in which we revise the lit review chapter for that dissertation on cats in space

[lolaraincoat]

So late last summer currer, who is evil, introduced me to Bookmooch and I have wasted a lot of time there ever since. It's a bookswap website which, unlike most, functions reasonably well outside the US. But "reasonably well" has its limits: there are upwards of 250 books on my wishlist, and none of them are currently available to be sent to Canada. On the other hand, if I needed five thousand free copies of The DaVinci Code, Bookmooch would be there for me.

Anyway, I accumulated a lot of Bookmooch points sending books to Finland and Ireland and Israel and (mostly) the U.S., and I scrounged around on the Bookmooch site for books to get in exchange, and that's how I ended up with all five of C.J. Cherryh's Chanur books, which I read one and a half of, and then gave up on as repetitive and predictable. They're often mentioned as a good example of SF told entirely from an alien point of view, which is true, and the aliens are basically intelligent matriarchal cats, which is entertaining for about one short book as far as I'm concerned.

But so then I passed them on to fishwhistle. And Fishwhistle, as I've probably mentioned here a time or two already, really, really likes cats. He likes me well enough, and he likes cheesy science fiction too, but cats ... well, cats are special to him. So he loved those books. Loved them. He stayed up late for weeks at a time, reading about cats in space. And now he is sad because he has read them all. And so, my beloved interwebs, I turn to you: what other Cats In Space fiction can you think of? I've already thought of that Heinlein novel, but isn't it late-period Heinlein, which is to say horrible sludge? And then, speaking of horrible sludge, there are the Larry Niven novels with the Kzin in them, but I think Fishwhistle has read all of those, even the short-story collections by other authors, and they just make him sad because the humans and the intelligent space-cats are fighting all the time. But surely there is more Cats In Space science fiction out there somewhere?

Meanwhile it has recently occurred to me that the novel I most want to read, of all the novels in the world, is one that has not yet been written (as far as I can discover, anyway): the thinly veiled roman a clef about Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg in New York in the late 1950s. Wouldn't that make a great book? And then later, a brilliant movie?

Comments

[norah]

There's Tad Williams' Tailchaser's Song, which is not Cats In Space but is a good fantasy cat novel nonetheless.

[donata]

I don't know any Cats in Space novels, but there's Akif Pirinçci's Felidae: crime fiction written from the PoV of a cat detective. It's not science fiction, but it does have a fantasy feel to it. It's been at least 15 years since I've read it, and, even though I don't remember anything of the plot, a strong impression of supernatural spookiness still lingers.

[idlerat]

Y'know, when he said he liked Avatar, I didn't even consider that angle. I just thought, "dudes like Avatar." Cats in space!

I'm sorry you got stuck with all those credits. Why must the foreigns have such bad taste?