science fiction – Page 3 – Pain In The Bud

The Greatest Feline In Science Fiction Film History Is About To Turn 45

Making his debut in 1979’s Alien, Jonesy is one of the most famous felines in cinema history.

There’s a popular meme among Alien fans that depicts Jonesy the Cat walking nonchalantly down one of the starship Nostromo’s corridors with his tail up, carrying the corpse of the recently-spawned alien in his mouth like he’s about to present a dead mouse as a gift to his humans.

The joke is self-evident: if the crew of the Nostromo had allowed Jonesy to take care of business from the get-go, the alien would have been disposed of before it had the chance to grow into the monstrosity that haunted the decks of the Nostromo and the nightmares of viewers.

Jonesy Alien — “Who’s a good boy? Who just saved his crew from certain violent death at the claws of a ruthless alien predator? That’s right, you did!”

Of course then there’d be no movie. No ripples of shock in theaters across the US as audiences were confronted by something more nightmarish and utterly alien than popular culture had ever seen before. No indelible mark left on science fiction.

Despite the film’s retrofuturistic aesthetic, it’s difficult to believe Alien first hit theaters almost half a century ago.

That’s testament to director Ridley Scott working at the height of his powers, the carpenters, artists and set dressers who created the starship Nostromo’s claustrophobic interior, the design of the derelict starship where the alien was found, and the bizarre creature itself.

The alien ship and creature designs were the work of Swiss surrealist H.R. Giger, who was little-known at the time but floored Scott and writer Dan O’Bannon with his hyper-detailed paintings of grotesque biomechanical scenes.

Signourney Weaver and one of the cats who played Jonesy in the first film.

Kane explores the infamous egg chamber in the derelict alien ship.

Fan art of Jonesy

A close-up shot of the retrofuturistic tech used in the series, a design decision that departed from the gleaming visions of the future common at the time.

A set photo showing the first film’s crew on the iconic space jockey set.

Giger’s work, specifically his 1976 painting Necronom IV, was the basis for the titular alien’s appearance. The alien, called a xenomorph in the film series, is vaguely androform while also animalistic. It is bipedal but with digitgrade feet and can crawl or run on all fours when the situation calls for it. It hides in vents, shafts and other dark spaces, coiling a prehensile tail that ends in a blade-like tip.

But it’s the creature’s head that is most nightmarish. It’s vaguely comma-shaped, eyeless and covered in a hard, armored carapace that ends just above a mouth full of sinister teeth like obsidian arrowheads. There’s perpetually slime-covered flesh that squelches when the creature moves but there are also veins or tendons or something fully exposed without skin, apparently made of metal and bone. Maybe those ducts feed nutrients and circulate blood to the brain. Maybe they help drain excess heat from the creature’s brain cavity.

Regardless, it’s a biomechanical nightmare that the Nostromo’s science officer, Ash, admiringly calls “the perfect organism” whose “structural perfection is matched only by its hostility.”

The alien, Ash declares, is “a survivor, unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.”

Alien xenomorph — The alien, also referred to as a xenomorph, “that thing,” a “dragon,” “the perfect organism” and various other names by characters in the series. Credit: 20th Century Studios

Part of what makes Jonesey so beloved is the fact that, together with the xenomorph and Ripley, he completes the triumvirate of survivors. We see Jonesy scurry into the protection of tiny confined spaces to escape the alien, hissing at it in the dark. We see him dart into the bowels of the ship after sensing the stalking creature, adding another blip to the crew’s trackers. Finally we see him settling into a cryosleep pod with Ripley, like so many other cats with their humans, when the threat has passed.

Jonesy — affectionately referred to as “you little shithead” by Ripley in the second film — appears in the franchise’s two most famous films, his own comic book series titled Jonesy: Nine Lives on the Nostromo, a 2014 novel (Alien: Out of the Shadows), and in hundreds of references in pop culture over the last half century, from appearances in video games (Halo, World of Warcraft, Fortnite) to references and homages in movies and television shows.

A page from Jonesy: Nine Lives On The Nostromo, which tells the story of Alien from the cat’s perspective. These panels depict Jonesy watching Ash and Dallas examining Kane in the ship’s medical lab.

