Fantastic Fiction: Resistance

Published in 1961-62 in teen science fiction: Andre Norton’s Catseye.

One of my favorite novels when I was a teen science fiction reader was Andre Norton’s Catseye. In the 1960s, Andre Norton, better known for adult science fiction, was also one of the most important writers of science fiction for teens. Norton had been a children’s librarian in the Cleveland Library system, but later worked in the Library of Congress on a project about alien citizenship, which may well have been significant for her writing. She bought a bookstore, which failed, returned to the Cleveland Library, and when she became a reader for Martin Greenberg and Gnome Press, Norton had already been writing for almost 30 years. At the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s, she produced radical books for teens.

Catseye is set on one of the worlds of a galactic-spanning human occupation. Its protagonist, Troy Horan, arrived with his family when their planet changed hands in a peace process, and they found themselves displaced persons, their ranch gone, their skills unsaleable. Initially welcomed to a new planet, their welcome wore out, and the next epidemic wiped out Horan’s family. As the book opens, he is a teenage refugee stuck in “the Dipple,” the shanty town-come-refugee camp on the edge of the world-city.

People who live in the Dipple have no regular rights to legal work. They can join the thieves guild, sign up for the military, or wait each day to see if they can get a work assignment at the labor exchange. On the morning the novel begins, Troy is delighted to be offered an open contract working with animals in what turns out to be a luxury pet shop, based on a liking for animals brought with him from his home planet.

The pet shop is not all that it seems, and neither are some of the pets. The kinkajou, the foxes, and the cats are all telepathic and are being used as spies. Troy can hear them, and when things go wrong, the foxes warn Troy that his employer is planning to kill him in order to tie up loose ends. They flee into the Wild, followed by the conspirators, the city patrollers, and the Rangers (who have already taken an interest in Troy). Troy comes to realize that while he cannot survive alone, as part of the we of the animal companions, he stands a decent chance.

The novel stood out to me because it was the first time I’d read a book in which the only hope for the hero was survival—there was no happy ending for a refugee, no escape from the encampment—but also because it explores the class and capital divisions of a society from underneath. Troy is offered two chances to escape the Dipple: first a long-term contract with the pet shop owner-spy after Troy protects both him and the animals, and second, more tantalizingly, with the Rangers who (in almost classic Romance) recognize his background as a hereditary Range Master on Norden as equal to their hereditary position. But Troy refuses the story of the returning prince, and the destinarianism it imposes, and the story ends with Troy and the companions heading into the wilderness, still hunted, to construct their own fates.

Sequel: Masks of the Outcasts, 1964.