Wednesday, June 3, 2020

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Catfishing on Catnet by Naomi Kritzer

Catfishing on Catnet is a young adult novel by Hugo Award winning author Naomi Kritzer.  It's actually an expansion upon the same idea that won her her recent Hugo Award for the short story "Cat Pictures Please."  And its an expansion that has been highly critically acclaimed, picking up nominations for the Norton and Lodestar awards - the Nebula and Hugo (sorta) awards for YA literature.  I was waiting for the Hugo Packet to come out to get to it myself (I half expect it to be in there), but some twitter recs made it too tempting to read, so.....I didn't wait.

And Catfishing on Catnet was really worth it.  It's a YA novel featuring two protagonists - a 17 year old girl and an AI trying to figure out who they are despite circumstances that constantly conspire to prevent them from doing so.  Oh and we have a group of LGBTQ friends on a website that is based around chatting over cute animal pictures -(cat pictures preferably but any will do), a group of non straight white male friends at a high school finding each other and a near future where autonomous cars and robots are common place.  It's a lot of fun throughout, and its most frustrating point is that it ends on a cliffhanger (the sequel comes out in 2021).  So yeah, this is a strong contender for the aforementioned awards.


--------------------------------------------------Plot Summary------------------------------------------------------
 Steph is 17 years old, and has never stayed in any one place in her life long enough to settle down, thanks to her mother's insistence they stay on the move lest Steph's father - a man she does not remember - find them: after all, said father apparently tried to kill them with arson and has gotten away with deadly stalking in the past.  Her only steadying force is her friends on CatNet, an online forum/set of chat-rooms for sharing cat and other animal pictures, a group of others who feel without a place for themselves.

Unbeknownst to Steph, one of her friends on CatNet, CheshireCat, is not another person, but an AI - the very AI who runs the website and ensures it's the place for everyone to get what they need.  CheshireCat truly loves Steph and her friends, and as Steph finds herself wishing for changes in her new town, and in her life, it can't help itself from intervening.

And as a result, both Steph and CheshireCat's situations will soon come to a head, requiring both to make choices about who they are and what they truly want for themselves.
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Catfishing on Catnet does eventually - minor spoiler - turn into a story with a real antagonist causing problems for our protagonists, CheshireCat and Steph, who they have to deal with in order to get their happy (for now at least) ending.  And yet that conflict really doesn't matter - the point of this book, and the charm of this book, is not about "defeating a bad guy".  The bad guy drives the plot to provide for character actions to occur, for the protagonists and others to realize their motivations and desires, and to act upon them and that's his whole purpose.

Because really that's what this book is about, a group of people, and an AI, who are trying to find out who they themselves are and to be comfortable expressing that.  Steph's whole group on CatNet are LGBTQ, as are her friends she makes in real life over the course of the book, all of whom have their own problems with expressing those identities as they might want - or in even figuring out where they fit in those identities.  Because this SF world has more than a bit of our real world's worst qualities in it: the sex-ed classes are taught by robots programmed to not give any useful information whatsoever other than the abstinence only bullshit some would love to impose - and certainly not any information for those who might not fit in the standard cis/hetero norm.  A dangerous male stalker can get away with his actions by being charming, leading to the police and others letting him go, while a woman on the run is deemed crazy.  And of course, racial discrimination is naturally still very much a thing.  So to people like Steph's friends, or to Steph herself - who isn't sure where she herself stands in any way due to her constant moving - they only have each other to try and help themselves learn to be who they are.

And through this story they do just that.  Steph finds friends like she's never had outside of online since she was literally 7 and learns a bit about her own sexuality - and may have found the time to really figure that out.  So do the rest of her friends.  And even the AI has to do the same - it literally has to decide whether or not to come out to the others about what it is, and fears the reaction just the same....and itself also has to figure out what steps it could take with its own powers might really be appropriate.  It's a metaphor that really works, mainly because Kritzer makes everyone involved in the story so damn lovable, whether that be a teen like Steph or her new friend Rachel or a literal artificial intelligence like CheshireCat.  It works so damn well, and I'm really excited to see where it goes from here, because development like such doesn't just end at this point in someone's lives.

And it will continue because Catfishing on Catnet ends on a cliffhanger.  It's....the only real annoying bit about this book, because it honestly doesn't need one?  I don't really care about the conflict the cliffhanger portends even though it promises more of the above character development I might crave.  But again, this is a minor complaint in the grand scheme of things, because everything else about htis book is so charming and lovable, it all really works out well.

Highly recommended, and not just for YA readers and this will be high up on my Lodestar Ballot.
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