Media

Creativity never happens in a vaccuum. The postfurry community is endlessly creative, but it would never had existed without the other things that inspire and influence its creators. From avant-garde sci-fi to silly cartoon nostalgia, we always love to hear about and share books, music and shows with a Postfurry sense of the fantastic, visionary, and humane.

None of these items are "required reading;" likely no one has experienced all of the media here, and it may not all appeal to everyone. But each of these entries had, or could have, something to contribute to the creativity of one or more postfurries, in terms of their asthetics, philosophies, tropes, or themes.

These lists are meant to be ever-expanding, and added to by anyone. If it inspired you, and you're in the postfurry community, it belongs here. If it's something you made, and you think it fits, you can put it here too. You can put a short blurb on this page (280 characters is a good guideline), or create a whole article to write a full-length review.

(Editors will periodically go through these lists to put them in alphabetical order, please feel free to do that yourself as well!)

Books - fiction

• Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow - A novel of immortality, reputation currency, and post-scarcity society, amidst the backdrop of a future Disneyworld run by competing adhocracies.
• Walkaway by Cory Doctorow - Fed up with the control of the rich and elite, a group of friends join a growing movement of creating a better society outside the default, something to which the elite begin to take umbrage, especially with immortality in the cards...
• Empress of Forever by Max Gladstone - A 20th century tech mogul is catapulted into a weird future, and finds out whether or not her prized business skills are a good fit there. Full review by Indi on Goodreads
• Glasshouse by Charles Stross - An amnesiac posthuman on the run seeks refuge in an experimental recreation of 20th century earth, but not everything is as it seems... An exploration on the nature of arbitrary mechanisms of social control and enforcement of hierarchy.

Books - non-fiction

• Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber - Explains how we have not always had money to exchange for goods.
• A Manifesto for Cyborgs by Donna Haraway - The precursor to the Xenofeminism Manifesto. One of the first pieces discussing posthuman feminism.
• Post-Scarcity Anarchism by Murray Bookchin - Post Scarcity is a concept that shows up often in Postfurry works. This text from 1986 talks about the politics behind it.
• Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard - The true inspiration for the The Matrix. Explaining that our reality is already a simulation of the real.
• TechGnosis by Erik Davis - A rambling, hypertextual guide to the hidden spirituality behind and within technology
• Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation by Laboria Cuboniks - This manifesto written by the pseudonymous feminist collective shares a number concepts with Postfurry. This text is a bit dense and other content here will hopefully be able to explain some of the concepts.

Comics (print or web)

• The Invisibles by Grant Morrison, Phil Jiminez, Jill Thompson, et al. - Freedom fighters for reality itself, in a drug-fueled aventure through different times and universes. Dated and problematic at points by a 2020s perspective, but still hugely influential for early Postfurry.

Games - computer/console

• Outer Wilds - Explore a tiny solar system that's in turns adorable, beautiful, and terrifying, as you seek to understand the time-looped supernova that keeps destroying it.
• Control (2019) - A trek through a secret agency dedicated to understanding and defending against a variety of paranatural and extradimensional phenomena. Of note are several different supernatural objects, locales and events created by, and based on the collective subconscious of humanity, and cultural associations and archetypes.
• Manifold Garden - First person puzzler in a beautiful world, of immense and intricate architecture, looping realities, subjective gravity and curved spaces. Surreal eye candy at its finest.
• Headlander - Metroidvania with a core mechanic of hotswapping the player's head into a variety of different types of robot bodies. The last human (head) is resurrected in an effort to save a space station of uploaded humans from the grasp of a megalomaniacal AI. Filled to the brim with gorgeous environments inspired by 70s sci-fi, cheesiness and all.
• VNC: The Virtual Nightclub - Burn:Cycle's spiritual successor in a sense, a point-and-click game within the titular club, packed with Y2K-era aesthetics. More or less lacks a story, its main appeal is the eye-candy. Sadly virtually impossible to find, and even harder to run.
• Sayonara Wild Hearts - "A pop album video game" telling a wordless story about heartbreak and getting back into one's flow. Fun and arcade-like gameplay, taking place within gorgeous surreal worlds themed after a tarot deck, all set and synchronized to a phenomenal original pop soundtrack.

Games - tabletop

• Mage: the Ascension - Magick is the ability to express your own paradigm of reality, regardless of the consensus of everyone else. Will you reinforce the status quo, seek power only for yourself, or work toward the self-actualization of all reality?

Film

• Paprika, directed by Satoshi Kon - In a future of devices that share dreams and therapists who explore them for their patients, who can help when dream and reality start to merge into each other?
• World of Tomorrow, and its sequels, by Don Hertzfeldt - Discusses a society where memory viewing/transplants, uploading and backup copies are commonplace, through the lens of a trio of rather poignant and emotional stories concerning loss, reminiscence and love, revolving around a girl named Emily, and her future selves and backup copies
• Gate To The Mind's Eye, soundtrack by Thomas Dolby and computer animation by numerous different organizations. Very surreal imagery, it doesn't really tell a story per se but explores the limits of computer animation in the early 1990s. The aesthetics and characters in many of the scenes are extremely postfurry.

Music

• All the work of Seeming, especially SOL: A Self-Banishment Ritual - Sounds that's both intricate and driving, lyrics that are deeply emotional and urgently raw, Seeming's music dances between waiting for the apocalypse, and learning to fight against despair.
• Foley Room, by Amon Tobin — This album and Tobin's other work takes numerous field recordings and disparate sound sources and turns them into some of the most moving and expressive music. Tobin himself is self-taught, which adds an important DIY ethos to his work -- when the genre of art you want to make doesn't yet exist, the only thing left to do is to roll up your sleeves and invent it yourself.

Television

• Steven Universe, created by Rebecca Sugar - Deeply empathetic, brightly colored, and unafraid to fight for what's right, this show is a truly inspirational work that deals beautifully with gender, queerness, and even trauma.
• She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, created by Noelle Stevenson - Another show exploring queer relationships, fighting for what you believe in, and trauma.

Visual art

• The art of Egypt Urnash Polymorphic anthropomorphic forms full of bright color, strange angles, and op-art, but still possessed of a wonderful sense of play and joy.

Web

• Pluralistic by Cory Doctorow - Often runs across postfurry adjacent topics and is an author who shows up in the fiction section.
• The Weird Studies podcast, with hosts Phil Ford and J.F. Martel: Explorations of philosophy and art, with an eye towards the notion of an aesthetic universe.
• Magnum Bullets - Gorgeous music video of a bar/club fight in a world of anthros, neon, and cybernetic modifications.