Title Demain les chats Author Bernard Webber Cover Art Philip Conrad Publisher Albin Michel - 2016 First Printing Albin Michel - 2016
	Title Sa majesté des chats Author Bernard Webber Cover Art --- Publisher Albin Michel - 2019 First Printing Albin Michel - 2019
	Title La Planète des chats Author Bernard Webber Cover Art --- Publisher Albin Michel - 2020 First Printing Albin Michel - 2020
	Category Science Fiction Warnings None Main Characters Pythagore, Bastet, Nathalie, Roman, Esmerelda, Angelo, Tamerlain Main Elements Cats, Post-apocalypse Website ---

Demain les chats

Sa majesté des chats

La planète des chats

I'm reading mostly SF this year and I'm poking around the library, checking out if they have something in French since I rarely read in that language and I found a trilogy, a post-apocalyptic tale from the POV of cats!!! Oh I had to read that even if it turned out to terrible. Which it didn't, but I wouldn't say it was great, and I think it would depend on the reader.

It starts off with a female housecat called Bastet just living her life with her "servant" Nathalie (she's a cat, you're fooling yourself if you think you own yours...) and just seeing the events of this domestic world through her eyes, trying to understand us. One quirk of this cat, she believes she should be able to communique with any other living creature's spirit through the waves generated by her purring, and will eventually learn to astral project.

Then she meets Pythagore, a siamese used for experiements in a lab, so he has a USB connector in his head through which he can connect to the internet and learn about humans. What follows is a bit of an info dump about the history of humans and cats (which I enjoyed) and also the cats commenting on human foibles (religion, war, etc). However at that point it got a little preachy, basically saying what kind of dumb people would believe in a giant bearded man watching you from the sky? And when war starts all the scientists are killed by religious fanatics, and the cats again think humans are dumb as rocks, but that's assuming science is always good and religion always evil, and of course that's not true either.

There were some moments that made me laugh, like when Bastet discovers she's named for an ancient Egyptian goddess, she imagines herself in that form, being worshipped by humans providing her with still writhing mice, bowls of milk and plates of "croquettes"...those crunchy pellet things. I loved how the fact that she was a domestic cat made her imagine she would be provided with unlimited supplies of processed cat food. Or when she doesn't like her servant's boyfriend, she wonders why Nathalie doesn't just climb up onto the roof and yowl in the night, plenty of elligible males will present themselves and she can pick out a better one...

I mentioned a war, maybe halfway through we get the apocalypse of a post-apocalypse story. Humans go to war, then since no one is taking care of the rats, they multiply and spread the plague. Cats are immune to the disease but the rat population explodes till there are millions of them against thousands of cats. A lion that gets loose from the zoo comes in handy, but the cats realize (well Pythagore and his student Bastet) that they need to gather up the rest of the humans, find an island where they can blast the bridges so they can be safe from the rats. And we end there, wondering how long their food will last trapped on a small piece of land in the Seine...with an adult male lion...

The cover of the book though, I like it but there isn't a single black cat in the tale, I kept incorrectly picturing Bastet as black instead of a spotted white!!

Sa majesté des chats

It's cat porn! No, really, an indecent amount of the book is spent on Bastet's sex life. Covering the topic a little bit is one thing, particularly to contrast cats with humans (we get a tiny amout of human porn, but nothing indecent), but this started to be a little much. Especially since the author is making it all up right? I mean these cats are starting to sound more human than the humans. And then the tale gets even more and more ridiculous with hot air ballons, a cockatoo that speaks multiple human and animal languages, pigs that put humans on trial. I mean I get it, the author was making a point about how humans treat livestock, or the animals we experiment on, and now they have the opportunity to return the favour. I can accept this in a fantasy like Redwall, where animals are essentially furry humans, or maybe something like Animal Farm where you know it's an allegory and that Orwell isn't trying to say that pigs could one day take over and run a farm, once again they were standins for humans. And I guess that's what Werber was going for here, a kind of Animal Farm, but somehow it feels like he wants it to be SF but it's all turning into anthropomorphic fantasy without really a reason for why the animals are suddenly getting as smart as humans, one or two cats with USB connections doesn't explain everyone else. I'm all for believing animals are smarter than we give them credit for, but I think we are unable to appreciate their intelligence because we ourselves are not intelligent enough to recognize an alien intelligence. But no, I just can't see a bunch of cats, pigs, dogs all sitting down discussing how to build a dirigiable.

Also Bastet is full of herself, yeah, she's a cat but I start to get irked when people make stupid mistakes because they are full of themselves, at least she's aware of it, and does realize her mistakes afterwards, though I've yet to see her actually learn from them.

But...I've read two of the three books, seems a bit silly not to find out how it all ends, even though you know as a first-person narrator Bastet has to survive, after all it's literally her story?

La Planète des chats

Well, let's just say I got to the end because I'm a completionist. There were far too many moments where I had to "hang y disbelief until dead". Like trying to move forty-thousand people on foot from New York to Boston...and we're not talking an army of fit soldiers but a ragtag bunch of people, some of which are pregnant, others are 80 years old, being attacked by rats as they go (at least that provides some of the food whose logisitics weren't explained), and well, yeah. I was amused by the fact that Hillary Clinton gets to be a character, finally becoming President, but since all communications are cut off and people are fragmented in their own enclaves, it's just those 40k people in New York...though she was made out to be the villain, trying to unreasonably block Bastet every step of the way, most humans were...but then cats probably do think that of us, we close doors to keep the out of rooms, or we won't open them to let them out of the house, the food is kept in a closet they can't get into.

And the grand finale...it takes like a year to come up with a vaccine, apparently we can do the opposite in about thirty days, including the time it takes to test and stuff...not convinced.

Basically the author had a point to make about communication and failure of communication, many of which were valid, and there were moment I did really enjoy, but as I mentioned before, the cat becomes more and more human, I suppose to be expected under the circumstances, and could be a member of any unheard or ignored community. Heck, if I ran into a cat that was speaking perfect English, spouting science and military tactics, I think I would stop thinking of her as "just a cat". But then a lot of the humans were intentionally portrayed as dumb, and the mob usually is.

I did enjoy the little historical blurbs at the start of each chapter. A little bit of history here, a little bit of science here, and tales of Oscar and Larry the cats that made me smile.

Anyway, I can't say I recommend this trilogy unless you really, really love cats, and definitely don't read this if you have a phobia about rats. I'm not convinced they could grow to such numbers so fast (there lots of leftover food after the humans die out but not THAT much) but the imagery is horror inspiring.