Magicats! [book]

 Magicats! [book]

Space-Time for Springers: This is just "my cat is sad" but wacky. A kitten convinced it will grow up to be human. 

The Game of Rat and Dragon: This is some real extreme nonsense 1970s sci-fi. Things from the dark eat you if you travel through warp space, but human brains are too slow to react to the millisecond attacks, so they have to make psychic entanglement with strong hunter cats. There is vague romantic undertones to this. 

The Cat from Hell: Oh, it's that stephen king story.  It's that thing from the tales from the darkside movie. The one king doesn't know how cats or mouths work. 

Out Of Place: I don't remember anything about this story and have just reskimmed it right now and still can't tell you anything about it. 

Schrödinger's Cat: I absolutely love Ursula K Leguin, but oof, this book just didn't work. It has a strong feeling of a metaphor based on some not quite right 1970s pop understanding of physics. Maybe it's just weird and abstract? It feels like it's supposed to be "what if this quantum mechanics stuff was in the normal world?" but none of the stuff explained it anything.

Groucho: A guy is a hollywood agent and then turns into a cat then is a movie star then probably dies ironically or has to get fixed at the end or something. This is another one I barely remember. 

My Father, the Cat: This story is so weirdly low stakes. For magic reasons a woman has a talking cat for a dad, her fiance comes home and the daughter insists she tells him, but the dad michigan J Frogs it and this is very sad somehow. 

The Cat Man: This might be the best story in here. It's a weird "torn apart by weasels" style adventure story. There is a tiny island with one guy living on it with a treasure,T the semi pirate sailor brings him supplies and some cats. The cats overbreed the island and the whole surface is covered with thousands of blood thirsty cannibal cats. Then at the end when the sailor comes back a final time the whole ocean around this island is just murder cats. 

Some Cats are Born: This is very twilight zone, it's that story where someone thinks something is aliens then something else is aliens then the first thing is aliens. 

The Cat Lover: I don't know what happened in this, I just reread it and still don't know what happens. Someone has an old sick awful cat so they drown it in a tub, then it comes back to life and is young again, but then it actually didn't, or something. 

Jade Blue: I don't know, It's the future and they genetically engineered a cat to be a mom for some kid, and also there is a time machine but mostly it's a story a cat breast feeds a kid drugs. 

Tom Cat:  A rich aunt is going to leave all their money to a cat, so the nephew decides to marry the cat and have sex with it. The intro to the story magicats wrote specifically mentions the story doesn't make any sense. 

Sonya, Crane Wessleman, and Kittee: It's the future and a rich guy owns a weird naked catgirl and his wife hates it. Then he dies and the cat girl eats his corpse. 

The Witches Cat: This had a very kiki delivery service sort of story, but also I can't remember any details of what actually happened. I think not much happened. 

Antiquities: This is one of those short stories you can tell the author had an idea of a story but just vaugely wrote down the main parts and called it a short story. There is a sherlock homes type mystery, and it turns out they dug up mummy cats from egypt to fertilize british fields then the woman is named baset. It's a very "yeah, I get it" type story. 

A Little Intelligence: Murder mystery about nuns who have to take care of some alien diplomats. alien is killed and one cat. Solved because earlier the cat was meowing and people kept saying "he says hello!" so the alien figured the nuns could talk to the cat and had to kill it as a witness. 

The Cat: This is a short story set in a preexisting sci-fi fantasy series and it is all made up words and concepts and is totally incomprehensible. 

Afternoon at Schrafft's: A wizard tells his cat familiar he doesn't need him, then accidently turns himself into a dinosaur and a frog. Sort of a nothing story to finish the book. It spelled sephiroth the videogame way at least.  

Ps. This book rules. it's an anthology of 18 sci-fi and fantasy short stories about cats. it is my last book to read for the year and I read it story by story over all of 2023.