Catfishing on CatNet

Fresh from stealing our hearts away in various pieces of short fiction, including the Hugo Award winning and highly zeitgeisty "Cat Pictures Please" and this year's Hugo finalist "The Thing About Ghost Stories", Naomi Kritzer is back with her first published novel in some time - and her science fiction debut - the much anticipated Catfishing on Catnet. Although my primary fandom is dogs, I also maintain an ongoing interest in cat-related media, and having been lucky enough to pick up a Catfishing on Catnet fridge magnet (yes, apparently some books have fridge magnets now!) this has been a very highly anticipated release for me, one which I'm pleased to confirm doesn't disappoint.

Catfishing on Catnet follows Steph, a teenager whose life has been defined by her mother constantly moving her to escape an abusive father she knows almost nothing about. Steph's mother claims that her Dad is an arsonist, who tried to burn down the house with them in it and is now hunting them down. Steph has no reason not to believe this (her Mom carries a laminated version of the article with the information in, after all) but is still not enamoured with having to change schools every few months, and the only real life friend she ever made was a girl she hasn't seen or heard from in over ten years. Luckily, Steph has friends that go with her everywhere she moves - the buddies she's made on an online chatroom system called CatNet, which only requires payment in animal pictures to use its services, and organises users into "Clowders" based on what Steph thinks are fancy algorithms, but what is actually the engineering of a benevolent AI trying to make its human users' lives better.

The AI of CatNet is, of course, the same AI from "Cat Pictures Please": a story which deals with the misadventures of an all-seeing intelligence trying to make humans happy while also learning how humans actually work. The kinds of actions taken by the AI in that story are reflected in some early scenes here: a bad teacher at Steph's school, for example, resigns after a delivery drone "accidentally" drops a load of books on how to quit your job and guidebooks for a city where her friend is conveniently hiring for a position in a totally different career. However, most of the time the AI - called CheshireCat by Steph and her Clowder based on its screenname in their group chat - is focused on the more serious issue of Steph's father, and the mystery surrounding both her parents. As CheshireCat becomes more invested in both the mystery of Steph's past and her wellbeing as one of its friends in its "favourite" Clowder, its actions start to increasingly expose its own identity, raising issues about trust and acceptance based on who we choose to be online.