Hunter's Moon - Blog Posts

The hunter’s moon—also known as sanguine moon—is the first full moon after the harvest moon, which is the full moon nearest the autumnal equinox. Here the Moonlight Illuminates Ice crystals in the upper atmosphere to give a rainbow halo effect around the Moon. Also known as a Lunar Corona. Taken last night in my Garden with a Canon 550D and Canon 100-400 L is lens. Credit James Dyson Location Warrington Cheshire England

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So I am a really big fan of animal point-of-view fiction (or xenofiction as it's sometimes called), but I can't help feeling that the genre has so much wasted potential, and writers in this genre have fallen into so much laziness. Animal stories have been a part of human culture since pretty much the beginning of time, and the more you read of these old animal fables and tales, you realise how clever and unique a lot of these stories were. And even more recently, we've had stories such as Jungle Book, Call Of The Wild, Animal Farm.But it seems since the release of Watership Down in, that the animal fiction genre has fallen into a sort of generic mould that every story has to follow. Don't get me wrong, I ADORE wds and I've read it so many times that the pages are falling out of my copy, but I've lost count of how many books I've seen that have the same "animals live in a tribal society with their own language, culture, and religion have to escape the clutches of The Evil Humans" narrative. While there are a few recent books that don't follow this exact mould (Felidae for example) the genre has seemed so stagnant for the past 50 years or so. And one thing that bothers me about these kinds of stories is how easily they fall into these really disturbing ideas. (I don't know if "ecofascit" is the appropriate term here, but it sounds very similar) They just all seem to drone on and on about "all the humans are evil and cruel and destructive and only the animals and untouched nature are pure bla bla bla" in such an embarrassingly misanthropic way. I read Garry Kilworth's Hunters Moon (the one about foxes) last year, and I could take none of the plot seriously because the writer couldn't go a single chapter without having a laughable Humans Bad rant. I don't know. Animal stories have meant so much to global human culture throughout history, and it makes me slightly sad to see the genre become stagnant and unoriginal over the past few decades.

(and I'd love to hear any book recommendations if you have any)

A preamble to the live reading of Hunter’s Moon/The Foxes of Firstdark by Garry Kilworth

As a work within what I’m going to be calling the mythic subgenre of naturalist animal xenofiction (as coined by YouTube user Cardinal West on his excellent video detailing the history of the genre), mythic NAX for short, one of the primary appeals of a book such as Hunter’s Moon/The Foxes of Firstdark should lie in how the author incorporates real biology and behavior of the animals he’s writing about onto the fictional human-like society he’s constructing.

Thus, before we dive into the live reading on the blog, I thought it’d be good for us all to be more aware of actual fox behavior so that we may better appreciate the bits of real animal behavior incorporated into the text and recognize the artistic liberties taken by the author. I’m writing a short distillation of my preliminary research done on the following four webpages:

https://www.nwf.org/educational-resources/wildlife-guide/mammals/red-fox

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/mammals/facts/red-fox

https://www.discoverwildlife.com/animal-facts/mammals/understand-fox-behaviour/

https://www.wildlifeonline.me.uk/animals/article/red-fox-behaviour-the-social-hierarchy

Obviously, as a Warriors fan, I’m not too demanding about biological accuracy in my mythic NAX novels, but I still expect the authors to incorporate it in some way. The Erin Hunter team’s portrayal of a feral cat colony may not be completely accurate but it shows in places they are at least aware of the basics of how they operate.

I’m also not a biologist nor do I have any particular knowledge of foxes, so I’m doing all this preliminary research from scratch. Obviously, I’m not going to go super in depth or go into super academic sources. This is, afterall, being done for fun.

Distillation of my research unde the cut:

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