Cats in Science Fiction

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Serendipity

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This came up in discussion with a friend... there are an awful lot of science fiction stories with cats having significant roles.
  • Robert Heinlein was a cat lover and his two famous fictional cats are Pete (full name Petronius) in The Door into Summer and Pixel in The Cat that Walked through Walls.
  • Larry Niven's K'zin race of cats
  • C J Cherryh's Hani race of cats
  • Van Vogt used cats in stories like The Catarrh
  • Anne McCaffrey had barque cats
  • and so the list can go on...
There is certainly enough to write an encyclopaedia of cats in science fiction.

I have so many questions about cats in SF, but I'll start with a simple one. Which cat in science fiction is your favourite? And why?
 
Doesn't Honor Harrington have a Treecat, Nimitz as a companion. I've not read many of the books (perhaps 4 or 5), but I kinda liked the cat. If i remember correctly, there was a psychic bond between Honor and the Cat.

Honor Harrington.jpeg

Sort of linked, but i suspect that cats in the Horror genre would be more numerous.
 
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He is a bit of a supercat - they are the native intelligent species on Honor Harrington's homeworld. I hesitate to say a bit more intelligent than cats - because I've met a few cats that ..... but yes, definitely some sophisticated thinking going on there.

Years ago I read an anthology called something like "In Space they can't hear you purr".
 
Cordwainer Smith had half-cat, half-human hybrids in his Instrumentality stories.
Lovecraft was very into cats and included several, especially in the Dreamworld stories. There's one called "The Cats of Ulthar" which is entirely cat-based.
Captain Fitzroy in the later Space Captain Smith books had a striped "Bagparsian feline".
And of course there's Jones, one of the few characters to survive the Alien series.
 
I would have to say my first SF cat is still my favorite.
I am pretty sure that Andre Norton's Star Man's Son, 2250 A.D. (the book is known under several names; I read it as Daybreak, 2250, I think) is the first SF novel I ever read. I was maybe 12-13 years old.
I had to look up the names just now, but the MC Fors had a big, telepathic cat, Lyra. As a cat lover from Daybreak 1964 or so, I was charmed to see a story with a kitty in it. So... Lyra is my answer.
 
Toby Frost said:
Cordwainer Smith had half-cat, half-human hybrids in his Instrumentality stories.
Lovecraft was very into cats and included several, especially in the Dreamworld stories. There's one called "The Cats of Ulthar" which is entirely cat-based.
Captain Fitzroy in the later Space Captain Smith books had a striped "Bagparsian feline".
And of course there's Jones, one of the few characters to survive the Alien series.
Click to expand...
A Bertram Chandler had his cat-human genetically engineered hybrid species in his Rim World series. They were sexually compatible, as his character John Grimes demonstrated more than once.;)
 
Favorite cat in SF is not something I've considered before. The first candidate that springs to mind is the MC's AI cat companion in Walter Jon Williams' Implied Spaces.

There are definitely a lot of cats in the genre, presumably because authors like cats.

Other cats in SF, off the top of my head:

George RR Martin's Tuf Voyaging has a bunch of genetically engineered cats.
Valerie Valdez's novel Chilling Effect has a bunch of psychic cats running around a space ship.
The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, by Heinlein has the titular cat companion.
There's a cat character in Doorways In the Sand by Zelazny.

ETA: Just noticed the I repeated a book referenced in the OP (the Heinlein). Ah well - I did read the post - but didn't cross-reference when making my list. :)
 
There's an immortal indestructible cat in Tom Holt's novel Flying Dutch .
 
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It isn't science fiction, but my favourite story involving a cat is 'The Cat Who Walked By Himself' by Rudyard Kipling. There's a marvellous retelling of it by the Dean of Canterbury on Youtube.

Agree though that there can only be one winner but best cat in scifi - The Cat from Red Dwarf.
 
paranoid marvin said:
It isn't science fiction, but my favourite story involving a cat is 'The Cat Who Walked By Himself' by Rudyard Kipling. There's a marvellous retelling of it by the Dean of Canterbury on Youtube.
Click to expand...
There are a lot of YouTube videos of the story but I don't recall ever hearing of it.
 
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Yes, that's the one! A wonderful tale, although I'm not sure I'd agree about 3 out of 5 'proper' men throwing things at cats. Perhaps we've changed in the 100 years since the story was written; but the cat who walks by himself never shall.
 
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