Customer Reviews

Catfantastic

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(0)
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Belden, Wilanne Schneider: "The Gate of the Kittens" - Yes, the title is a reference to Norton's novel _The Gate of the Cat_; this is a Witch World story, although not directly related to the novel.

Bell, Clare "The Damcat": The writing style here reminds me of Lilian Jackson Braun's `oral history' stories, without an interviewer. The elderly narrator worked on the Black Canyon dam project in 1934, along with a Hopituh and his wildcat, and has his reasons for saying that it can't be demolished.

Boyer, Elizabeth H. "Borrowing Trouble" - No relation to "Trouble" later in this volume; the human protagonist is a fire wizard's apprentice who gets a familiar to keep from being expelled as hopeless. The character's names are all Scandinavian, but there aren't many other Scandinavian overtones.

Cahoon, Blake "Day of Discovery" - Toys with the `cats are aliens' theory (see Norton's _Star Ka'at_ for an example). The human characters are physicists who may answer the eternal question, how can a cat disappear in a small apartment?

Carr, Jayge "Wart" - Spacers' shipscats run the gamut from the Biotech shipscats in Lackey's SKitty stories, where they've been genetically modified for greater intelligence, to this story. Wart and his rival Grimalkin not only don't mindspeak each other or the humans aboard ship; Wart doesn't think in particularly sophisticated terms, although this story is told from his point of view.

Dunn, Marylois "Yellow Eyes": Cat and White Cat also appear in _Tales of the Witch World 1_ and Catfantastic 2's "Shado". White Cat, the female, acts as a familiar to the lady of the castle, while the macho Cat spends his time hunting, bossing the other cats and dogs around, and cadging food in the kitchens. `Yellow Eyes', a new hound bought at a fair, is much brighter, by cat standards, than the other hunting dogs. She's detected the presence of a strange animal in the countryside that's scaring the game away - a giant `leaf-ear.'

Farley, Donna "It Must Be Some Place" - "Imagine tossing a pair of magic socks straight through a dimensional doorway!" Butterfly, a magical tortoiseshell tom, knows more about magic than Jack, the apprentice doing laundry, and his master put together, but he's no familiar. Fortunately, he has enough of a soft spot for Jack to help him find out where lost socks go, before his master gets home from a wizards' convention. (Farley is well aware that all tortoiseshell cats are female; that's how you know that the toms are magical. Read the story, OK?)

Friedman, C.S. "The Dreaming Kind" - The genetic experiment's sole modification to the kittens was to enhance their vision. Why, then, did their minds seem to be affected, so that they reacted to things that weren't there? Or at least, to things the researchers couldn't see...

Griffin, P.M. "Trouble" - Dory has tremendous potential, but she's too young either to protect herself from a lynch mob, or to mindspeak with Trouble, the cat who will become her familiar when she grows up - so he takes matters into his own paws. This story is continued in Catfantastic 4 "The Neighbor"; Griffin's stories in Catfantastic 2, 3, and 5 are unrelated, unfortunately.

Lackey, Mercedes "SKitty": See my review of Lackey's _Werehunter_, which contains all the SKitty stories to date.

Mathews, Patricia Shaw "The Game of Cat and Rabbit" - Another ship's cat story, but this is an ordinary, non-bioengineered cat (although the narration is much more sophisticated than Wart's, for example). The ship has a crew of 2, counting the cat - and an unwanted, invisible passenger that *sounds* like a rabbit. (No, this is not a rip-off of Norton's novel _Plague Ship_.)

Mayhar, Ardath "From the Diary of Hermione" - Hermione is a 19th century professional familiar, but her human associate recently made a serious error in judgment. The style is a deliberate imitation of a certain type of old-fashioned diarist, capitalizing words at odd intervals to indicate emphasis (like Miss Climpson in the Lord Peter Wimsey novels, but less energetic). Hermoine reappears in Catfantastic 2, 3 and 5, but not 4.

Miller, Ann and Rigley, Karen Elizabeth "It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's...Supercat!" - The narrator is a science fiction writer who actually *has* seen UFOs. Her cat, with neutral coloring, eyeglass-markings, and a timid disposition, is named Clark Kent. :)

Norton, Andre "Noble Warrior" - The title is just the English translation of the main character's name, Thragun Neklop, a *real* Siamese cat, given by a princess to a British East India Company officer in thanks for saving her father's life. Upon Thragun's arrival in England, he finds that even this strange country has thewada - house elves or brownies, in English terminology, but don't think `Harry Potter's Dobby' here. Hob doesn't do housework; he plays spiteful tricks, sometimes fatal, if he's crossed. A `Noble Warrior' story appears in each volume of Catfantastic (5 so far). Incidentally, Thargun is the first to say, in #2, that a house guard and a thewada normally have very little to do with one another.

