like a short man;
disproportionately long legs;
four-fingered hands;
large clawed feet;
stubby tail;
round head;
flat face;
narrow chin;
large slanted eyes;
scarlet irises;
fronded tendrils;
small nose;
single nostril;
wide mouth;
carnivore teeth;
large ears resembling bat-wings;
sleek black-striped orange fur, white at the throat.
I do not remember any of these details while reading the novel. I suppose it is a bit like an anthropomorphic tiger. An exercise would be to reread the description in The Game Of Empire to check whether it adds or contradicts.
Other Feline Aliens
Larry Niven's kzinti - Anderson wrote three kzin stories.
James Blish's Martian dune cats in Welcome To Mars, Aaa in The Star Dwellers and Chrestos in The Warriors Of Day.
4 comments:
Paul:
Andre Norton's Salariki (home planet Sargol), appearing in *Plague Ship*, *Eye of the Monster*, *Android at Arms*, and as background cameos in one or two other stories, were very catlike — in particular, *Plague Ship* showed them responding to Terran catnip as enthusiastically as Terran cats did.
David Weber's *Honor Harrington* series has a species humans refer to as treecats. They're empathic and form bonds with specific humans (including the series' title character), so intensely that the human's death usually leads to the treecat going into a fatal decline.
Marion Zimmer Bradley included cat-men in several different stories. *Hunters of the Red Moon* (a "The Most Dangerous Game" scenario) is the only one I've read where any cat-man was a significant character rather than a more-or-less faceless enemy.
Kaor, Paul!
Besides the examples listed by you and David, I would include as well Poul Anderson's Chee Lan, from the human discovered planet Cynthia. Chee and other Cynthians are described as reminding humans of cats.
Sean
Sean,
I think of the Cynthians as intelligent squirrels.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Yes, but the descriptions I've seen of Cynthians still reminded the characters in the Technic stories of cats, not squirrels.
Sean
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