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Study 037 - All Cats are Gray (Patreon)

Published:
2023-04-06 16:56:49
Imported:
2026-06
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A month of science fiction kicks off with All Cats are Gray by Andrew North, aka Andre Norton! Selections this month are from The Future is Female, edited by Lisa Yaszek.

Grab Dreams in the Witch House for play on the PC now!

Special thanks to our reader, Andrew Staton - check him out on Twitch!

Here is that cover for Witch World - bird suits and rayguns for all!

Comments

Crom Thews

Ha. I read Quag Keep back in the 70s, and the Appendix at the end inspired me to hunt down the 1st Edition Dungeon Masters Guide. I'm still playing today.

Antti Laakso

So surreal to hear you guys talk about my Dreams in the Witch House game! Your podcast was my favorite thing to listen to when I was drawing the backgrounds or doing the animations. So thanks for the quality content! PS. You can get the game on GOG as well: https://www.gog.com/en/game/dreams_in_the_witch_house

UltharMeow

Agreed, the pacing is off on this one and the science is wrong, but there’s something charming about Steena and Bat that I can’t articulate. I just enjoy this story. Maybe because it is a space opera, I’m willing to forgive some errors if I get to enjoy the image of a big grey cat sitting on a spaceport bar drinking a glass of something weird.

Alison Scott

The US has lots of great libraries, but the Library of Congress is definitely high on the list.

Peter Lillevold

Had to play Dreams in the Witch House! Oh the point-and-click nostalgia! Brought me back to the days of Kings Quest, Space Quest and Indiana Jones games I played in my youth :D

Alan Ricks

You may have heard of the 1982 film “The Beastmaster”? Its loosely based on the Andre Norton’s 1959 novel “The Beast Master”.

Sweatin' to the Great Oldies

I would love to talk with someone with color blindness who has tried EnChroma glasses. What is it like to suddenly be able to distinguish "new" colors? I'd love to give them a camera and have them set the color balance to give me some idea of how they might be perceiving color differently than I. My grandfather had color blindness and was an early tech adopter who had to set the color balance on his ginormous video camera. His red trees were something to behold. All of this gives us a rare - ahem - insight into another person's brain since our experience of color is whatever our brain translates various wavelengths of light into. And translation is notoriously tricky. There may well be nuances that most of us don't catch that others do. What I wouldn't give to try out some tetrachromacy and find out what color my hair *really* is.

Mistress Frieren

I pictured Stina as Phoebe Bridgers based on that opening.

Steve

Weirdly the cover doesn't seem to have anything to do with any of the stories (https://archive.org/details/Fantastic_Universe_v01n02_1953-08-09/mode/2up). Of course, La Planete des singes was originally in French. There was no Statue of Liberty beach scene but there is a kicker with the Eiffel Tower. I can well imagine that this cover inspired the American movie interpretation.

Andrew Brown

Maybe the author liked the ending where the protagonist gets married… Sometimes we don’t need to read too much into the reading.

Alex Liggett

I devoured Norton's 'Solar Queen' series of novels growing up. I re-read a couple recently and despite a certain amount of 'he was feeling space-sick so he took some space-aspirin and had a space-nap', I really love the universe she builds. It's very much the universe of this story, full of space-buccaneers in smoky space-dives, amidst which are the crew of the free-trader Solar Queen, plucky upstarts trying to make a go of it in a universe dominated by giant space-corporations, and whose success is down to their quick wits and superior skills. It's pure space-competence porn.

Jim Cannon

Quag Keep is even weirder than that summary suggests. All the characters have bracelets with dice on them, and when they concentrate on the dice, they can affect the outcome of a scene or battle. It mentions Greyhawk, but its clearly not Oerth, but there is sone Erol Otus weirdness. I think a better version of that trope of the gamers in a fantasy world is Joel Rosenberg's (no, not the weird one) Guardians of the Flame series. Although its a bit brutal at times.