He’s like the anti-xenomorph. Cats are predators, after all, and Jonesy might be the xenomorph to the ship’s rodents just like every ship’s cat in thousands of years of human naval endeavors. But to the crew members Jonesy’s a source of comfort, a warm, furry friend to cuddle with. Unlike the xenomorph he’s got no biological programming urging him to impregnate other species with copies of himself in one of the most horrific gestation processes imaginable.

Xenos are like predators on steroids, gorging themselves on their victims to fuel unnaturally swift cell reproduction and growth. As a result, over the decades some have speculated that the alien simply ignored the cat, deeming its paltry caloric value unworthy of the effort to kill.

The idea that Jonesy was too small to interest the alien is proved a fallacy in later franchise canon when we see the aftermath of a xenomorph consuming a dog. It’s indiscriminate in its quest for energy, feasting on adult humans and animals alike until two or three days pass and it’s a 12-foot-tall, serpentine nightmare the color of the void of interstellar space.

Just imagine sitting in a theater in 1979. Your idea of science fiction is sleek jet-age spacecraft, Star Trek and Stanley Kubrick’s clinical orbital habitats from 2001: A Space Odyssey. You’re expecting astronauts, heroes, maybe a metal robot or an alien who looks human except for some funky eyebrows, green skin or distinct forehead ridges.

Instead you get a crew of seven weary deep space ore haulers inhabiting a worn, scuffed corporate transport ship, complaining about their bonuses and aching for home, family and the familiar tug of gravity.

But home will have to wait. The ship has logged an unusual signal of artificial origin broadcasting from a small planet in an unexplored star system. The crew has no choice but to investigate. It’s written into their contracts, which stipulate the crew will forfeit their wages if they disregard the signal.

So they land, suit up, move out and find a derelict starship. An incomprehensibly massive vessel so strange in detail and proportion that it could only have been built by an alien mind, with unknowable motivations and psychology.

The Egg Chamber — The egg chamber of the derelict alien ship, designed by Giger.

Inside, hallways that look like ribcages lead to vast chambers with utterly bizarre, inscrutable machinery that seems to consist of biological material — skin, bone, joints, organs — fused with metal. In one of them the corpse of an alien, presumably a pilot, is integrated into a complex array. It’s at least twice the size of a large human man. Its elephantine head is thrown back in the agony of its last moment, when something exploded outward from its body, leaving a mangled ribcage, torn papery skin and desiccated organs.

And beneath that, a shaft leading to another horror — a chamber that seems to stretch for kilometers in either direction, where leathery eggs are cradled in biomachinery and bathed in a bioluminescent cerulean mist.

The decision to enter that chamber sets off one of the most shocking scenes in cinema history, leads to the birth of pop culture’s most terrifying monster, and sent millions of theater-goers home with nightmares in the spring and summer of 1979.

It’s almost too much to handle. But take heart! The unlikely female protagonist makes it to the end, and so does the cat. What more can you ask for?

Jonesy on the Nostromo — Jonesy grooming himself on the flight deck of the starship Nostromo. Credit: 20th Century Studios

Laika And Felicette: The First Dog And Cat In Space Were Sacrificed For Human Ambition

Mankind’s achievements in space came at the expense of dogs, cats and non-human primates, who were sent into orbit during the early days of the space race.

I’ve been watching Apple TV’s exceptional show, For All Mankind, which dramatizes the space race of the 1960s and beyond in a sort of alternate history where the Soviets, not Americans, first lay boots on the lunar regolith.

That loss lights a fire underneath the behinds of the people at NASA and convinces American politicians that the space race is the ultimate measure of our civilization. In real life, American ingenuity and the creativity fostered by a free society allowed the US to leap ahead and “win” the space race. Space missions were already becoming routine by the time the drama of Apollo 13 briefly rekindled public interest.

Then the Soviet space program faded, the competition turned one-sided, and without an arch-enemy to show up, American politicians pulled back NASA’s funding to a fraction of what it once was, where it remains today. That’s why the rise of the private space industry — Elon Musks’s Space X, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, etc — will almost certainly be our ticket to Mars.

But in For All Mankind, NASA remains the budgetary behemoth and source of prestige it was in the 60s and 70s, leading to the development of a permanent moon base, lunar mining operations and a planned mission to the red planet.

There’s a quiet moment in the second season when a Soviet cosmonaut, visiting the US as part of a peacekeeping mission, shares a drink in a dive bar with an American astronaut.

