Progress is being made on the Cóyotl Awards, a juried award for furry fiction to be run by the Furry Writers' Guild, with the first winners announced at Rainfurrest 2012 next September.

While some details remain private to guild members, preliminary rules have been published. The award is currently to be presented in General and Mature sections for the best Short Story, Novella (over 7500 words) and Novel (over 40,000 words).

Each member may submit five nominations to each category for works they are uninvolved with to a five-member council, rating them on plot, character, setting and literary merit; the four works with the highest weighted average will be voted on by guild members.

Update (18 Oct): The restriction on the number of nominations was removed before the ballot closed.

Is the new Japanese animated feature Redline Furry? No, but its trailer, just released in the U.S., does show a human racecar driver (with an impossible Pompadour) competing against background Furry bioengineered or alien opponents in the far future.

Redline, directed by Takeshi Koike, produced by Tokyo’s Madhouse animation studio over seven years, and introduced on the international film festival circuit in 2009, comes to the USA for a one-week theatrical run. It is playing in downtown Los Angeles this month and in NYC from January 6, and will be released on DVD and Blu-Ray on January 17.

Two young German Shepherds, year-and-a-half old Devaki and Makita, were shot and killed on November 12. Co-owners Shannon Hautala, Gary Kuoppala and Alexis Gunderson spoke with the press.

The owners were doing chores on their farm in Clinton Township, Iron Range, Minnesota.

The dogs ducked under a fence and ran into the woods. The owners started calling for the dogs as soon as they went out of sight. Hautala said she heard gunshots shortly afterwards.

The next morning, Hautala found the dogs dead near a hunting stand on the adjoining property. Hautala said the hunters admitted to her they had shot the dogs. Kuoppala said:

All they said is they can shoot anything that comes on their land and if the dogs come on their land, they can shoot them.

The Lion Man of the Hohlenstein Stadel is a 32,000-year-old sculpture which depicts a humanoid figure with the head of a lion. Fragments of it were first discovered in 1939 by archaeologist Otto Völzing, in a cave named Stadel-Höhle im Hohlenstein (Stadel cave in Hohlenstein Mountain), in the Lonetal (Lone valley) in the Swabian Alps, Germany.

The figure, pieced together over many years as fragments were found, stands around 30cm tall, and was carved from mammoth ivory using a flint knife. It may represent a mythical creature, or possibly a shaman hiding under an animal hide.

Debate has raged over whether the figure is male or female, and the discovery of approximately 1,000 new fragments may help resolve the issue. The sculpture will be disassembled and rebuilt to include the new fragments.

Hoo-hah! Roscoe, does this bring back memories! Memories of all the rip-roaring space operas that I devoured during my junior-high and high-school years. Among my favorites were the Chalice of Death stories by Calvin M. Knox, in Science Fiction Adventures magazine; the last of which was the wonderfully-titled “Vengeance of the Space Armadas” (collected into Lest We Forget Thee, Earth by Ace in 1958).

A hundred thousand years ago, there had been a planet called Earth. It had been a proud world ruling a thousand vassal stars, but its stellar empire had turned upon and annihilated their conquerors, and wiped the name of Earth from the maps of space. ~~~~ But Earthmen still survived . . . a strange race of worldless men and women, by tradition advisers to rulers, but never themselves ruling. Wanderers through myriad planets, their origin was a half-forgotten legend. …

It was later revealed that “Calvin M. Knox” was a pseudonym of Robert Silverberg, who had hacked out the Knox stories in his spare time while a college student, for beer money. Silverberg said later that they made it hard for the critics to accept him as a “serious author”. [Ed Valigursky's 'racy' cover likely didn't help. Update: See Mr. Silverberg's comments.]

You know what? I’m damn glad that he wrote them, because uncritical teenagers need blood-&-thunder space opera just as much, if not more, as they need Serious Literature.

I suppose video games have assumed the popular-fiction role that pulp magazines such as Captain Future, Planet Stories, and Startling Stories used to fill. Kudos to Sean for bringing space opera back to print with his “D-Evolution” s-f novels, of which Death Drop is the first.

Pueblo, CO, Vintage Six Media, October 2011.
Trade paperback $19.95 (560 pages; Amazon), EPUB, Kindle, MOBI, PDF $9.95.