Wednesday, June 11, 2025

Eye of Cat - Roger Zelazny

   1982; 235 pages.  New Author? : Mostly.  Genres : Native American Mythology; Science Fiction; Navajo Culture.  Overall Rating : 6*/10.

 

    The master galactic beast hunter, Billy Blackhorse Singer, has just been offered a job: stop an Stragean assassin who’s on her way to Earth to kill the UN Secretary General.

 

    It sounds easy enough, but this extraterrestrial has some enhancements that will help her in her mission.  Most importantly, she’s a shapeshifter.

 

    Hmmm.  That presents a challenge for Billy.  Humans can’t shapeshift.  He needs a partner who can do that, and remembers capturing an alien creature long ago that showed some shapeshifting tendencies, but no signs of being sentient.  Still, it’s in a cage down at the ILI (Interstellar Life Institute) in nearby San Diego, so why not go check it out?

 

    It'd be great if the beast turns out to be a sentient shapeshifter, but if so, I wonder what other hidden talents it might have.  And what it would take to get it to team up with Billy.

 

What’s To Like...

    Roger Zelazny is the author of several Science Fiction series, but ANAICT Eye of Cat is a standalone tale.  It’s not a spoiler to reveal that Billy successfully recruits the caged creature, who he dubs “Cat”, and who turns out to be both a shapeshifter and a telepath.  But its price for joining up with Billy is a stunner: in addition to being freed from its present cage-in-a-zoo situation, it wants a chance for revenge.  He wants one week to chase down and attempt to kill his erstwhile captor.  Billy.

 

    The main plot thread is a prolonged chase scene: first Billy and Cat contending with the assassin; then with Cat stalking Billy.  It isn’t easy avoiding a stalker who can effortlessly read every thought in your head.  Billy gets some help from a panel of human mentalists, but frankly, they are of limited value.

 

    There is a second, more subtle plot thread which I found to be more intriguing.  Billy is a Navajo, but he has “left the Blessed Way”, meaning he lives and thinks like a white man, and has forgotten his Navajo gods and legends.  It was fascinating to watch him gradually revert to his heritage.

 

    Most of the tale is set in Dinetah, the “Land of the Navajos” located in the Four Corners area of the western US.  Roger Zelazny incorporates a bunch of Navajo words into the text, and I really enjoyed that.  The story takes place in the near future, with strange things such as “float cars”, “Porta-phones”, and “Trip Boxes”.  Yeah, I know, we have Porta-phones now (we call them cell phones), but Eye of Cat was written in 1982.  And those Trip Boxes enable users to teleport, reminding me muchly of the TARDIS in the Doctor Who series.

 

    The ending is not particularly twisty, but suitably resolves the main plot threads.  The storylines are tied up, Billy gets reacquainted with his Navajo roots, and his soul finally finds peace.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.4*/5, based on 35 ratings and 20 reviews.

    Goodreads: 3.64*/5, based on 1,763 ratings and 76 reviews.

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Chindi (n.) : a spirit, usually malevolent; a ghost.

Others: Yetaalii (n.).

 

Excerpts...

    He thought of the old man’s words and the things of which they reminded him—of the sky creatures and water creatures, of the beings of cloud, mist, rain, pollen and corn which had figured so prominently in his childhood imagination—here in the season when the snakes and the thunder still slept.

    It had been a long while since he had considered his problems in the old terms.  A chindi . . . Real or of the mind—what difference?  Something malicious at his back.  Yes, another way of looking at things . . .   (loc. 245)

 

    “This beast can read thoughts.”

    “So it reads that there’s someone up ahead waiting to kill it.  Doesn’t have to be a mind reader to know that.  And if it keeps following, that’s what could happen.”

    “It can change shape.”

    “It’s still got to move in order to make progress.  That makes it a target.  Billy’s armed now.  It won’t have it as easy as you seem to think.”

    “Then why’d you decide to come?”

    “I don’t like to see any outsider chasing Navajos on our land.”  (loc. 2225)

 

Kindle Details…

    I bought Eye of Cat as part of a two-book bundle of Roger Zelazny sci-fi tales.  The other book is Isle of the Dead.  It appears Amazon no longer offers this bundle in e-book format; but you can buy the paperback version for a mere $59.99.  No, that is not a typo.  Eye of Cat as an unbundled e-book is presently not available at Amazon.

 

“You have been in the minds of too many Californians.  They’re full of pop psychology.”  (loc. 1478)

    There’s just a modicum of profanity in Eye of Cat; I counted only three in the first quarter of the book, all of them variations of damn.  The cussword choices get a bit more varied later on, even including an f-bomb, but on the whole, the expletives remained sparse.

 

    There were a number of typos, but most of these were spacing issues: Hewas, Hehad, Itis, Idropped, and theoldman.  I suspect these slip-ups arose during the e-book bundling conversion stage, and therefore I don't blame the author, who passed away in 1995. 

 

    A variety of literary tropes are sprinkled throughout the text, including flashbacks, deliberately garbled paragraphs and what I presume were newspaper headlines.  I found them to be more distracting than enlightening.  Your take may be different.  In any event, they became sparser as the book progressed.

 

    Overall, I thought Eye of Cat was an ambitious effort by Roger Zelazny that unfortunately falls a bit flat.  I enjoyed the Native American cultural aspects of the book, but the action scenes, although present, were few and far between.  Fortunately, Roger Zelazny’s writing skills do a good job of overshadowing the overly lengthy storyline.  The relatively mediocre Goodreads rating, listed above, reflects this.

 

    6 Stars.  One last thing.  There’s a brief but heartwarming “Dedication” at the beginning of the book that simply reads “For Joe Leaphorn, Jimmy Chee, and Tony Hillerman”.  If you know who these three are, and like their tales, you’ll enjoy Eye of Cat.

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