful the 1% have something to piss all over that isn't themselves or their children. I want Emily and her ilk to live in fucking terror of PETA and Earth First! and the Earth Anti-Slavery Society. There should be bombings of these "dozens" of places. This society could never have emerged in the first place without, as one commentor on the antebellum American South, the emergence of a constant, relentless, and definitive culture expectation that some people are born with boots and spurs, and some are born with saddles. Instead, the world is blithe and bonny. With furry slaves.

How is a morph "made"? Are they born "adult?" Do they get an education? How do they learn to speak? How long do they live? What happens when an owner gives one up? For a high-powered, wealthy executive who claims to be very interested in human behavior (she specializes in selling stuff, after all), Emily is utterly incurious about the origins, treatment, or moral consequences of the entire 'morph culture. Unfortunately, apparently so is the author.

The author wants you to be outraged that such a universe exists. I'm *glad* Emily is starting to develop a moral conscience by the end of the book; but the author mistakes strong emotions about the culture presented in the book with strong emotions about how poorly and ridiculously the writer proposes, or fails to convincingly describe, how that culture came about in the first place.

Don't bother. There's better.

I went to Rainfurrest this weekend, the annual Furry convention in Seattle. I haven't been to a Furry convention in over a decade, not since the kids were born, and haven't really had much contact with the furries.

I like furries, in the abstract. They're exuberant, for one thing, gleefully exploring a weirdly transhuman idea about the shape of both the body and mind. They're willing to play with all sorts of ideas about how people would interract if we could know more, and less, about each other.

And oftentimes I like them in the real world, too. They're fun to be around, and the fursuiting part of Furry fandom is actually getting good enough to be interesting.

Rainfurrest emphasized a curious schizophrenia about Furry's past, and the sex lives of Furries, in a way that tells me the Burned Furs managed to do a lot of lasting damage before the failure of their doomed campaign. In talking with a number of furries at the convention, I got a dual impression: that furrydom remains, in general, a highly sexual community, and that furrydom is, in general, deeply ashamed of this fact.

I wanted to know how much young furries knew about Furry Fandom from 1992 through 2001: From the start of Confurence through the collapse of the Burned Furs. It turned out the answer was "Nothing, except that it was all run by a bunch of gay guys. Furry's not like that now. It's not about that." (That was a quote from one young man in the hallway.)

Except Rainfurrest had an awful lot of outness to it. Cross-gendered heavily sexualized fursuits, outright drag queens, and a popular t-shirt reading "FUR FAG" were everywhere. Leaving aside the way Furry fandom has co-opted gay language, with panels about "How to come out as a Furry to your parents and co-workers," and t-shirts that read "Furry. Deal With It." (Furries should also probably stop wearing "Furries Ruin Everything" t-shirts. Tongue-in-cheek only works when the audience understands ironic mockery.)

Furry fandom wants more respect. It wants to be something other than the bizarre, unloved step-child of SF fandom. It wants to forget that it was ever dissed by Something Awful, 4Chan, and Cruel Site, and it wants to be somewhere other than the very bottom of the geek hierarchy.

Yet it has no narrative on which to hang itself, no story predominates the Furry mindset, no striving, acheiving characters and situations. All that distances Furries from mere humans is differences in the body, and the most straightforward way to make that difference known is through sex. That's why the dealer's room is dominated by nude pin-ups, the fiction is dominated by erotica, and the one company that makes the most money off Furries sells "fantasy creature sex toys."

I don't expect this schizophrenia to ever work itself out. There will always be too much sex in Furry to mainstream the whole genre; there will always be just enough non-sexual content for the whole of Furrydom to think, "Someday, someday, we'll be legit. But I still want Bad Dragon [NSFW!] in the dealer's room."

Omaha was busy, so Lisakit and I went to do the household's monthly shopping run today. Lisa went in ahead while I parked the car, then gathered up the cloth grocery bags we're reliably taking with us these days. There were a lot of them-- this was the monthly warehouse run after all. I started stuffing them into one bright blue bag. Then I paused, tumbled them out, and stuffed them into another bag, one I'd acquired at a convention long ago.

Because I'd rather have people know I'm a furry than believe I shop at Wal-Mart.

(Note: The links are probably NSFW.)

So, let me get this straight: Yiffy, gregarious and sociable Furries are still more hated than basement-dwelling masturbators who want to marry their silicone orifice-equipped, Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha dakimakura-covered full-body pillows? Unfuck you, Gizmodo.

If you're an old-school furry, this ought to fill you with fear and terror. Either that, or you'll wet your pants in anticipation.

Abbondanza was the name of a mythical pizza delivery service in Doug Winger's strange, balloon-animal universe, where impossibly doubly endowed creatures would offer you "meat toppings" and "creamy desserts" along with your pizza.

Next NW Fur Con, we ought to have dinner there. It's in West Seattle, along California Street, near Lincoln Park.

Some (VERY NSFW) examples of Doug's work: Negotiation, After Pizza, and Mini Pizza.

It takes a bit of navigating (hint: go to the freezer, not the 'fridge) to find it, but there's a 60-second ad for orange-flavored sugar water feature pole-dancing anthro flamingos, a deer doing the flower scene from American Beauty, another doing the splash scene from Flashdance while her bear boyfriend looks on, and an hot babe octopus doing, uh...

... you just really have to see it. Visit Orangina!