Cat Fantastic

The late Andre Norton was a great cat lover and often wrote cats or catlike creatures into her novels. Here she teams with the incredibly prolific Martin H. Greenberg to edit the first of five delightful feline-themed anthologies whose cat-heroes and -heroines live sometimes in the future, sometimes in the past, and sometimes in dimensions other than our own. The 15 original stories here collected include Wilanne Schneider Belden's "The Gate of the Kittens" (written in Norton's own Witch World series), Clare Bell's "The Damcat" (a Hopi shaman and his bobcat partner help defend a dam being built in the 1930's against malevolent sorcery), Elizabeth H. Boyer's "Borrowing Trouble" (an accident-prone apprentice sorcerer and his feline familiar end up saving his master from a jealous enemy), Mercedes Lackey's "SKitty," "Jayge Carr's "Wart," and Patricia Shaw Mathews's "The Game of Cat and Rabbit" (cats gone to space in the distant future prove their worth both onworld and off), Marylois Dunn's "Yellow Eyes" (a cat and a hound in a vaguely Medieval setting team up to find out why the local game is disappearing), Donna Farley's "It Must Be Some Place" (a tortoiseshell tomcat helps a wizard's apprentice search the Land of Lost Things for a missing invisibility charm), P. M. Griffin's "Trouble" (in a city vaguely like Dublin, a cat leads a young girl to the wizard who can help her learn to use her innate magical powers), Ann Miller and Karen Elizabeth Rigley's "It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's...Supercat!" (an sf writer and her cat team up with an extraterrestrial to capture an escaped alien bird), and Norton's own "Noble Warrior" (given to an early-19th-Century English sea captain for his daughter, a Siamese cat from a long line of palace guardians teams up with the family's Hob, or house-spirit, to defend the child and her great-aunt from a sinister governess). Any lover of cats will delight in this anthology, which has remained in print for 20 years and bids fair to last as long again.

...then you've got to try this anthology. Any one who enjoys seeing the world through the eyes of these not-so-usual cats can find something to sink their claws into here. There's SF, there's fantasy, humor, drama . . . almost any style you could wish for. Not all the stories will appeal to everyone, but the collection offers the reader a buffet of good choices with quality stories. I admit, I liked the second anthology slightly better, but "Critical Cats" had me seriously teary eyed. The fun of an anthology is that these are short stories and you can pick one to read anytime! It's my favorite travel reading!

I am not a fan of short stories, but I enjoy the series of Catfantastic books. It combines my two loves, cats and fantasy. The stories are all excellent. The authors really have an insider's knowledge of the cat's mind. I laughed, cried, and cheered for the cats throughout the book. It's the type of book that you race to finish, but feel sad when you reach that last page because you know it will awhile before you'll get to read another like it.

If you like both cats and fantasy, you will like these stories. Some of the characters that appear in this first book make return appearances in the other volumes. I look forward to new editions and recommend any of the volumes.

This is the first of (so far) 4 books of shorts about cats. Many talents have come together to write about critters they are obviously fond of. I have a "89 paperback of this book and it, along with the rest of the series have been all over the country and read by quite a few different people who have been unable to locate a copy of the older books...If you don't have these try and fine a copy...used book stores, yard sales and library sales are good places to start and there are a lot of books well worth the effort...this series is one of them!