I Was An Alien Cat Toy edition by Ann Somerville Literature Fiction eBooks
Download As PDF : I Was An Alien Cat Toy edition by Ann Somerville Literature Fiction eBooks 
Temin crash lands on an unexplored planet and gets up front and personal with the natives – who are giant felines. Survival will mean making some unlikely alliances - and some most unusual friendships.
I Was An Alien Cat Toy edition by Ann Somerville Literature Fiction eBooks
A human, Timen, is marooned on an alien world inhabited by sentient, giant cats, the Day-neh. They mistake him for an animal, keep him as a pet and can't figure out he's cold when he has no fur. But one of the cats, Gredar, takes a liking to the small creature and keeps him warm. After a while, Gredar figures out Timen is not just an animal, and tries to communicate. It also helps that Timen is gay, and the males of the Day-neh race are bisexual.Let me get my gripes out of the way first: Timen frequently uses a curse word "shefting," and it's annoying. It's just a replacement for the word f*cking, but he still uses the word f*cking to describe sex. Also, his spaceship is called a "podpod." That's what a toddler would call a spaceship. I cringed when I first read it, and I thought I was in trouble on page one.
The book is fairly light on the typos, though it could have used a copyeditor to catch the comma mistakes.
But my biggest complaint about the book is that it's just not visual. The Day-neh are supposed to be giants compared to our protagonist, but there is no sense of scale. The author narrates, but does not describe. I was nearly blind for most of the story. The only indication of size difference is one piece of narration which states Gredar is 4 meters tall. I assume Timen is 2 meters tall or so, but that's it. There's no mention of how big Gredar's paw is compared to Timen's hand, or arm, or even dick. Without some relative measures, it's very hard to see what's going on.
Action does not seem to be the author's thing either. The crash-landing happens between chapters, the climax happens while the protagonist isn't looking, and the giant bird-thing (a "boril") is killed between chapters, too. Even the sex is difficult to see. Visually, it is not a satisfying read, and the lack of action and good descriptions really do hurt the story.
But for all that, I still got invested in what was happening. This is a story that's been done many times before, but I really felt for these two, and the author gave this setup a great deal of thought. This isn't a mere gay sex story; she sets up an entire society.
The Day-neh are matriarchal. Gredar may be a strong male, but he still answers to his mother, and his mother can send him away at any time. Males in this society are only allowed to stay in the settlement if they are useful, and they can be killed if they do not stay in their place. This is refreshing, and it gives the males a good reason to do what they do. The females call the shots, so males amuse themselves by having sex with one another. It's an effective way to justify a casual m/m relationship, making it so much more than a gay romance.
It's also not simple. Timen has to learn a new language, and Gredar tries to learn Timen's. At times their dialogue sounds like Tarzan and Jane trying to discuss politics, and it can be a bit laughable, but I respect it for not taking any shortcuts. Timen does get better, but he is alive at the mercy of Gredar's mother, and Gredar is allowed to keep Timen in her house complete at her whim. The other females in the house are also a danger to Timen. It takes time for Timen to earn a place in their society, despite him being male, and I like that.
The author put a lot of effort into this, and it shows. Despite the weak descriptions, I still felt for Timen and Gredar, and I liked seeing them together. Both are in danger in different ways, and it's refreshing to see that. The relationship really does go both ways: Gredar protects Timen, and Timen does pay him back.
Until the ending... Timen's reason for going home is so contrived I wondered what everyone was upset about. The solution is so simple: if Timen is happy here, he should stay. He doesn't *have* to go home. Granted, life would have been difficult in a world that wasn't to his scale, but that seems like such a flimsy reason to send him home.
Also I wish more attention had been drawn to what happened to the first human colony on this planet 500 years ago, why the Terran government didn't bother to find out what happened to it, and why the colonists attacked the Day-neh in the first place. And why do the space ships have cloaking devices? Doesn't that eat up a lot of power? And the scanner Timen has; shouldn't that require recharging after a year of operation?
Ah, it is far from perfect, but it is still on the good side of imperfect. For all its flaws, it is a good read.
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I Was An Alien Cat Toy edition by Ann Somerville Literature Fiction eBooks Reviews
Ms Somerville was already known to me as a more than competent author (not a given among M/M romance writers, especially ladies) but with this one she really outshines most of her collegues.
I am not in a position to evaluate the absolute originality of the plot itself as I am no avid reader of SF in general, but as far as M/M fiction is concerned it was quite new and engaging Temin is a deep space pilot who crashes on a supposedly uninhabited planet only to find it peopled by a society of intelligent catlike bipeds. After several vicissitudes human and cats get to know and appreciate each other and a special relationship is forged between the human and one of the cats.
There is nothing kinky in this the aliens may be catlike but they are sentient and just as clever as humans.
All this story is beautifully told. The author manages to convey the believable feelings of a man stranded in the middle of nowhere with no hope of getting rescued and the perspective of a curiously alien society. As far as catpeople are concerned their behaviour is clearly patterned along the lines of our terrestrial cats (lion prides come to mind) but those patterns also serve as a basis for a nicely developped alien psychology, believably different from ours. The love story is warm and intimate, nicely done.
I can only find two flaws in this book.
The pacing could have been expanded further to give the evolution of the characters' interaction even more scope; do not misunderstand me, this book is long (and a good deal for its $4,99) but it could have been even longer and even more satisfying.
