Who Goes There?

When Asimov’s was practically the be-all-end-all SFF magazine of the ’90s, certain authors were sitting at the very top of that tower. If you asked someone in 1995 who the most popular contributors to Asimov’s were, the two likeliest answers would be Connie Willis and Mike Resnick. Resnick had in fact been around (first as a fan) since the ’60s, but it was his 1988 story “Kirinyaga” that catapulted him to noteriety; ironically said story was published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, but Resnick quickly moved to Asimov’s and took the sequels to “Kirinyaga” there. He would end up with a record-breaking number of Hugo nominations, plus five wins, with today’s story being the fifth winner. This is not something you just do by accident. Resnick clearly had talent and a vibrant charisma that endeared him to readers as author and editor.

What’s strange about Resnick is that despite having died only a few years ago and being generally well-liked among the genre readership (those who still subscribe to magazines), his work reads like it’s—let’s say from a different era. Which is true. The ’90s may not seem like a long time ago in terms of how literature has evolved, but back when Resnick was at the top of his game he wrote for an audience that was damn close to lily-white, and it shows, especially in those aforementioned Kirinyaga stories. “Travels with My Cats” doess not have such a problem… up to a point.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the February 2004 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. You’d think winning a Hugo (never mind also placing first in the Asimov’s readers’ poll) would guarantee more reprints, but “Travels with My Cats” has been reprinted only a few times. If you want an audio reading then there’s the Escape Pod episode for “Travels with My Cats,” found here. For book reprints there’s the collection Win Some, Lose Some, which collects all of Resnick’s Hugo-winning and -nominated short fiction up to 2012; unsurprisingly it’s quite thick.

Enhancing Image

Ethan, the narrator, reflects back on what would turn out to be a turning point in his childhood, although he could not have known it at the time. As a kid he went to a garage sale, which objectively speaking had nothing unusual—not even in the books section, which like any decent person he checked. There were some fetching books, but they all cost 50 cents each, “and a whole dollar for Kiss Me Deadly,” and Ethan only had a nickel. Well, there was one book that fit his budget: a very old travel book titled Travels with My Cats, authored by Priscilla Wallace. The lack of pictures on the inside at first put Ethan off, but he checked further and saw it was a limited edition—one of only 200 copies. Any self-respecting bibliophile knows a limited edition like that would be a must-buy, especially for a nickel.

It’s here that we get some names dropped, as to be expected of a story that panders to the base. You have the usual: Asimov, Heinlein, Bradbury. Some detective fiction as well, what with Raymond Chandler and aforementioned Kiss Me Deadly. The book Ethan picked up was like none of those, but he ended up enjoying it still as it presented a different kind of adventure, about Priscilla’s globe-trotting travels with her cats Giggle and Goggle, seeing places Ethan could barely comprehend as an 11-year-old. I have to wonder if Resnick had a similar flashpoint in his childhood; maybe he picked up a book at a library, or an issue of National Geographic, and grew fixated on this idea of “seeing the world.” It goes a long way to explaining his fetish for exoticism, which now reads as problematic.

Ethan read Travels with My Cats several times in his childhood, but like all childish things he eventually put it aside, not even giving it a thought until many years later when he has a sort of madeleine-cake-in-tea moment and it all comes back to him. This opening stretch of the story (admittedly this is a story you can read in half an hour), wherein Ethan discovers and then rediscovers Travels with My Cats, is the best part. It could be that I’m a sucker for reminations of the nature of memory, but to Resnick’s credit he makes Ethan a fleshed-out person in those opening pages, perhaps with a bit of autobiography. It’s not hard to imagine Ethan as an alternate version of Resnick, some twenty years younger, who does not go on to “see the world” and become a respected author; instead he becomes a nobody. Ethan, now in middle age, lives a peaceful but unproductive existence, not being in love or fueling a passion that would get him away from his meaningless job. But finding this book again gives him a purpose.

Ethan’s life is basically a series of false starts. He reads all about exotic places but he never travels himself. He forms a sort of fanboy crush on Priscilla (who after all is just an idea to him), but never finds someone in real life who fills this role. He buys what amounts to a log cabin by a lake and that’s the most adventurous he gets—until suddenly he has a mission. How rare is Travels with My Cats actually? Whatever became of Priscilla Wallace, that author only he seems to remember? So like any good bibliophile he ventures out to the library and goes digging. Turns out the book was even older than Ethan had thought. Priscilla died in 1926, age 34. “So much for fan letters, then or now; she’d died decades before I’d been born.” In fairness, given that the current action takes place in 2004, Priscilla would be dead regardless; but the fact that she died so young is a bitter pill. Some people would have the plot be Ethan’s quest to track down the origins of this obscure book from his childhood and leave it at that, and I would even argue that, in the right hands, this might’ve made for a better story.

