Audible recommended Kitty Cat Kill Sat to me. I was pretty sure it was a blatant attempt to get cat lovers to part with their credits and will be a sycophantic attempt at fan service. But, it was on sale and I decided to give it a go.
I was very pleasantly surprised. The cat antics are mostly kept at a low volume and Argus employs a novel approach to the problems faced by a cat "manning" a space station built for humans, approaching it as an accessibility issue.
Lily is a lonely immortal uplifted cat. As she tackles an unending series of technical issues with her space station, while trying to fight off an endless series of attacks by old tech junk left in orbit and around the solar system, as well as emergent events spewing monsters that threaten what little is left of Earth's population. It's a post apocalyptic tale of constant jerry rigging of old tech in an attempt to survive.
However it is more than that, it is a first person account of Lily's journey to deal with her loneliness and pain, to find companions that will help her get out of the rut of constant trouble shooting and find out the secrets lying at the heart of the disaster that befell the solar system.
It is not a perfect book, there is some repetition and perhaps it could have been shorter. But it was very enjoyable and the long setup pays off very nicely. It is much more than just: Cat in Space.
An imaginative, feminist, and brilliantly relevant-to-today retelling of Orwell’s 1984, from the point of view of Winston Smith’s lover, Julia, by critically acclaimed novelist Sandra Newman.
The Rise of AI in Classic Science Fiction (British Library Science Fiction Classics)
Assembled with pieces by SF giants such as Isaac Asimov and Brian W Aldiss as well as the less familiar but no less influential input of earlier science fiction pioneers, this new collection of classic tales contains telling lessons for humankind’s gradual march towards life alongside the thinking machine.
This week I've been mainly reading, no. 102.
Emma Newman's second Planetfall novel After Atlas (2016) explores the Earth bound #dystopia left behind by the Atlas mission (from the first book). Only near the end do you come to realise quite how related the 2 books are. Playing with a number of standard #scifi tropes, this also includes a police procedural element. Its a breezy, if at times downbeat read & does a good job of expanding her dystopian 'world building' for the series. @bookstodon
#CfP for "Book Chapters for an edited volume: Interdisciplinary Studies on German #Philology - #Utopia and #Dystopia in German #Literature, Film, and Television", which will be published by Istanbul University Press.
I can never praise the genius of Stanislaw Lem enough.
In this vision of the future the powers that be use mind-controlling drugs (not "tech") to hide the fact that there is no real technological progress and that the world is dying. @bookstodon#stanislawlem#sciencefiction#dystopia