“Do you like dog?” the cosmonaut asks.

“Dogs?” the astronaut replies. “Of course. Who doesn’t like dogs?”

The Soviet shakes his head.

“No, dog,” he tells her. “Laika.”

Laika was the first dog in space, or more accurately, the first dog the Soviets acknowledged sending into space. (The Soviets didn’t acknowledge their failures, and we can only guess at the number of lost cosmonauts and animals officially denied by the Russians, drifting in space for eternity or disintegrated in atmospheric re-entry.)

The moment turns somber as the cosmonaut recalls the Moscow street dog who was selected because she was docile, fearless and could handle the incredible noise and g-forces of a rocket launch.

“I held her in my arms,” the cosmonaut tells his American counterpart, taking a sip of his Jack Daniel’s. “For only one or two minutes on the launchpad.”

Then he leans in and tells her the truth: Laika didn’t triumphantly orbit the Earth for seven days in 1957 as the Soviet Union told the world. She didn’t endure the mission.

She perished, alone and afraid, just hours after launch when her capsule overheated.

The Soviets never designed the Sputnik 2, Laika’s ship, to return to Earth safely. Her death was predetermined.

We laud astronauts and cosmonauts, the brave men and women who willingly strap themselves into tiny capsules attached to cylinders of rocket fuel the size of skyscrapers and depart this Earth via brute force, knowing something could go wrong and their lives could end before they realize what’s happening. We should admire them. Their accomplishments are all the more impressive when you consider the fact that the combined processing power of every computer at NASA’s disposal in the 1960s was but a fraction of what we each hold in our hands these days when we use our smartphones.

Those first astronauts and cosmonauts were extraordinarily brave — but only up to a point.

Unwilling to risk human lives in the early days of space exploration, space programs used dogs, cats and later monkeys and apes, strapping them into confined spaces, wiring their brains with electrodes for telemetry data, poring over the information they gleaned about their heart rates, blood pressure and breathing as they left our home planet.

The sad eyes of a stray dog, separated from everyone she loved, were the first to behold Earth from space. A few years later the eyes of a French street cat took in the same view before humans did.

Felicette, the tuxedo cat who was launched into space by the French on Oct. 18, 1963, didn’t even have a name until the French recovered her capsule and took her back for examination.

The scientists and engineers in charge of the launch didn’t want to humanize her if she didn’t make it, which was a common practice in space programs. (Ham, the chimpanzee sent into space by NASA in January of 1961, was known as No. 65 until his successful recovery. NASA was worried that a name would make him more sympathetic and lead to bad press if the chimpanzee died during the mission.)

Ham_the_chimp_(cropped) — Ham the chimpanzee was little more than a baby. Credit: NASA archives

Despite Felicette’s endurance and successful return, French scientists repaid her bravery by euthanizing her a month later so they could study her brain and learn more about the effects of spaceflight on mammalian biology.

Felicette, like Laika and Ham, was never given a choice. Those animals, with their child-like mental capacity, endured their missions out of a desire to please their human caretakers as much as any natural stoicism they may have possessed.

Would we do the same thing today? Will we repeat those experiments as we set our eyes on Mars?

Consider that the moon is a three day trip, and it’s close enough to Earth’s magnetic field to protect living beings from radiation. Mars is at least a seven month trip if the orbital conditions are right, and there will be no protection from radiation aside from what can be built into the craft. Take that trip without adequate protection and you’re guaranteed to get cancer.

It’s easy to say we wouldn’t make animals our test subjects for a Mars journey, and NASA now has decades of data on the effects of space and zero gravity thanks to the International Space Station.

And yet Neuralink, another company owned by Elon Musk, currently uses monkeys to test its brain interface technology, which allows the primates to operate computers with their thoughts. Those monkeys are forced to endure radical surgery to implant microchips in their brains. The teams working on the technology say suffering by those animals will be worth it as people with paralysis are able to do things with their thoughts and regain a measure of independence, increasing their quality of life.

Likewise, it will probably be an animal, or animals, who will be the test subjects on board craft that first venture beyond the Earth’s protective magnetosphere. Scientists and engineers will do their best to create a vessel that shields its occupants from harmful radiation, but they won’t know how successful they’ve been until the test subjects are returned to Earth and their dosimeters have been examined.

Will an astronaut volunteer for that kind of mission, knowing the “reward” could be a drastically shortened life?

