Kitty Cat Kill Sat

Kitty Cat Kill Sat, by Argus, is a space opera about Lily ad-Alice, a 400-year-old super-intelligent kitty cat, who operates a combat satellite around post-apocalyptic Earth.

Lily is the sole inhabitant of the hacked-together station, and when she’s not collecting space debris and turning it into more weaponry, she’s answering distress calls to save the few remaining humans from a wide variety of future horrors. The space station — of course — is not designed to be crewed by any cats, especially not one cat operating an entire station alone, and Lily has a lot of catlike snark about the difficulties of operating the equipment without thumbs or a spoken language.

As the book unfolds, readers see how a centuries-old cat comes to own and operate a space station. Lily’s interactions with other sentient beings, whether that’s a human settlement desperately seeking help from an attack or a lonely AI dreaming of NOT being a combat machine, show friendship and optimism in the face of extreme danger.

Lily’s unique cat perspective adds fun and whimsy to the dark story of post-apocalyptic earth. We readers aren’t told exactly what happened to leave a few disparate groups of survivors on the planet and in a few ships. There are plenty of space disasters and alien dangers for those survivors, too, as well as more mundane problems of oppressive cultures and economic exploitation.  It’s a dark, dangerous world, but Lily is doing her kitty best to save it, and ignore the strange haunted aspects to her space station home…

This is a weird novel to discuss, because it was an intriguing concept and a fun, quirky book, but it could have been an amazing book. There’s an episodic style that began to drag as every time we got a little info about the plot, the chapter ended and we cut to an new day of alarms blaring but being ignored, interfaces not made for cats but working anyway, and Lily manually turning on a FutureTech or a maintenance drone.  After a while, Lily vague-blogging about her ship stopped building suspense and made me want to skim to get to something happening.  The novel could have been by about a third to create a snappy space adventure.

Still, it’s a fun story of a cute space kitty saving the world, one weird friendship at a time.