The Spider Incident

Chad, I must conclude that you do not have cats. Otherwise you would know that no cat is below the station of any human. It is quite the other way around: all humans are below the station of any cat!

Runninghead

As a red-green colour-blind artist/designer (a fact I've successfully hidden from many an employer over the years) the misrepresentation of the condition did irritate me a little. Norton's story also reminded me of a time in college when a friend of my girlfriend quizzed me about colour-blindness. I told her all items that are red or green were completely invisible to me, which is why I could see the colour of her bra through her red sweater. Her hands immediately leapt up to cover her chest, swiftly followed by a look of utter hostility for making her seem foolish. At the time I immediately regretted the joke but decades later it still makes me chuckle 🙂

Mark K

I liked this. The cat descriptions (sniffing greedily, or focusing its bathing on an area between two toes) were pretty good. The story didn't make a lick of sense, but it was so short we got the payoff before it wore out its welcome. I gotta say, regarding the creature's malevolence: you walk on a ghost ship where everyone died mysteriously long ago, where all the previous salvage crews die mysteriously, and then you see a mysterious ghost moving towards a crewmate, some assumptions seem warranted! On another show I feel like Chris would be making a "stupid expert" comment if they stood still to see if it just wanted to give Cliff a big old hug.

Clyde Duensing III

As you were discussing Andre’s life and quoting her comments regarding how she felt about fiction and the effect it should ideally have on a reader, her words and backstory really hit home with me. Andre Norton came along for me at a crucial point in my life as a young reader. It is appropriate, considering her own work as a librarian and her talk of fighting for books to put in children’s libraries, that her novel “Daybreak 2250 AD” AKA “Star Man’s Son” came to my attention as a featured selection in a school book promotion flyer. It had a cool painting on the cover and looked exciting so I ordered it. When I read it, my brain exploded, it was so evocative and exciting to my young mind that it sort of changed my life, and turned me into an instant fan of her work, but also helped transform me from a somewhat interested, to an avid reader. That book has been a touchstone for me, however great you might think it really is, and cemented by love for post-apocalyptic stories, a genre probably not quite as overdone when she wrote it as it is now. I’ve read it about 8 times since that first time when I was about 11, and read it to my daughter when she was young. Years later, in the 90’s, I attended a small Sci-Fi convention in Florida with some artwork, one of which was a depiction of a scene from that book. The main guest of the show was Andre Norton. The people running the Con made the connection between my art work and her stories and I ended up being invited to lunch with Andre Norton along with a small group of other people. I got to meet her, talk with her personally and have her tell me, among other things that the city in one of the main sequences in the book was modeled after Cleveland. She was great woman and I am still thrilled that I got to meet her while she was still with us and tell her the impact her work had on me.

Jeremy Impson

In the spirit of Jekyll-esque pedantry, I must remind you that the A-Tean were soldiers of fortune, as stated in the title narration. That means we have to assume they were paid by everyone they helped.

It's a Ghost.

There's a Doctor Who episode with Peter Capaldi called Empress of Mars. It doesn't have much in common with this story, but knowing that the episode was written by Mark Gatiss, who is a known lover of strange stories (especially M.R. James), I wonder if he got the title of the episode from this story.

Adequately Excellent Entertainment

I am also sold on a book with a guy in a bird suit holding a ray gun. So sold that I found a used mass market paperback and ordered it.

Eric - Speaker in Digressions

I first learned the phrase "in the dark, all cats are gray" from a Norwegian phrase book, where it didn't seem immediately useful. I note from an Andre Norton bibliography that there's a series of spacer novels about the crew of a ship called The Solar Queen, also published under the name Andrew North. The captain of the ship is named Captain Jellico; Memory Alpha doesn't mention if there's a connection with the Star Trek character. A few of the Solar Queen novels are available for free on Project Gutenberg, and one is called "Voodoo Planet," a 1959 novel in which Jellico and his crew face African witch doctors in space, which I bet is not awkward at all.