Felicette pictured on commemorative stamps.

Felicette, left, was just one of several cats considered for the launch by French scientists.

To hear Musk and futurists tell it, pushing toward Mars is not just a matter of exploration or aspiration, but is necessary for the survival of our species. Earth becoming uninhabitable, they say, is an eventuality, not an if.

Others point out it’s much easier and wiser to pour our resources into preserving the paradise we do have, and the creatures who live in it, rather than banking on a miserable future existence on Mars where society will have to live underground and gravity, at 0.375 that of Earth, will change the human form in just a few generations.

To put it bluntly, while Musk and futurists look at life on Mars through the rose-colored glasses of science fiction fans, in reality living there is going to thoroughly suck.

If people do live on Mars they’ll never venture outside without a suit, never feel the sun on their skin, never swim in an ocean. They’ll never have another backyard barbecue, watch fireworks light up the sky on the fourth of July, or fall asleep to the gentle rain and crickets of warm summer nights. They’ll never hear birdsong or have the opportunity to see iconic animals like elephants and lions. Every gulp of air will be recycled, every glass of water will have passed through the kidneys of others. There will never be snow. Circadian rhythms will be untethered from the cycle that governed human biology for the 200,000 years our species has existed.

And while there could be a future — if you want to call it that — for people on Mars, there won’t be a future there for the rest of the living creatures on Earth.

As a lifelong fan of science fiction who devours SF novels, counts films like Alien and Bladerunner among my favorites, and is fascinated by shows like For All Mankind, The Peripheral and Star Trek, I understand the appeal of space and the indomitable human spirit that drives us to new frontiers. I just hope we can balance that with respect for the Earth and the animals we share it with. Let’s hope there is never another Laika, Felicette or Ham.

Correction: For All Mankind is the name of the Apple TV series about an alternate history space race. The first reference to the show’s name was incorrect in an earlier version of this story.

felicette-container — A close-up of Felicette’s face. Credit: French government archives

Ham the Space Chimp reaches for his apple reward after his space mission. — Ham the Space Chimp waits for his apple reward. Credit: NASA archives

Study: More Than Half Of US Adults Haven’t Read A Book In A Year

Did you now? Little Buddy the Cat read an astounding 713 books last year and authored 43 of his own, including the bestseller “How To Handle Your Human Like A Pro: 10 Steps To Better Performance By Your Servant”

You read that right. According to a survey of more than 2,000 people from an independent industry research firm, 51.7 percent of American adults did not read a book in 2021.

More than one fifth (22.01 percent) haven’t read a book in three years, and more than 10 percent haven’t read a book in 10 years.

There are obvious reasons for that, including the choice of many other mediums for entertainment, plus an unprecedented volume of content offerings from streaming networks and traditional TV, meaning most of us have tens of thousands of movies at our fingertips through paid subscriptions like Netflix, Amazon and Hulu, as well as free ad-supported streamers like Tubi and the Roku channel.

Then there’s internet doomscrolling, the endless consumption of news (of which I am guilty), social media platforms designed to keep people engaged, fan fiction sites and a million other leisure activities competing for our attention.

Yet none of those things have a quality that books do. When you read a book, you are entering a theater of the mind created by one mind. Not a movie that has 500 crew members in addition to its cast, focus groups, script writers, script doctors and script polishers. Not a TV show written by committee in a writers room to the specifications of network honchos. With a fiction book, you’re allowing one person’s imagination to usher you into a story, trusting in their storytelling skill to make the experience worthwhile. With a well-researched non-fiction book, you can travel back in time, reliving wars, coups and personal stories, events that shaped the world and events that meant the world to a few people.

Not surprisingly, the survey shows, the percentage of people who read books regularly is lower for younger age cohorts. Credit YA fiction, like Harry Potter, The Hunger Games and similar series for turning at least some of them into readers.

catbook — A curious kitty reading “The Art of Meowing for Treats” by Buddy the Cat. Credit: PITB

The publishing industry is in a sorry state. In lean times publishers and their imprints have become as risk-averse as major movie studios, so they’re far less likely to take chances on new authors with new perspectives than they are to fall back on the same handful of big-name novelists or surefire memoirs like Prince Harry’s Spare.

Because of that, publishing houses don’t invest in developing younger up-and-coming writers the way they once did, and there are fewer literary journals and genre magazines for new authors to use as stepping stones.

