Catfishing on CatNet
November 30, 2019 6:03 PM - by Naomi Kritzer - Subscribe

The AI from Kritzer's Hugo Award-winning short story "Cat Pictures, Please" is back at novel length -- along with "a group of teenagers who have found friendship and community online, never realizing that one of their online friends is actually an artificial intelligence." The author describes it as a "technothriller YA (young adult) novel about friendship, online community, AIs (artificial intelligences), robots, hacking, sex ed, and road trips". (I'd add: queerness, monstrous humans, art, dealing with cops, and being embarrassed by your parents.) Here's an excerpt (the second chapter of the book).
posted by brainwane (3 comments total) 4 users marked this as a favorite
 
Given how much I loved "Cat Pictures Please", this is on my "Read ASAP" list.
posted by happyroach at 8:27 PM on December 1, 2019


I did not quite love it as much as I expected to given that I love everything else of the author's I read. Maybe because it's YA and thus a little...I dunno, less than usual, for me? But it's still pretty sweet and a nice adaptation of the same concept from the original short story. Extremely LGBTQ friendly, as it turns out.
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:38 PM on December 1, 2019


I saw this, re-read the story, bought the book and just finished it!

It was good! It kinda hits the same notes for me as the latter half of Gould's Jumper series: abilities used for mundane and serious problems, scrappy teen sidekicks, the living on the run, etc.

I slightly preferred the outsider perspective of the stort story, but I don't that would work with the plot here. (I love the unreliable narrator device when it's mostly cultural differences.) I'm far enough removed from modern teen culture that I'm not sure if the "kids" these days talk like that, but I could believe it.

There were some plot points I didn't see coming, which was nice.
posted by Anonymous Function at 7:47 PM on December 2, 2019


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