Synopsis

The fate of the world rests on the haunches of one small cat.

It’s 2135. Fluffy is a super-intelligent GAB (Genetically Altered Brain) cat. Like many dogs, cats, mice, and the occasional pig, her brain is the product of genetic tinkering by humans that started more than a century ago. With their powers of telekinesis, the animals can manipulate physical objects without being able to grasp them. They can speak to each other telepathically without audible voices. Now, people have begun to fear them and to systematically capture and exterminate them. Fluffy leaves the safety of her home to look for her lost brother and joins a band of animal revolutionaries. After a series of brushes with death, Fluffy and her friends find a secret university for GAB animals. There, they work with enlightened humans to save Earth from certain destruction.

Review

Read: October 2019

Rating: 1.5 stars out of 5

Spoiler warning!

Anyone who knows me can tell you that I’m a sucker for animals – especially cats. I’ve read Erin Hunter’s Warriors for the last ten years; I’ve fostered numerous cats over the last fifteen; my current shirt has a screen-printed image of a cat on it (perfect for Halloween!).

I began reading Ted Myers’s Fluffy’s Revolution fully anticipating a completely corny yet genuinely entertaining story. The reality is disappointing: Fluffy’s Revolution only fulfills half of those expectations.

Myers’s tale is one about a world where some animals, called genetically altered brain animals, have rapidly evolved to have superhuman abilities and humanoid intelligence. Because people are people, an anti-GAB campaign has arisen: animals both normal and mutant are being targeted and killed. That premise definitely has some potential. Unfortunately, Myers neuters it by cramming everything into just one hundred forty pages. With so much to explore and so few pages, the storyline is simultaneously hectic and underdeveloped. Rising action leading to important events is severely diminished, resulting in the impression that stuff just… happens in this book.

There’s scant buildup to the action points and climaxes of the story, and the various conflicts are solved with far too much ease. For example, a jaundiced classmate at Animals U (a university for GABs) traps Fluffy somewhere so she can show off by taking point on a world-saving endeavor, thus endangering the entire planet with her petty jealousy. Fluffy defeats this obstacle in like three pages – and a good deal of that text focuses on everybody else going “Where’s Fluffy?” and Pandora doing her best impression of a shrug emoji. All in all, fewer than five pages are expended on the entire arc involving Pandora. The raids on numerous places are trite and hurried. And the solution to the potentially planet-demolishing meteor hurtling toward Earth?

Likewise, Myers fails to adequately explore his characters. Almost everyone in this story suffers from second-dimensionality. Fluffy herself is just too perfect – and does way too well on the streets after not leaving her condo for five years (basically all of her life). All the “good guys” seem to be there simply to help Fluffy out, rather than being characters in their own right. Professor Riordan, her owner, is a drunken middle-aged mess of a bloke whose wife passed away around the same time he adopted Fluffy. The guy manages to pull through for his beloved cat and get his ducks sort of in a row, but Myers doesn’t spend a great deal of time discussing Riordan’s grief for his deceased wife or his recovery from alcoholism. Indira, an assistant for the professor who spotted a gargantuan meteor careening towards Earth, seems to function only as a plot device and a love interest for Riordan. As for the first three humans that Fluffy meets in the resistance, two of them have backgrounds that are barely touched upon, and the other has a tale that, while interesting, is sloppily presented in a rushed manner. By the time these three die, the reader doesn’t really know enough about these folks to be truly upset. Even the villain, Epps, lacks a compelling motive for his atrocious behavior – which in turn makes for a feeble redemption arc. And no, I don’t want a Trump descendant to be a villain – not because I love Donald Trump (he’s fucking terrible), but because he’s already the antagonist of today’s world so I want to read about someone else.

The romances are also worth mentioning for how… weird they all are. Even the one between two humans – Riordan and Indira – is kinda odd. While an age gap within legal constraints isn’t always a bad thing – think Tom Branson and Sybil Crawley – it’s worth noting that Riordan is probably two decades older than Indira. Also, their relationship is expressed in the story in eloquent sentences such as “She kisses him, and they start making out.” Fun fact: This occurs in a scene where the two of them are executing a mission to extract from the bad guy’s lair an important astronomer who knows about the apocalyptic meteor. Another human pairing is introduced in one sentence (“Rudy has more than a little compassion for Janet; everyone knows there was chemistry going on between them, although it was never spoken of”) and then is never touched on again. The animal romances are leagues more bizarre. Again, I will hark back to Erin Hunter’s Warriors to emphasize that animal romances in fantasy series can be handled with grace – or at least absence of cringe. Myers does neither of those things. For instance, a cat named Tigger flirts with Fluffy like this: “Wow, you’re a looker! Do you have reproductive organs?” I’m assuming that the bit about gonads is a reference to spaying/neutering, but it still seems like an invasive question to ask anybody within five seconds of meeting them. Finally, in the weirdest, most cringe-inducing example, Fluffy’s friend Sally goes into heat for the first time in the middle of a school dance; several toms surround the poor thing, who doesn’t even know what’s happening; and school authorities step in and explain that the animals at the university have a sort of marriage and practice monogamy. Fluffy’s brother, Jack, professes his eternal love to Sally, who reciprocates; they then sneak off to fuck, thus consummating their partnership. Yyyyyup. That’s how it happened. Like, congratulations on practicing marital fidelity, but seriously, what the FUCK???

Overall, this story is a complete train wreck of craziness. I did manage to get a couple of laughs out of it and to finish it, but those positives don’t outweigh the stultifying writing style; grammatical inconsistencies; the hustled, muddled plot; and overall random weirdness. At least it’s short.

Synopsis and cover image from BarnesandNoble.com.

GIF from http://thatsridicarus.soup.io/tag/patrick.

Thank you to Edelweiss+ for the free digital ARC!