Compounding the problem is the echo chamber in publishing: Because many publishing jobs offer low salaries, most of the people who can afford to take those jobs are independently wealthy, increasingly concentrated in places like Brooklyn, and share similar perspectives. That has a pronounced effect on the kind of books they’re publishing.

Still, I think we all share in the blame. I read only 12 or 13 books in the past year. That seemed low but not so bad until I though about it. That’s a measly 120 books in 10 years. It doesn’t add up to much over a lifetime.

When you put it like that, you either want to make sure every book you read is a gem, or you get your ass in gear, put down the junk news articles and smartphone, and dive into more books.

I am a science fiction junkie and wanted to read more female authors since my favorites happen to be a bunch of British guys — Iain M. Banks, Alastair Reynolds, Peter F. Hamilton — and managed a measly one fiction book by a female author in the past year, although it was pretty awesome. (Dead Silence by S.A. Barnes, also known as Stacey Kincade. I think she’s Barnes for science fiction and Kincade for other stuff.) I’ll definitely be down for the planned sequel, and I have Ursula LeGuin in the queue.

What are your reading habits? How many books do you read per year, and are you happy with your pace?

PITB Reviews: ‘The Peripheral’ Is A Refreshingly Original Science Fiction Thriller

Amazon’s newest streaming hit is heady, fast-moving and a lot of fun. There’s nothing else on TV like it.

Amazon’s newest big-budget prestige drama, The Peripheral, imagines a near future when technology has become even more deeply embedded in every day life.

Flynne Fisher (Chloe Grace Moretz) is a young woman who lives in North Carolina’s rural Blue Ridge Mountains, works in a 3D print shop by day and plays virtual reality games by night.

The story is set a decade from now in 2032, and while Flynne’s brother, Burton (Jack Reynor), plays startlingly realistic VR games for fun, Flynne plays them for money. Although Burton is a former United States Marine Corps infantryman and war veteran, his sister is the superior player when it comes to video games, and she’s so good that well-heeled players across the world pay her to carry them through high-difficulty levels.

If that seems fanciful, consider that it already happens in real life: some people fork over big bucks to highly skilled players who can help them win in multiplayer video games like Fortnite, or run them through the most challenging missions in online role playing games to get coveted in-game gear.

Flynne’s side hustle allows her to afford expensive medication for her sickly mother. Apparently in 2032, Democrats and Republicans are still squabbling over how to pass meaningful prescription drug reforms while remaining in the good graces of the corporate behemoths who finance their campaigns. Some things never change.

When a Colombian company called Milagros Coldiron offers Flynne a hefty chunk of change to beta test their newest game — and the incredibly immersive new headset it comes with — Flynne thinks she’s just taking a lucrative but routine job, one that will help pay for her mom’s meds for at least a few weeks.

What she doesn’t know is that her life is going to change drastically the moment she steps into the newest form of virtual reality, revealing things about her world and herself that she never imagined.

There’s so much more to the story, and in fact we’ve barely scratched the surface, but The Peripheral is the kind of show best appreciated by knowing as little as possible going in.

The ambitious new series is based on a 2014 novel by technoprophet William Gibson of Neuromancer fame. Gibson envisioned the concept of cyberspace in 1981, more than a decade before the first mass market commercial dial-up services were available.

At the time, the idea of exploring almost photorealistic worlds in virtual reality was a radical new idea, and it took more than 35 years for technology to catch up by making it feasible. (We’re still not quite there yet. VR tech has improved by leaps and bounds, and we’re beginning to see the first deeply immersive VR games, but Mark Zuckerberg’s much-hyped version of the metaverse, for example, has fallen flat and been pilloried by press and players alike.)

By choosing to adapt Gibson’s work, Amazon has dipped into the largely untouched world of literary science fiction.

While the science fiction of movies and TV has been treading the same worn ground and returning to the same tired concepts for decades, SF novels are a rich source of astonishingly inventive big ideas, from the existential stories of Liu Cixin (The Three Body Problem) to the galaxy-spanning space opera of the late, great Iain M. Banks, to the gothic horror-tinged, wildly imaginative universe of Revelation Space by Welsh astrophysicist Alastair Reynolds.

