Catseye

I thought I was going to spend Our Decameron Year (and counting) catching up on a bunch of classics I haven’t read (Middlemarch is the big one), but instead I found myself… reading a bunch of midcentury popular fiction, your Jack Vances and Patricia Highsmits and Donald Westlakes. Andre Norton—a long-time employee of the Cleveland Public Library until she began working for Martin Greenberg’s Gnome Press and then became a full-time writer—is, I suppose, both a writer of midcentury popular fiction and a classic (of sorts) that I haven’t read. Despite Norton being one of the formative writers of the nascent young adult SF market (the Science Fiction Writers of America’s prize for young adult novel of the year is the Andrew Norton Award), I’m not sure I’ve ever read anything by her. I picked up Catseye at my local used bookstore for my daughter, since it’s about telepathically communicating with animals, but she has steadily maintained no interest in science fiction in non-manga form, so it kicked around my bookshelf for ages. This was fun, although I’m not sure that I’m particularly motivated to pick up any of the followup novels set in the same universe. It reminded me most of Heinlein’s Citizen of the Universe, perhaps without Heinlein’s undeniable ability to create a racetrack of a plot.

Troy Horan is a young man of “the Dipple”, a vast refugee camp for the permanent underclass of the bucolic Korwar, a vacation planet for the galaxy’s rich and powerful; Horan’s parents were, essentially, ranch owners until their home planet was ravaged by being turned, off-handedly, into a staging ground for an interplanetary war. Because of his (overstated!) facility with animals, he gets a desperately-needed contract as the employee of an exotic pet shop. There he encounters a few animals of Old Earth (two cats; a fox; a kinkajou) who seem to be able to communicate with him telepathically, and gets caught up in a criminal conspiracy that uses them as (hur-hur) catspaws. There’s an extended set piece in an unsettling alien ruin that’s excellent; I appreciated the degree to which Horan’s period as a refugee put him into alignment with the animals (rejecting, at one point, a bribe that would have returned him to his position of wealth and relative independence on his home world; a marked contrast from Heinlein’s Citizen, where the protagonist is revealed to be scion of one of Earth’s wealthiest families), and there’s some nice early-environmentalism, but it was lacking something to give it zip. Was it the opacity of Horan as a character? (Not that Heinlein’s juveniles are going to be mistaken for Kate Chopin or anything.) The lack of momentum of the plot compared to something like Have Spacesuit Will Travel? I don’t know it was enjoyable, but I might have to make a little more effort to find something pegged as Norton’s best work.