Second, Ms Somerville's writing, elsewhere perfectly neat, becomes a little clumsy when trying to write down the attempts of the characters to speak each other's language. As it happens often it did get in the way.
There are some sex scenes, explicit but plot related and never indulged upon, which is always fine with me but could disappoint readers looking for hotter stuff. The ending is a little sad, bittersweet so to say. Even here the author manages to convey great depth of feeling with not one redundant word.
The book is much better than its title (or the front cover). So why than only 2*/5*?
1. Our hero is depicted as very resourceful. So why did he not use maths (numbers) to show his sentience BEFORE the s*t hit the fan? It is basic! Depicted alien cats are bipeds, using front hands/paws, so they use numbers, and it is the surest way to show sentience. Or just write your name! As he did AFTER the problems!
2. Previous expedition tried to eradicate the local sentient species????? WHY??? Author has shown that there are MANY Earth-like planets, and FTL is cheap and plentiful. Also we have found no other sentient race. So WHY kill off the only one we found????? Over WHAT? Makes NO sense at all.
I was quite pleasantly surprised. I've been reading sci/fi for over 40 years and recently discovered the MMshifter genre while looking for books with gay characters. Searching those lists led me to this. I really loved this book. Much more skillfully written that nearly all of the MM shifter/romance/fantasy/erotica/whatever stuff. It was basically a Sci/fi story that just happened to have a human male main character that was gay. CAUTION SLIGHT SPOILERS The only complaint I have is that I wish there were more of it. It's not a short book but, I would have love to see more of the alien culture and a subplot fleshed out about the human politics and events that caused Temin to be stranded. I can see where this all might be leading to another book but, it would certainly be more powerfull to be one book with both stories intertwined than two separate ones. This is the first book I've read from this author and I look forward to reading more.
A human, Timen, is marooned on an alien world inhabited by sentient, giant cats, the Day-neh. They mistake him for an animal, keep him as a pet and can't figure out he's cold when he has no fur. But one of the cats, Gredar, takes a liking to the small creature and keeps him warm. After a while, Gredar figures out Timen is not just an animal, and tries to communicate. It also helps that Timen is gay, and the males of the Day-neh race are bisexual.
Let me get my gripes out of the way first Timen frequently uses a curse word "shefting," and it's annoying. It's just a replacement for the word f*cking, but he still uses the word f*cking to describe sex. Also, his spaceship is called a "podpod." That's what a toddler would call a spaceship. I cringed when I first read it, and I thought I was in trouble on page one.
The book is fairly light on the typos, though it could have used a copyeditor to catch the comma mistakes.
But my biggest complaint about the book is that it's just not visual. The Day-neh are supposed to be giants compared to our protagonist, but there is no sense of scale. The author narrates, but does not describe. I was nearly blind for most of the story. The only indication of size difference is one piece of narration which states Gredar is 4 meters tall. I assume Timen is 2 meters tall or so, but that's it. There's no mention of how big Gredar's paw is compared to Timen's hand, or arm, or even dick. Without some relative measures, it's very hard to see what's going on.
Action does not seem to be the author's thing either. The crash-landing happens between chapters, the climax happens while the protagonist isn't looking, and the giant bird-thing (a "boril") is killed between chapters, too. Even the sex is difficult to see. Visually, it is not a satisfying read, and the lack of action and good descriptions really do hurt the story.
But for all that, I still got invested in what was happening. This is a story that's been done many times before, but I really felt for these two, and the author gave this setup a great deal of thought. This isn't a mere gay sex story; she sets up an entire society.
The Day-neh are matriarchal. Gredar may be a strong male, but he still answers to his mother, and his mother can send him away at any time. Males in this society are only allowed to stay in the settlement if they are useful, and they can be killed if they do not stay in their place. This is refreshing, and it gives the males a good reason to do what they do. The females call the shots, so males amuse themselves by having sex with one another. It's an effective way to justify a casual m/m relationship, making it so much more than a gay romance.
It's also not simple. Timen has to learn a new language, and Gredar tries to learn Timen's. At times their dialogue sounds like Tarzan and Jane trying to discuss politics, and it can be a bit laughable, but I respect it for not taking any shortcuts. Timen does get better, but he is alive at the mercy of Gredar's mother, and Gredar is allowed to keep Timen in her house complete at her whim. The other females in the house are also a danger to Timen. It takes time for Timen to earn a place in their society, despite him being male, and I like that.
The author put a lot of effort into this, and it shows. Despite the weak descriptions, I still felt for Timen and Gredar, and I liked seeing them together. Both are in danger in different ways, and it's refreshing to see that. The relationship really does go both ways Gredar protects Timen, and Timen does pay him back.
Until the ending... Timen's reason for going home is so contrived I wondered what everyone was upset about. The solution is so simple if Timen is happy here, he should stay. He doesn't *have* to go home. Granted, life would have been difficult in a world that wasn't to his scale, but that seems like such a flimsy reason to send him home.
Also I wish more attention had been drawn to what happened to the first human colony on this planet 500 years ago, why the Terran government didn't bother to find out what happened to it, and why the colonists attacked the Day-neh in the first place. And why do the space ships have cloaking devices? Doesn't that eat up a lot of power? And the scanner Timen has; shouldn't that require recharging after a year of operation?
Ah, it is far from perfect, but it is still on the good side of imperfect. For all its flaws, it is a good read.
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