Review: The Analog Cat and Other Animals

The Analog Cat and Other Animals
Alice Dryden

Argyll Productions
December 2025

Print Edition $19.95
Ebook Edition $9.95 (DRM-free)

It already seems hard to believe, but there was a period from around 2000 to the late 2010s when furry publishing veritably overflowed with paid short story markets, mostly in the form of anthologies. FurPlanet led the pack, with three or four (or more) titles coming out every year. Now, they’re as rare as hen’s teeth. What happened? There’s a lot of factors, from the passing of editor Fred Patten to Covid ending con sales—and publishing new titles—for a few years. But the real problem was that the biggest audience for these “semi-pro” short story markets was…other furry writers who were interested in getting into them. With few exceptions, they just didn’t sell much. The general audience perception seemed to be, more or less, “Why should we pay for short stories when there’s all this free stuff online?”

I get that; some of the free stuff online is absolutely top-notch, and some of the stories I’ve read in furry anthologies have been real clunkers. But on average, the writing in the anthologies was better. And that (finally) brings me to Alice Dryden’s collection The Analog Cat and Other Animals. Most of these stories were published in those past anthologies, from the title story’s appearance in breakout anthology The Furry Future to more obscure—at least, obscure to me!—markets. (I had forgotten about Werewolves Versus Space, and never got a copy of the ambitious but short-lived furry literary magazine Allasso.) And the stories are, to a one, terrific.

The title story (dropping the “ue” from “Analogue” for this edition) is the opening story in the collection. It’s been one of my favorite furry stories since I first read it, and upon a reread, it still is. It’s short; it deservedly won the Cóyotl Award; it’s hard sci-fi with a dystopian edge, yet resolutely hopeful; it’s written in second person, for reasons that become clear by the end; that ending will probably make you cry in the best way. It’s not the only story here that might, although some of the others might make you laugh out loud. There’s an underlying sweetness running through nearly all these tales, which might be a sorely needed balm for many of us right now.

Unlike a lot of furry stories (including mine), the majority of these stories have humans in them, and there’s a wide variety of anthropomorphism in the way the animal characters are portrayed, from the alien cats in “Case Study” to the normal-except-for-talking animals in the whimsically magical realist “Wolf’s Holiday” to the entirely non-anthropomorphic cat in “For I Shall Consider My Cat J/FRY”. What’s marvelous about the collection is the breadth not only in genres and literary playfulness, but in ways to approach capital-F Furry. These furries are robots and cyborgs, spirits, even gods, and always delightful.

The problem with selling anthologies, I’m told, is often that readers don’t feel like they know what they’re getting—maybe they’re only going to like half the stories, and so it feels like they’ve somehow wasted time and money. I’ve never been sure that’s the right way of looking at things, but it is what it is. Single-author collections can sell better, but they’re few and far between in furry, and rarely seem to attract the attention that novels do. The Analog Cat and Other Animals deserves attention.