Jason Thompson

That’s so hilarious that The Outsider and Others ended up in the remaindered book pile

Shadavid

I first encountered the phrase 'all cats are gray in the dark' reading a James Bond book when I was about 12. Then nothing for 50 years until now. I remember reading Norton's The Beastmaster several times while in primary school. I was entranced by the idea of the connection between the central character and the animals. This story has me wondering about how often non-human animals feature in her tales.

Richard Horsman

I’m looking through the table of contents for The Future is Female and there are a bunch of real winners in here. Hope you do Zenna Henderson at some point, if not this month. Brilliant writer who never quite got her due.

Jason of the K

I can't believe you guys didn't note that "The Colour out of Space" was in the Outsider collection! Cosmic horror inspiration straight from the horses mouth?

Z.A. Kahan

The beginning of this story reminds me of "Magnetic Rose", from the anime anthology film "Memories". Similarities of an apparently abandoned yet overly opulent spacecraft drifting through the cosmos.

Levi Krain

I read Quag Keep in 6th grade, which was the same time I really started playing D&D (after dabbling in it in 5th grade). I remember being excited that it was overtly D&D but also finding it kind of hokey. My favorite bit was the character who was a wereboar. Regarding the story... I recently started reading S.A. Barnes' novel "Dead Silence" which is about a crew of spacers doing space things who stumble upon a luxury space liner that disappeared two decades before and they both want to claim it (to get rich) but also find out what horrible thing happened to the crew and passengers. It's still a mystery about halfway through the book but if it turns out to be an invisible monster that only shows up on gray backgrounds... well, I probably won't do anything except maybe tsk tsk a little. So far, I like the novel, though!

ESTY

As soon as I heard the description of Stina I couldn’t get Fiona Shaw’ portrayal of Maarva Andor out of my mind (from the ANDOR series). This coloured my interpretation in 2 ways: the cat is a droid now, and the ending is obviously a cover story so nobody comes looking for her.

Karl Haikara

One thing I wanted to say is I'm happy that you guys kept up march is for draculas and all the Aickman month and those types of stories even as you move into new waters as I'm more into those things and less into Sci fi, but I love listening to you guys no matter what the story is, even a lame one like this lol. One thing I thought about was if this story could be seen as a parody, as the narrator relates he's a failed fiction writer essentially and the story ends up being a lame retelling of something he was told with a pat ending the way he thinks pulp readers might like. Chad had mentioned that with the style of the story but it might even explain the ending as well as the kind of plotting which reminds me of a story I would have wrote as a kid.

Science Doctor, PhD

I find the "you attack the thing before confirming it to be malevolent" to be interesting in a show (and even episode) that has a lot of love for tabletop role playing games. I have ran a lot of games, and I don't recall my players doing too much checking on whether the random creatures they run into are explicitly evil or not. Heck I recently ran Masks of Nyarlathotep and my players came in with a LOT of assumptions about fishmen, Peruvian vampires, and things which should not be named. Despite even asking any of those things 'why' they should not be named. Maybe it's just an eldritch version of a do not call list? Terrible sleep-deprived jokes aside; it is interesting how a change of setting, or engagement, can make these questions come up.

William Moore

I’m so happy to be fully caught up from episode 1 and coming up to my favorite pulp author! I would absolutely suggest Witch World (I own the toucan helmet cover)! Norton does a great job showing how a team is saving the Witch World, not just the main character. If you’re looking for more cat stories, Cats Eye could be fun. It also has a very creepy cat on a guys shoulder on one of the covers. And if you’re looking for more spacers, Saragossa of Space. You’re telling me I can buy a plant, count me in! Or is that a bad investment, who know! I want to thank you both for helping slog through some of lovecrafts stories, introduce me to new pulp stories with plenty of gaming inspiration, and being all around great people. Thank you