Post
TARGET CONTROL CATS
Years ago I ran across a humorous scifi short story about a ship's cat on a starship. Through an unlikely series of events, the cat manages to operate the ship's weapon and destroy an attacking pirate ship. It seems that the crew was incapacitated by the pirates dreaded paralysis ray. Which has no effect on cats.
Story was "Well Worth the Money" by Jody Lynn Nye. Collected in Cats in Space and Other Places.
See Also:
"A game of Rat and Dragon"
Cordwainer Smith
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_of_Rat_and_Dragon
Ah! You are absolutely correct! Fits perfectly. How could I have forgotten Cordwainer Smith's masterpiece?
@nyrath @Nick_Stevens_graphics And here I didn’t suggest it because I figured you had already considered it and was thinking of something else.
Nope, I'm an old man, and i tend to be forgetful.
@nyrath Are you familiar with the British sci-fi/humour TV series Red Dwarf? 3 million years of feline evolution...
This was an entertaining story, but seemed unique.
To my surprise, I heard that there is another such story: CATFANG (Star Stormers #3)
by Nicholas Fisk. In which a cat attacking a ball of string is used as a make shift targeting computer for the ship's weapons.
Which leads me to wonder: are there any other scifi stories like this?
@nyrath
Not sure if same track, but there is David Brin's @davidbrin Uplift series, where dolphins and chimps have been enhanced to human level intelligence and collaborate in space travel.
Unrelated to that, I like to think we humans today should try harder to communicate with whales first and perhaps squid or octopi later, which are about as alien to us as anything arriving in a flying saucer.
They communicate by colour and texture!
@nyrath The first Berserker story "Fortress Ship" has a monkey trained to play strategy games by non-sapient means.
Yes, that story was based on the Machine Educable Noughts And Crosses Engine
https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/futuregames.php#menace
The ball of string thing sounds like a variant on the use of randomization to prevent warfare from being totally deterministic. I recall at least two stories dealing with the problem, by Sheckley (I think) and maaybe Asimov.
"The Game of Rat and Dragon" by Cordwainer Smith is about telepathic cats who partner with telepathic humans to fight space monsters. But not just cats by themselves.
I think Fred Saberhagen's Berserkers have a block of radioactive material in their core for a similar purpose.
The closest one that comes to mind is "Trouble with Treaties," Katherine MacLean & Tom Condit. Not quite the same, humans pretend that the ship's cat is their king in order to bamboozle credulous aliens.
The 'feel" of many Eric Frank Russell is similar I think...
At least the cat's name was not "Offog"
@nyrath not exactly the same, but Kitty Cat Kill Sat is about an uplifted cat controlling a weapons satellite, so all the missile launches are quite intentional
Kitty Cat Kill Sat by Argus is not quite the same, but it is one of the best scifi novels I've read in the last five years. It is just begging to be made into a game or something.
@nyrath As an instinctive contrarian, I quickly grew tired of the sci fi meme trope of Humans are scary/unique because X. Yawn!
We need more of that for other species. Like cats. Trilobytes. Tumbleweed. Bacteriophages.
That's a common bit in "Earth is space Australia"/deathworlder/HFY stuff. (Which of the three a story is boils down to human jingoism: "Space Australia" is the "we"re just weird" end, while HFY is the "we kick everyone's asses" end.)
I'd be interested in reading that, if you ever remember the title.
Perhaps you are thinking of "Trouble with Treaties," Katherine MacLean & Tom Condit. Not quite the same, humans pretend that the ship's cat is their king in order to bamboozle credulous aliens. The humans want to convince the aliens that humans are part of a multi species empire. So they pretend that all their pets are intelligent.
A classic!
"Listen! We must have dogs, we Masians! Dogs to like us, as they like men!"
I used trilobytes as a small bit of inspiration for a non humanoid alien in a story. It's eyes had an external calcite cover, with the internal anatomy unknown. But unlike trilobites they had higher radiation adaptations due to evolving on a planet bathed in increased UV from a K type star. They where over all as unremarkable as the human character, just different.
हिति , in Nepāl Bhāṣā, is the word for a shared community water tap. Even in modern Newar cities, these ancient structures still pour out fresh mountain water piped through ancient underground filters and conduits. They are a place to wash, to talk, to drink, to meet the locals: a nourishing, refreshing social-ecological place.
