Cat's Pawn

I received a copy of Cat’s Pawn, by Leslie Gadalla from the publisher through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers program. Cat’s Pawn is many things. Unfortunately, none of them are good. I generally try to be a positive critic and find the good parts in any book/movie/album that I come across. I firmly believe there are positives to be discovered in any creative work, no matter how flawed it may be as a whole. Sadly, this has not been the case with Cat’s Pawn. Try as I might, I cannot find any redeeming quality in this sci fi attempt. The entire novel is an example of why “show don’t tell” is such an important tenet of writing fiction. From start to finish, we are always told what happens. No in depth description, of show more characters, events or places ever takes place. The reader is not once made to feel like he is there, like he could see the action. Zero involvement. The action is rushed, and the pacing is all over the pace. It’s as if the author had certain passages which it wanted to get to as soon as she could, making everything leading up to them as brief as possible. Scenes which might flesh out the story and characters more are kept minimal in the rush to get to the next plot node. A plot which is unfortunately more predictable than the next Rambo movie. There’s nothing wrong with writing a story that’s been done before, but with poor writing and virtually no plot twists (one might argue they are there, but give it a go and see if you can find one thing you cannot predict), it just doesn’t hold up. I won’t go into offering examples of why I consider Cat’s Pawn bad writing, as one can open the book at virtually any page and see what I mean. Unfortunately, I can only rate this one star. This is by far the harshest I’ve ever been to a book, but with literally hundreds of little known indie sci fi novels out there waiting to be discovered, you’ll be better off not wasting your time with this. show less

Not exactly an original premise, but reasonably well executed. The insectoid Hivemind the Kaz have been controlling an ever expanding Empire for a million years. The Orians are a more cat-like race, solitary by preference, living in a desert world, but well endowed with technology. Humans are mere stripings having just entered the space exploration, and not yet really encountered the Kaz. Both are competing for their attentions without drawing any attention to the fact.

A human Andrews, manages to become embroiled in the honour of a ranking Orian, Taren. Being human he has no such concepts and would rather live his own life, with his own people. Even if that means associating with drug runners and gamblers. Taren has to carefully balance show more that desire against his own honour, his species' deepest secrets, keeping Andrews alive, and then the Kaz side with Andrews' boss.

It's well enough written, with the loner culture of the Orian sufficiently alien. I'm not quite sure that all the technology has been thought through properly, because the Kaz should be massively overwhelmingly ahead of any little provincial species' just stumbling into space, and they aren't even if the resources are stretched thin. I didn't like the time distortion for the opening and closing chapters, but that's a personal bugbear. It's a good mix of action and dialogue, but the characters are not very self-aware of the issues around them, Andrews seems to take some particularly un-wise decisions. A good contrast to far too many heroes who immediately adapt to alien cultures however.

There are much better insects vs cats in space books out there - Pride of Chanur by C J Cherryh springs immediately to mind - but this is a worthy contender. show less

I received a copy of Cat’s Pawn, by Leslie Gadalla from the publisher through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers program. It is a classic sci-fi space opera about xenophobic humans and the myriad of other sentient beings in the universe. As with many sci-fi stories, much of the plot revolves around trying to prevent interstellar conflict, often with mixed results. The primary race in the story, the Orians, look like overgrown cats, thus giving rise to the title of the book. As a cat person, I wanted to find the Orians superior and in many ways they are. But as the title hints, they are not without faults. The main human character, Bill Anderson, has more obvious flaws, but is not evil, just venal. I enjoyed that the story shifted show more between Bill’s point of view and that of the main Orian, Talan. The reader thus has the chance to get inside the heads of the the two main characters and sometimes see the same scene from two very different perspectives. Since this is the first of two books, there are some plot lines left unresolved, but Cat’s Pawn has a satisfactory ending and can be read by itself. show less

This is something of a fish out of water story: a human stuck for health and financial reasons on a planet of cat-people. I believe the book is a refreshed version of a 30-year old soft science fiction novel, and it holds up pretty well. I'm not a huge fan of stories told in flashback, but there's a decent frame for it here and it holds together pretty well.

The main character isn't terribly sympathetic, but not quite to the point where I didn't care what happened to him. The story sets up a larger backdrop, and I wouldn't mind checking out further stories in the series.

Cat's Pawn by Lisa Gadalla is an updated reissue of a science fiction space opera written 30 years ago. One of the main updates is not explaining the internet which would have sorely dated the reissue. It's a good read a cross between H. Beam Piper and Jack L. Chalker. Piper's earthling trying to figure out how to get by without knowing all the rules with Chalker's different aliens and his use of drug addiction.

It does fall into the mold of taking one genre of story and putting it into space. In this case it is reflective of a foreign intrigue story set in Africa or Asia. Again enjoyable and it kept me reading.

Five star story. I loved it, and was unable to put it down, reading till the wee hours of the morning. I will be getting the rest of the series and reading it too.

Now for the bad part. It was provided to me in epub format, which is great, but I'm one of the tiny group of 43.7 million kindle owners [Forbes], and need mobi. When I was delivered the e-book, it tersely stated, "Here's the url to calibre; go install it and convert it yourself". No problem; I was able to do it, but if I were trying a marketing campaign to get my book out there, I would provide the book in all formats to make it easier for the customer. If you know the url to calibre, why don't you download it and convert the book ONCE instead of making all your readers do it?