I loved this book. Struggled with it in a couple places—you can, at times, really tell that it was originally written as serialized fiction. But even those bits of “wait, you forgot about-“ kinda make sense within the world of the story. Lily is a 400-year-old housecat who uplifted herself, the ADHD shouldn’t really be a surprise.
The story arc of this book is a really touching found family kind of thing, which always gets to me to some degree, but where it really shone was in the worldbuilding. I think I understand the Warhammer people a bit better now.
In short, this book is set after the sci-fi. It’s, like, 15,000 years in the future. Civilization has collapsed. Civilization has, in fact, collapsed, rebuilt, risen, and collapsed again, dozens of times over. Lily is an immortal, uplifted cat, who wound up inheriting command of the space station that’s the best of the best, a mostly self-repairing, spectacularly heavily-armed orbital installation. She mostly fills her time by providing close artillery support to the deserving down on Earth, amongst other things like “using a low-powered orbital laser to guide a semi-sentient cloud of mind control chemicals away from population centers.” 15,000 years of sci-fi tech is a lot of time to build horrific weapons, and AIs that go a little nuts, and generally every other sci-fi story arc you can imagine. It’s a little reminiscent of Fine Structure in that way.
So—and this terrible pun is both intended and premeditated—this book is catnip to me. All the sci-fi, and found family? And it’s about a cat? How could I not love it? Please, give it a read.1
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