Saturday 1 December 2001

Pic of the day: One of my Class Menagerie T-shirts. Because I am a certified furry fanboy.

Fuzzy furry thoughts

It is creepy how a little sleep can change a human mind. This morning, I woke up and felt the need to write fiction again. (You know, this way of saying it, it sounds like some ancient curse or something. "You feel the need to hunt the innocent ...") I haven't been writing much lately. I've mostly spent my hobby time playing the newest computer games.

I guess I may have been in part inspired by the success of Fox Cutter. A hobbyist and programmer not unlike me, only with more perseverance, he has relentlessly worked on his online story and brought it up to the size of a novel. (Warning: I suppose you want to check out his work. Be aware that even though it is about furry characters, it is not written for children.)

***

Anyway, this morning I sat down and wrote some furry fiction. Well, actually it stopped fairly early into the furry part. And just so you don't get me wrong, I still mean furry as in "anthropomorphic".

The pseudo-science behind this fiction is that there are many universes in parallel, each with their own Earth. (You could say there is an extra dimension, or even several of them, and that these worlds are our Earth but it varies along these dimensions, just like our Earth varies as you move north or south, showing different life forms.) On some of these Earths, intelligent life has taken different forms than it did here. So instead of beach apes becoming intelligent, walking on two legs and talking, it may have happened to dogs or cats or squirrels.

Why would this happen? Well, one way of seeing it is that there are a virtually infinite number of universes, so you simply sort them by whether or not they have intelligent life. Another possibility is that concepts like intelligence "leaks" from one universe to another. And of course you have a modified Däniken hypothesis: After all, modern human scientists are struggling with the concepts of multi-dimensional universes already. A far more advanced species might be able to "breach the fourth wall" and actually travel to parallel worlds, setting events into motion with a technology that can not be distinguished from magic.

Not that I believe any of that rubbish for a moment. It is just my excuse to write about humanoid squirrels. Squirrels are cute. And they have absolutely fabulous tails.

***

But sleeping too little for a couple weeks takes its toll, and so in the evening I grew more and more sleepy. Eventually I could not stay awake anymore, but fell asleep in my chair again and again. I dragged myself off to bed, where I fell asleep again and dreamt that I was very very sleepy ...

When I woke up again, I felt different. Oh, I still felt sleepy, but now I felt that writing about furries was a stupid thing for me to do. (It is, but this has not stopped me before.)

This new attitude does not mean any disrespect for other writers of furry stories. Using animals as symbols of humans is an ancient tradition. I may point out that Jesus (the founder of Christianity) called king Herod a fox, and referred to his followers as sheep. (Not considered great praise in modern societies, I'm afraid.) He was also, as far as we know, the originator of the famous expressions "wolf in sheep's clothing" and "pearls for swine".

Many comics are about furry characters, from Disney's Mickey Mouse to the thought-provoking Ozy & Millie. It may be that it is easier to say things when you have created a little distance. People can think "it's a different world, it is not about us" but at the same time, they can see how it could apply to their own lives.

I guess I would like to be able to write like that. To create parables that mean something to people. But I am not able to do that. When I write fiction, my characters tend to gradually take on a life of their own, and I end up reporting on a life that is different but no deeper or more meaningful than any other. The more I write, the more it becomes pure entertainment instead of preaching.

I bet C.S. Lewis never had that problem. If anything, his books became more and more preachy as time went by. Man, it must feel good to actually be able to say something deep.