Catalyst by Anne McCaffrey and Elizabeth Ann Scarborough – review

Catalyst is the first book in a new series co-authored by Anne McCaffrey and Elizabeth Ann Scarborough that focuses on the Barque Cats.  McCaffrey has mentioned the Barque Cats  in passing in several of her sci-fi novels.  Most of her fans are at least semi-familiar with the species and know that they desceneded from one particular ship’s cat by the name of Tuxedo Thomas.  It was never widely explained how the Barque Cats came to be telepathic or when the humans around them first began to recognize it. All that is seemingly going to be rectified in this new series.

The story revolves around a particular ship’s cat, Thomas’s Duchess, who is called Chessie by her crew.  Chessie is abducted while she is pregnant with her latest litter of kittens and taken to the surface of the closest planet.  While she is there, she develops a fondness for catching and eating a small, shiny type of beetle.  When her kittens are born, they are capable of communicating telepathically with a human to which they are bonded.  The powers of telepathic speech do not extend to other humans.  When Chessie and one of her kittens is rescued and they ship out, they end up finding a mysterious ship, aimlessly drifting in space.  Upon investigation, the ship contains an ancient feline being that has its own agenda.  Meanwhile, a quarantine has been placed on the planet where Chessie and her kitten were abducted because of an outbreak of what the scientists in the area believe is a plague. Naturally, the events are all connected, and Chessie and her kitten are the only ones who have the full picture.

There is also a core cast of human characters in the book:  Janina, who is Chessie’s  Cat Person, Ponty, the con-man who abducted the ship’s cats, and Jubal, Ponty’s son.  The humans may have a secondary role in the book, since the primary focus is the cats, but they aren’t marginalized in the story.  Chapters alternate between the human points of view and the cats’.  Each human is a developed character; they aren’t there as props, although, mostly, they seem to be there to help clarify what the cats are doing.  It’s far easier for the reader to care about the story when there are humans present in it who clearly care about the cats that they are trying to protect.

McCaffrey and Scarborough have collaborated together on several novels.  I have always enjoyed their work, because they write very well together.  It’s difficult to find the places where McCaffrey wrote or the places where Scarborough did–their efforts flow together pretty much seamlessly.  There is no obvious point of trade-off anywhere in the novel.  They have a real gift for creating complex worlds without bogging down the story with too many details, and they create relatable characters that seem realistic.  These are people who have their own lives and their own problems, and as the reader gets carried away into the story, they just hope that these characters are going to be okay.

McCaffrey and Scarborough are also very skilled at creating science fiction that’s readily accessible to women who wouldn’t ordinarily read sci-fi, without making it light, fluffy fare that’s as forgettable as your last cupcake.  They focus more on character driven stories that don’t carry a lot of technical jargon or battle tactics.  There are occasional romantic subplots, but this is hardly a sci-fi romance.

Overall, the book was easy to read and compelling enough that I didn’t want to put it down until I was finished.  It was fairly light reading, and there wasn’t much of anything in it that could be considered shocking or graphic.  I would not only recommend this book to fans of McCaffrey and Scarborough’s other work, but I would also recommend it as a YA novel for girls who are looking for something a little more sci-fi tinged, or anyone who might enjoy reading a sci-fi book about cats.  I enjoyed reading it because it reminded me why I loved Anne McCaffrey’s books in the first place.  I had started my sci-fi reading adventures around ten or eleven reading the Dragonriders of Pern series.  I can say, after I finished reading this book, that, once again, I’m truly looking forward to reading the rest of the series.