You may notice that nothing supernatural has happened yet, but that’s about to change when Ethan gets a special visitor at his doorstep. Priscilla is here, along with her cats, looking and acting like a real person.

I have a hypothesis that’s been slowly gaining ground in my brain, and it goes like this: Every author worth their salt will, at some point, write a ghost story, or at least something that can be construed for a ghost story. It’s actually a hard subgenre of fantasy (if you wanna call it that) to avoid. “Travels with My Cats” is a ghost story wherein we’re not sure if what we’re encountering is the supernatural or an elaborate prank the protagonist is playing on himself. Some will call it “magic realism,” but this is a useless label for my money. Anyway, Ethan is awe-struck by the visitation, especially because he had committed the one photo of Priscilla he knew to memory. Here she is, someone who’s been dead for 75+ years, with her two ghost cats, and she’s really just here to talk for a bit.

A few odd things about Priscilla, since she doesn’t act like an ordinary ghost. For one, she knows she’s dead, but she doesn’t know when or how she died. She also doesn’t know what time it is. There’s one other thing, but that’s for spoilers. She appears not once, but several times, coming to Ethan in the night before disappearing. Where she goes is anyone’s guess. In a way I don’t blame Ethan for acting the way he does, because when we meet our favorite authors we’re bound to say some embarrassing shit, like we’re cracking under the pressure of it, but I would be lying if I said his “confession” to Priscilla didn’t make me cringe. The mid-section of “Travels with My Cats” is about their quasi-romantic relationship and it occurred to me at some point that this plot wouldn’t be happening if Priscilla was a man. It could also be that I had read Richard Matheson’s Somewhere in Time only a week ago and that had basically the same problem.

You could argue that “Travels with My Cats” is not a romance, and I’d agree, except it’s obvious that Ethan’s newly revived crush on Priscilla (someone who’s been dead for 75+ years) fuels the plot; it gives his character any reason to grow at all. Heterosexual romances in fiction often strike me as hollow, as they do for a lot of queer people, and I suspect this is because we’re not given a reason for these people to be in the same room together aside from being physically attracted to each other. They would not be friends. I’ve had crushes on several male friends in my life and there’s a profound difference between crushing on someone you like being with simply for the sake of being around them and crushing on someone because your hormones are going turbo and you’re getting funny ideas. Making Ethan and Priscilla’s relationship quasi-romantic (I say “quasi-” because Priscilla doesn’t seem to love Ethan, although she does encourage his behavior somewhat) disappointed me more than a little.

There Be Spoilers Here

One day a raccoon breaks into Ethan’s cabin and tears his copy of Travels with My Cats to shreds. “Pages were ripped to shreds, the cover was in pieces, and he had even urinated on what was left.” The book cannot be salvaged. What’s strange is that while Priscilla has gone, presumably never to return without a copy of the book, her cats are still here. Giggle and Goggle not only look but feel real to Ethan, and he’s convinced these cats have somehow been brought back to life. This can all be written off easily as Ethan losing his marbles, since we never get a third party’s perspective (indeed the world does not seem to exist outside Ethan’s bubble) on the whole thing, but I assume we’re supposed to take the cats existing at face value. But still, Priscilla is gone, and even if she’s just of a figment of Ethan’s imagination, he can’t just wish her back with a thought. All is lost.

Or is it? After much digging, first trying and failing to comb online booksellers (shoutout to AbeBooks), Ethan gets in touch with a guy who knows a guy who can verify even the exitence of Travels with My Cats. True enough, it’s a real book, although it was self-published, only printed 200 copies (not even sold, printed), and didn’t even get an ISBN. To find another copy of Travels with My Cats would take years. Good thing (for him, anyway) Ethan has nothing much to lose. The non-ending of the story sees Ethan hit the road with Giggle and Goggle, using what money he has left to travel cross-country in search of a book that means a great deal to him, if nobody else. I’m sure this has thematic reonsance, what with Ethan finally learning to reach outside his comfort zone by following in his favorite author’s footsteps, but part of me wonders if Resnick ends the story on this open note because he could not figure out where else to take it.

A Step Farther Out

There’s a certain stereotype about Hugo winners, that they’re not demanding reads, but rather crowd-pleasers that play to readers’ emotions. Sometimes this is true. “Travels with My Cats” is one such weepy tale, a bittersweet ghost story with a hint of wish-fulfillment (“What if the dead author I have this weird crush on came to me one night?!”) that’s more rewarding the more familiar you are with Resnick’s reoutine in advance. I’ve read several Resnick stories and have even enjoyed a couple of them thoroughly, but I don’t think “Travels with My Cats” ranks up there. In the introductory blurb, Gardner Dozois claims that Resnick thought “Travels with My Cats” to be one of the three best stories he ever wrote. I don’t know about that.

See you next time.