Furry fiction - then vs now?

[Poetigress]

A few years back I ran across an old three-ring binder of mine, full of prints and printouts of furry art from around 2000 – mostly taken off VCL, from when my husband and I were first exploring the fandom. I looked through them, at what I’d felt was worth saving back then, and what really struck me was how much furry art had changed in a period of no more than a decade – but it didn’t just change in terms of preferred media or style. It improved dramatically (and really rather amazingly) in terms of mechanics, anatomy, having more art with full backgrounds instead of floating character pinups, in all kinds of ways. Back then, it seemed to me that there were only a handful of artists producing work at a pro or semi-pro level. Now, there are far, far more working at that kind of skill level and craft. In other words, somewhere along the line (possibly bit by bit) the bar really got raised.

So since my only exposure to the older furry fiction has been pretty much through the Best in Show anthology (and even that, I read years ago and haven’t re-read recently), this brings me to a question for those who’ve been reading fiction in the fandom for roughly the same time period, who still remember the furry zine heyday but are also reading what’s being published now:

How do you think furry fiction has changed in the past 10 or even 20 years – not so much in terms of publishing or venues, but the work itself? Is it overall better? The same? Worse? All the above, in various ways? Have the styles changed, the way preferred or popular styles have changed in visual art?

And if we, as writers and readers and a fandom, want to encourage the same sort of dramatic improvement in quality over a relatively short span of time… how do we do it? (Or can we even influence it?)

[mwalimu]

Among the factors at work here are the speed of data transfer and places to store it. In 1990, a computer might have a hard drive that holds maybe 100M - that’s megabytes. But your modem, 14.4K if it’s halfway decent, might be able to manage an upload/download speed of 5M per hour, if you didn’t mind tying up your landline for that long. World wide web, search engines, as we know them, didn’t exist; you might be able to find a few BBSes you could call and get some pics from, or some shareware games, so it’s not like you had easy access to tons of stuff you could fill that 100M with. CompuServe, AOL, and Prodigy came into existence around that time. By 1995, many communities had an actual Internet service where you could do ftp/telnet/usenet/etc. to anywhere on the Internet, if you could navigate the maze of setup instructions to make it work with your home PC (anybody remember Trumpet Winsock?), and 1G hard drives were available if you had $500 to spend. In 2000, the Internet as we know it was starting to take shape. WWW had been around a few years, broadband Internet was becoming affordable and accessible to average folks, and that same $500 would buy you 100G.

Now consider this… a 10K word story in an ASCII .txt file is about 55K bytes, in the same ballpark as a graphic image file of moderate size and resolution. In those early days, considering storage space and transfer speeds, that story file looks a lot more bang for your kilobyte than the image file (if you could find either). Also consider that in those early days, text editors worked fine whereas high-resolution graphics were still evolving and were expensive and clunky by modern standards. While the tools for both formats have improved since then, the degree of improvement for visual arts has far exceeded what it has for writing.

Prior to WWW, the means of making one’s writing (and art) available online were much more limited, and what got posted seemed to be better. When it got easy to post a lot of content, more lesser quality stuff gets posted. The fandom was a lot smaller then too so there were a lot fewer people producing art and writing (and music and video and comics). In the days of Miavir’s story index it was possible (if a bit of a stretch) to read and keep up with virtually all works of fiction that were getting added.

As for the subject matter itself of the stories, I don’t know if it’s changed that much. You had furry settings, the debate raged even back then about whether furries had to have some animal characteristics vs. being “humans in fursuits”. A few of the stories were as good as anything you could find commercially published (Greg Howell’s “Light on Shattered Water” comes to mind) while many others had problems that would never get past a publisher yet were good enough to be enjoyable reads nonetheless (“Trouble’s Tales” comes to mind). It’s a lot harder now to come up with something truly original that someone hasn’t done before, and some ideas that seemed clever and original at the time now seem like overused cliches.

In the final analysis, the same things that made a good story then - plot, character development, setting and world building, good writing style, spelling and grammar - still make a good story now.

[Rabbit]

I think that the big difference since then is that a lot of us have learned professionalism not just in writing, but in the related/supportive fields like editing/publishing. Sofawolf was the most professional outfit going even in 2000, but it was unthinkable that they’d win a Hugo until they grew more. I’d also like to opine that more such publishing professionalism is what’s still needed most. Our publishers aren’t nearly tough enough on our writers.

For my own part… I know I’m a lot more skilled-- and professional!-- than I was back then. But in the old days I also had bigger dreams and more powerful story ideas, which made up for a lot. Too bad you can’t have it all at once!

[Fred_Patten]

I have been active in furry fandom since it started in the early 1980s; not so much online as in the printed fanzines and “small press” furry magazines of the late 1980s and 1990s like “Yarf!” and “Pawprints Fanzine” and “Mythagoras” and “Furryphile” and “Rowrbrazzle” and “Tales of the Tai-Pan Universe” and “Steam Victorian” and a few others. I mined them for “Best in Show” in 2003.

The biggest difference is that almost all furry fiction from the first, in Kyim Granger’s “FurVersion” around 1987 or '88 (I forget the title or which issue, but it was by Rod O’Riley), consisted of short stories, which necessarily did not have much depth. Paul Kidd’s “Fangs of K’aath”, serialized in “Rowrbrazzle” starting around 1990, was the first full novel, which he had written earlier for professional publication and only self-published it in “'Brazzle” when he couldn’t sell it professionally. Furry fans were not encouraged to write longer stories with character and plot development until the furry specialty small press like Sofawolf Press and FurPlanet Publications and United Publications came along to put them into print. That the furry specialty press also paid something probably helped a little, but it was so little that it probably didn’t help much. Furry writers have always written furry fiction for their own and the fandom’s pleasure, whether there was any money in it or not.

There were a few longer, mostly rambling “novels” in the amateur press associations like “Rowrbrazzle” and on the Internet. Besides Paul Kidd, there were Charles Garofalo’s and Michael Susko Jr.'s and Simon Barber’s stories in “Rowrbrazzle”, but they mixed their own characters with copyrighted characters like the Disney and WB funny animals, Pogo, Kimba, Crusader Rabbit, and so on. (They still do. Barber’s “Seven Brides for Seven Bunnies”, starring the “Tiny Toon Adventures” cast and his own similar characters, is running currently.) Some of them, like Garofalo’s “American Kitsune”, were quite good; it was too bad that he made it unsaleable by including so many copyrighted characters (from different companies) in it. One that appeared on the Internet around 2000 was “A Leopard’s Tail” (I forget the author offhand – Robert or Richard Luna?); it was serialized for a couple of years and then disappeared unfinished.

Anyway, when the furry magazines except the erotic ones disappeared in the early 2000s, it seemed like a furry literary tragedy. A few years later, the furry small-press publishers and cheap self-publishers like Lulu.com and CreateSpace replaced them, but their format has pretty much limited furry writing to novels. The only furry short-story venues left have been dominated by erotic magazines and anthologies. There are a few non-erotic others, like the online non-furry s-f/fantasy magazine “Strange Horizons”, but most furry would-be writers don’t know where to find them.

[Poetigress]

Admin note: I split the posts about whether there’s a market for a new publication to a new topic, so this thread doesn’t go too far astray.