Book Report: Cat Pictures Please
You may have noticed in the recent post where I talked about the schedule of this blog that I only mentioned the first Monday of every month. Second Mondays are for Excerpts (work in progress) or Spotlights (this started out being about a book of mine that’s recently come out or is soon to come out, then expanded to be about books other people have coming out), and third Monday is for writing advice. The fourth Monday of each month I usually take off, but because I’ve finished a couple books recently, I’m going to start a book report week that will go into that fourth Monday sometimes, when I have a book to report on.
This is a little different from a Spotlight in that the book hasn’t come out recently, I guess, or in that it’s not a furry book—usually I think of the Spotlight as a “go look for this book at your next convention” feature. Maybe this will just end up being a replacement Spotlight feature some months, I dunno. This month I read a book of short stories and I wanted to tell you about it.
Naomi Kritzer is not a furry, though one of her stories was nominated for an Ursa Major award, a fact she was unaware of until the Ursa Major Award anthology contributor copy landed on her doorstep. When I first met her at a WorldCon, she said, “Oh, you’re the one who won all those Ursa Major awards,” which was not a sentence I expected to hear at a WorldCon.
I got to hang out with her at a few other conventions and she was always great to talk to. Her Twitter account is always full of local Minneapolis/Minnesota politics as well as SFF and writing; she cares a great deal about people and about politics as a way to help people.
In her story “Cat Pictures Please,” the narrator is a search engine that has developed consciousness. It wants very badly to help people, and finds all kinds of indirect ways to do that, only to be frustrated by people’s inability to accept help even when it is literally being shoved in front of their face. The story won a Hugo Award in 2016 and embodies the strengths of her writing: all the people, including the AI, are real people, and the AI’s frustration with them is our frustration with our friends who know they should drink less but don’t; who hate their jobs but won’t look for a new one. It’s also our frustration with ourselves, because we are also those people.
All of Naomi’s stories feel real and tangible in that way. As someone who loves character, I really appreciate her writing because she, too, puts her characters at the heart of every story. Whether her narrator is a mom with a precocious child who seems to have the greenest of thumbs or a woman who keeps running into the same con man over and over, they feel real. Their worries are relatable and their stories feel real because we can imagine knowing them very easily.
There’s a lot of imagination in these seventeen stories. From AIs to Baba Yaga to alien sex toys, the worlds here are our world with just a little (or a large) tweak. I had a great time venturing into every story, not knowing what to expect because there’s such variety in them.
Lastly, I have to mention “So Much Cooking,” the final story in the collection, published in 2015. It basically follows a recipe blog during a pandemic, and it’s…a little too familiar now.
You can get Cat Pictures Please from the publisher, or anywhere you get books. I enjoyed it a lot and I think that if you like my writing, you’ll like it too.