God of Clay By Ryan Campbell Cover Art by Zhivago 259 pp., $17.95 (Kindle, $5.99) Sofawolf Press, September 2013 With the release of Forest Gods, the second title in Ryan Campbell’s Fire Bearers trilogy, it seemed like a good time to catch up with the first book, God of Clay. I’m only sorry I left it so long, because I thoroughly enjoyed the read.
The Rise of the Red Shadow By Joseph R. Lallo Cover Art by Nick Deligaris 439 pp., $2.99 (ebook), $16.00 (trade paperback) Amazon Publishing Services/CreateSpace From the 1950s up through the 1980s, the paperback original dominated genre fiction. Some became undeniable classics—the Ace Science Fiction Specials included the first publications of Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Wild Shore—but most aimed less at dazzling critics than at presenting rousing adventure tales. They might rarely be your Favorite Book Ever, yet if you got hooked on an author—or a series—you’d grab title after title. Unless you’ve got the next Dresden Files, though, major publishers aren’t interested in those kinds of titles anymore. This has opened a gap for self-published and small press ebooks to fill. Series like Annie Bellet’s The Twenty-Sided Sorceress and, closer to home, Phil Geusz’s David Birkenhead septology would fit beside 1980s stalwarts like Diane Duane and Alan Dean Foster. Amazon and Goodreads are full of well-loved series—far more than there were in the …
Five Fortunes Edited by Fred Patten Cover Art by Terrie Smith 415 pp., $19.95 FurPlanet Productions, January 2014 This anthology is a collection of five furry novellas, each about 80 pages long. The theme? All the main characters are taking steps forward to choose and shape their own futures. I’ve read work by all of the contributing authors before, but for most of them it’s been a while, so I was curious to see what their recent output would be like.
What Happens Next: An anthology of sequels Edited by Fred Patten Cover Art by Sara Miles 424 pp., $19.95 FurPlanet Productions, July 2013 Other than annual awards collections, mainstream fantasy and science fiction anthologies have all but vanished. Furrydom, though, has an infatuation with them. We pump out several a year, nearly always of original fiction and nearly always themed: cyberpunk, Halloween, science fiction, gay erotica featuring farmboy foxes. Whether readers share this enthusiasm for anthologies with writers, though, seems murkier. In What Happens Next, an anthology from 2013, each story connects to a published story from furry’s past. At first blush there’s a logic to this. What sells most consistently in genre fiction has long been the serial, from E.E. Doc Smith’s Lensman series through Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files. Kyell Gold‘s popularity is in no small part due to the Argaea and Dev & Lee series. Yet the chances are slim that a reader who isn’t deeply invested in stories produced by furrydom over the last quarter-century will know all or even most of …