Scarborough, Elizabeth Ann "Bastet's Blessing" - Shuttle is left behind when his archeologist companion heads out for the excavation season in Egypt. Soon Dr. Mercer is facing the old Imhotep two-step, and her best defense is her soulwalking cat. (After all, in life the ancient Egyptians worshipped cats.) Shuttle's speech patterns are very dignified; he sounds as though he stepped out of a Victorian novel into the home of a modern archaeologist. Upon his first meeting with Dr. Mercer at an animal shelter, although she can't understand his speech: "Madam, please disregard my present habitation. I was evicted from my former lodgings because of xenophobic tendencies toward my species..."

I am not a fan of short stories, but I enjoy the series of Catfantastic books. It combines my two loves, cats and fantasy. The stories are all excellent. The authors really have an insider's knowledge of the cat's mind. I laughed, cried, and cheered for the cats throughout the book. It's the type of book that you race to finish, but feel sad when you reach that last page because you know it will awhile before you'll get to read another like it.

If you like both cats and fantasy, you will like these stories. Some of the characters that appear in this first book make return appearances in the other volumes. I look forward to new editions and recommend any of the volumes.

Even though I am not a Sci Fi person per se, I do love cats (I have 4!!). I thought I would give this book a try, and I am very glad that I did. This book is a wonderful collection of stories, all involving cats of course, in a wealth of different genres. Some were adventure, some were 'love stories', some straight comedy in a variety of manners. I truly enjoyed reading this book, and plan to read books II through IV!

The late Andre Norton was a great cat lover and often wrote cats or catlike creatures into her novels. Here she teams with the incredibly prolific Martin H. Greenberg to edit the first of five delightful feline-themed anthologies whose cat-heroes and -heroines live sometimes in the future, sometimes in the past, and sometimes in dimensions other than our own. The 15 original stories here collected include Wilanne Schneider Belden's "The Gate of the Kittens" (written in Norton's own Witch World series), Clare Bell's "The Damcat" (a Hopi shaman and his bobcat partner help defend a dam being built in the 1930's against malevolent sorcery), Elizabeth H. Boyer's "Borrowing Trouble" (an accident-prone apprentice sorcerer and his feline familiar end up saving his master from a jealous enemy), Mercedes Lackey's "SKitty," "Jayge Carr's "Wart," and Patricia Shaw Mathews's "The Game of Cat and Rabbit" (cats gone to space in the distant future prove their worth both onworld and off), Marylois Dunn's "Yellow Eyes" (a cat and a hound in a vaguely Medieval setting team up to find out why the local game is disappearing), Donna Farley's "It Must Be Some Place" (a tortoiseshell tomcat helps a wizard's apprentice search the Land of Lost Things for a missing invisibility charm), P. M. Griffin's "Trouble" (in a city vaguely like Dublin, a cat leads a young girl to the wizard who can help her learn to use her innate magical powers), Ann Miller and Karen Elizabeth Rigley's "It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's...Supercat!" (an sf writer and her cat team up with an extraterrestrial to capture an escaped alien bird), and Norton's own "Noble Warrior" (given to an early-19th-Century English sea captain for his daughter, a Siamese cat from a long line of palace guardians teams up with the family's Hob, or house-spirit, to defend the child and her great-aunt from a sinister governess). Any lover of cats will delight in this anthology, which has remained in print for 20 years and bids fair to last as long again.

...then you've got to try this anthology. Any one who enjoys seeing the world through the eyes of these not-so-usual cats can find something to sink their claws into here. There's SF, there's fantasy, humor, drama . . . almost any style you could wish for. Not all the stories will appeal to everyone, but the collection offers the reader a buffet of good choices with quality stories. I admit, I liked the second anthology slightly better, but "Critical Cats" had me seriously teary eyed. The fun of an anthology is that these are short stories and you can pick one to read anytime! It's my favorite travel reading!

This is the first of (so far) 4 books of shorts about cats. Many talents have come together to write about critters they are obviously fond of. I have a "89 paperback of this book and it, along with the rest of the series have been all over the country and read by quite a few different people who have been unable to locate a copy of the older books...If you don't have these try and fine a copy...used book stores, yard sales and library sales are good places to start and there are a lot of books well worth the effort...this series is one of them!

This is a wonderful book, filled with lots of stories of cats and magic. Any cat fanatic should love it!

Nothing quite like curling up with a purring cat in your lap and an adventures cat in your book! ^_^

As with all compendiums there are some good, and some bad stories, but I feel that the good drasticaly outweight the bad. I've found this to be a well collected anthology series and would highly recommend it to anyone who is fond of cats!

It's short stories. What are you going to do? After all, some are bound to be fantastic, and others... well others just aren't as good. That's how I felt about this book. My favorite was The Dam Cat, but many of the others were good too. Cat lovers everwhere: it's a wonderful must read.