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6:21am August 24, 2014
chordatesrock-deactivated201504 asked: Would you ever talk more about what you thought The Book of Night With Moon got right and wrong about cats?

I’m not sure how to answer that, because it was all very subtle in both directions.  I do know that of all the cat books I’ve ever read in anything like a fantasy genre, they were the only cats who felt like cats.  Who I felt like if I saw a bunch of cats gathered on a street corner I could imagine that they were wizards and be right.  And that this is where Fey disappears to when nobody can find her in our small apartment.  I could totally see Fey as a wizard.

One obvious thing is I don’t think cats communicate by subvocalizing, I think that’s a handy trick for the author to deal with the language issue.  And I don’t begrudge her that, it’s a fantasy book after all.  She does at least say that a lot of Ailurin (cat language) isn’t vocalized at all but comes in a variety of subtle body movements.  Which is how I’d handle it if I were doing something similar, I’d say that it was movements and smells translated very roughly into English.  Because I’m pretty sure cats communicate with each other in a combination of movements, smells, and vocalizations (which are primarily audible, not subvocalized, when they happen – and I’ve seen cats have entire conversations using complex-sounding “words”, and known more than one autistic people who literally “spoke Siamese cat” before speaking English, so I am sure there’s something to that).  

I think they also communicate in ways that we don’t really have words for, where somehow the idea just gets across, but you can’t really tell how the idea got across.  See Anne’s post about Nikki’s vocation as a security guard:

But then, one evening last week, something changed. Nikki found a way to communicate with me that was…pretty unmistakable (and no, it did not involve urine). 

I am still not sure how she did it, or even exactly what she did to get her message across. Maybe someday I will be able to describe the mechanism (as I’m sure it was something perfectly mundane as far as cats are concerned), but I can’t yet, so I will just skip to the result. And the result was that my brain completely paradigm-shifted and I realized that everything about her behavior that had seemed “weird” or “frustrating” to me made total sense when I looked at her in the vocation of a security guard.

In other words, the patrolling, the seeming annoyance at the other cats “interfering” with her work, the extreme dislike of anything that altered her perceptions or seemed to “trick” her…it all suddenly fell into place.

So, I did what anyone whose cat has just told them the feline equivalent of “you know, you’ve been awfully dense about all this!” would do: I said “Thank you”. 

Then I am sure I visibly relaxed, because she visibly relaxed, and ever since then, there’s been a whole lot more relaxedness around here, and a lot less harrumphing.

I don’t know how that mode of communication works, either, but it’s clearly real and I’ve experienced it with Fey before.  Fey often uses it to tell me how old she is, and to make sure I’m aware how old she is, but I couldn’t tell you how she does it.

Anyway the things that Diane Duane got wrong, they were little things.  Like, bits of cat lore that “everyone knows” but that aren’t true.  I can’t come up with any good examples, though.

I just know that it’s the only cat series I’ve ever read where I could read all the way through, watching cats doing wildly improbable and fantastical things, and yet still at the end of the day be able to say, “Those were cats.  Those were real cats.”

She got some very subtle details right, too.  Like smelling each other’s breath after eating, and making faces based on it.  Fey is always smelling my breath.  If she likes it, she licks the air in front of my mouth appreciatively.  If she loves it, she tries to stick her entire face into my mouth and lick my tongue.  If she hates it, she squeezes her eyes shut and turns away, or flicks her ears back while doing the same.  And all of that is in the book.

I have a friend who is semi-obsessed (it seems to me) with the idea that cats are incapable of planning, so when I told her the cats were realistic her first question was “Well were they able to plan?”  Which… okay…

I have a friend who keeps ladybugs in terrariums so they won’t dry up and die over the winter when they come into our apartments for heat.  And the (perpetually horny) male ladybugs always figure out, eventually, that the female ladybugs have to eat at some point.  So the male ladybugs start planning to stake out the food dish and then, as the females are eating, they try to have sex with them.  Which the females aren’t thrilled about.  So then the females come up with plans to keep the males from ambushing them at the food dish – I always forget what they do.

And if they can do that with their little ladybug nerve bundles that pass for brains, then yes, cats can plan.  If it’s not already obvious that an animal the size of a cat, who is both predator and prey, must be able to plan, in order to survive.  You can’t do a successful hunt against intelligent prey like rats and mice and birds and squirrels, without some serious planning ability.  Same for the ability to escape larger predators.  But somehow planning is a sticking point with my friend when it comes to animal intelligence.  And nothing will convince her that cats plan anything ahead.  Nothing.

So the fact that they plan doesn’t strike me as inconsistent with cats.

And in general, as I read, I find myself easily imagining that these are real cats, doing real cat things, and real cat magic.  (Sidling?  Brilliant.  Explains everything about them.)

Now if only she got cognitive disability (huge trigger warning for the entire plot of Intellivore, including a scene set in an institution where a doctor believes that severely DD people have no minds, and has nightmares about it) and fat people (just the odd commentary here and there, but enough to jolt me out of the story whenever it happens because it’s so incongruous) as good as she gets cats.  Then, I would be in utter heaven.

Anyway if you haven’t read the feline wizards trilogy then I’d suggest doing so, and then maybe it would be easier for us to have a conversation about what was right and wrong in it.  Being prompted to remember the potentially inaccurate parts, would help me analyze them better, than an open-ended question.  Not your fault though – these kind of questions are hard enough to ask as it is.

Notes:
  1. withasmoothroundstone posted this