Welcome to Issue 6:  Hibernation As winter melts into spring, readers and bears alike awake from their hibernation. Emerge from your cave, dear reader-bear, look around, and see the new stories we have for you to read! * * * Dragon Child by Stella B. James Double Helix by Lucia Iglesias The Bone Poet and God by Matt Dovey The Hedgehog and the Pine Cone by Gwynne Garfinkle As If Waiting by A. Katherine Black The Adventures of WaterBear and Moss Piglet by Sandy Parsons * * * Once you’ve seen these stories—full of dragons and bears; creatures gigantic and minuscule; voyages both out into the universe and inward to the truest…

Welcome to Issue 5:  Mind-Expansion Frogs, toads, and mind-altering experiences… Is there any more powerfully, permanently mind-altering experience than reading a story?  A good story doesn’t just stay with you, it can change you.  It can expand your mind.  Stories are how we navigate the world, and when we let others control our stories, we lose our voices, our power, our agency, and even who we are.  But when we are free to explore and find the stories that resonate—they can give us voice, power, agency, and help us understand who we are. The great thing about furry fiction is that it doesn’t accept the normal constraints laid upon us…

Welcome to Issue 4:  Staples and Spice In furry fiction, some animals are the staples, and others are the spice.  Doing a round-up of stories in our first year, for instance, Zooscape has published four times as many cat stories as, say, elephant or octopus stories.  People like cats, so there are a lot of stories about them.  Fewer people seem to feel compelled to write stories about, oh, manta rays or sentient piñatas. In this issue, the staple is foxes and wolves, and the spice is turtles and insects.  Wolves who are out of their element; foxes who are on journeys.  Turtles who carry entire worlds on their backs;…

Welcome to Issue 3:  Transformation Transformation has always held a place of significance in the world of furry fiction.  Those of us who love animals also love to imagine becoming animals, or imagine animals becoming us.  Transformation stories can blur the lines between humanity and our animal cousins, or throw those lines into sharp relief. The very act of reading fiction is transformative — for a brief time, you become someone else, somewhere else, thinking someone else’s thoughts.  So, take your own journey of transformation through theses stories, and find out who you are when you come out on the other side. * * * A Warm, Dark Place in…

Welcome to Issue 2:  Artifacts Book-ended between cats, you will find in this issue a variety of artifacts.  Ancient artifacts that belong in a museum, and artifacts that don’t think of themselves as inanimate.  Powerful artifacts that can do great good when wielded in the right paws, or great damage when the right paws can’t stop them.  So, wander through this library of an issue, examining the artifacts along the way.  Someday, instead, perhaps they will examine you… * * * Cat of Thunder by John Taloni Bibelots and Baubles by Shauna Roberts New Hire at the Final Library by Laurence Raphael Brothers The Move by Kristi Brooks ¡Viva Piñata!…

Welcome to Issue 1:  Cats and Boots The first question most people ask about furry fiction is, “What about reptiles?  Do they count?  They don’t have fur!”  But furry fiction isn’t just about having fur — it’s about empathy, most often with animals, but sometimes anthropomorphic literature reaches even further into the unfamiliar and finds ways to make it familiar. For our first issue, we offer a journey that will take you from the familiar to the very fringe of furry fiction.  From a dog experiencing the apocalypse and two fables about cats and boots, we’ll take you to eerie places where humans don’t quite belong, and finally end on…

Welcome to the launch of Zooscape! Animals are among the most precious and fascinating resources in our world.  Their variety extends from bizarre deep sea creatures to cuddly friends who sit on our couches hoping for a bite of your sandwich.  They are the most extreme aliens we’ve truly encountered and also the archetypes we tell fairy tales about.  When we tell stories about animals, we’re telling stories about ourselves, both as we are and as we could become.  Furry fiction includes all varieties of stories featuring anthropomorphic animals — from talking dragons to witches’ familiars, from animal-like aliens to Aesop’s fables, and everything in between. Furry fiction is an…