Furry Writers' Guild Forum

Furry Speculative Fiction

Publishing and Marketing
#1

I don’t know if this is the right place for this, but I was asked to write a guest blog post about writing furry speculative fiction, and I thought people here might be interested in seeing it.

“Writing Furry Speculative Fiction” on Jester Harley’s Manuscript Page

I get a lot of interest and curiosity from other writers when I say that I write furry fiction. It’s been particularly interesting to watch in my critique group as the term “furry fiction” has spread. Whenever we get new people at our critique table, we’ll all go around and introduce ourselves by saying something like “I’m Mary, and I write science-fiction and furry.” To begin with, I was the only one who claimed to write furry. This week though, three full members claimed to write furry, and one new person was really interested to hear about furry, because he has an idea for a steampunk story about birds.

Anyway, I think there’s a lot of overlap between furry as a genre and speculative fiction in general. The essay I linked to is kind of about that.

#2

I still consider furry a subgenre of fantasy/science fiction, personally, though I know a lot of furry writers disagree on that point and I don’t really want to drag that whole debate up again. :slight_smile: But yes, I think there’s always been a lot of overlap.

#3

That sounds like an argument that could go on as long as the argument over whether Star Wars is sci-fi or fantasy.

#4

I would suppose it depends upon your definitions. Regardless, labels aren’t too important so long as you’re enjoying it XD

#5

Labels are really helpful when you’re looking for something. Before I knew the label “furry,” I didn’t have much luck finding stories about talking animals. It’s much easier now that I know the label.

#6

That is true. Preferences in literature is a peculiar topic. I’ve always wondered why some genres don’t appeal to me and do appeal to others. I can figure out reasons, but sometimes there’s not really logic behind it. It’s not hard for me to understand that my brother would never read anything with a sniff of romance, and yet I love a well-written romance story. And even more weirdly, I don’t really enjoy writing stories of those kinds myself. Weird.

#7

Good article, Ruffnah. I particularly liked the comments attached to it.

Genre (brief & broad):

When defining genre by story elements, I contend that all of fiction can be divided into two super-genres: speculative and realistic. I define speculative (spec-fic) as having some element which does not exist in the world as we know it. Morphs don’t exist in our world, therefore furry fiction is a type of spec-fic.

In the world of professional publishing, if it’s speculative and not specifically part of some other genre, then it’s labeled fantasy/sci-fi. This makes fantasy/sci-fi almost a synonym for spec-fic. And because bookstores are lumpers, dumping a bunch of different books under one label, furry gets dumped in with all those other fantasy/sci-fi books. Now when a bunch of writers get together we like to talk nuances, and so spec-fic (fantasy/sci-fi) gets split into dozens of sub-genres.

FYI: Genre can also be defined by target audience (the many sub-genres for children), emotional reaction of the reader (horror, etc), the writerly skill of the author (Literary), or some other factor.