Indeed, Netflix is developing a series based on The Three Body Problem, with Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss taking the helm. Amazon has acquired the rights to Banks’ first Culture novel, and Netflix’s highly-praised anthology series Love, Death + Robots adapted two of Reynolds’ short stories as episodes.

Finally we’ve moved beyond the Alien clones, Star Wars sequels, prequels, spinoffs and crossovers, as well as the unfulfilling JJ Abrams mystery box offerings that have made up the bulk of live action science fiction on the big and small screens.

There are no candy-colored light swords in The Peripheral, nor are there spandex-clad superheroes or franchise installments designed with merchandise sales in mind. Instead, we get a story for adults, one that gives the audience a lot to think about while also holding a mirror up to our own world, as the best science fiction always does.

After all, technology changes but people don’t. Human nature is a constant. What we do with our shiny new toys says a lot about us as a species and civilization.

Reynor’s Burton connects to a VR world from his Airstream camper in The Peripheral, which is set primarily in North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains and London, UK.

Gary Carr as Wilf Netherton and Chloe Grace Moretz as Flynne Fisher in The Peripheral.

Although The Peripheral begins with the comparatively low-stakes world of virtual reality, its scope rapidly expands until, by the end of the first episode, it becomes clear the show is asking its audience to grapple with existential questions about humanity and our future.

The Peripheral demands its audience’s full attention as it introduces concepts like the parallel universes of M-theory, nanotechnology and the idea that even if matter can’t be shifted between time and space, information in the form of photons can.

Gibson uses these heady concepts in his narrative sandbox, forcing his characters to consider wild concepts like the possibility that there may be infinite versions of themselves existing in infinite branching realities.

How would you react knowing there’s a version of yourself who chose to study classical literature and move to Athens, or a version who became a software programmer, authored a lucrative app and lives in a Manhattan penthouse? Can you imagine having a different wife or husband, or a different child? (Are there realities in which I am not the loyal and loving servant of Buddy? In that case, who is feeding him snacks, and are they doing it promptly?)

T’Nia Miller radiates malice as Cherise Nuland.

Of course, none of this stuff would matter without interesting characters and a compelling narrative. Moretz and Reynor have the chemistry of a real brother and sister in the way they regularly bicker but ultimately love each other. Eli Goree’s Connor is a man of wonderful paradoxes, and T’Nia Miller steals every scene she’s in as the delightfully malicious Cherise Nuland, an antagonist who loves making her enemies squirm while dispensing witticisms in cut glass RP.

For longtime SF fans, there’s another compelling reason to give the series a shot: Canadian writer-director Vincenzo Natali, best known for his mind-bending 1997 indie film Cube, is an executive producer and directs four of the season’s episodes. Natali is a pro at incorporating heady ideas in ways that enhance his narratives instead of weighing them down.

The first season just concluded, and you can stream all eight episodes on Amazon Prime. Bud and I are already looking forward to The Peripheral’s return.

cube-pic-6 — Cube writer-director Vincenzo Natali is behind the lens for half of The Peripheral’s episodes.

Catstronauts Vol. III: Star Commander Bud Leads His Fleet To Victory & Catnip

Meet the Feline Federation’s heroes, led by the dashing and brave Star Commander Bud!

In Catstronauts Vol. III, we meet Lieutenant Luna, a hotshot young pilot, Star Commander Leonidas, a stalwart explorer, the brothers Star Commander Zeus and Star Commander Taro, massive and fearless tiger warriors, Star Commander Hera, the most feared tigress in the galaxy, Lance Cpl. Oliver, a rising star in intelligence, Star Commander Alexandros, a decorated veteran of many galactic campaigns, Star Commander Xysto, the Felid Fleet’s most respected and capable captain, and Star Commander Buddy, whose bravery and prolific napping are the stuff of legend. (Click to view larger versions of each portrait.)

Star Commander Hera

Star Commander Buddy

Star Commander Alexandros

Lance Cpl. Oliver

Star Commander Leonidas

Lt. Luna

Star Commander Hesperus

Star Commander Zeus

Star Commander Taro

Star Commander Xysto

Star Marine Ajax

Star Admiral Heracles

Star Admiral Astraeus

The Battle of Dog 359, Stardate 2662

Star Commander Xysto and the fleet’s flagship, the USS Sparta, led a task force to the Wolf 359 system that included Zeus and Taro on their redoubtable USS Voidclaw, and Buddy with his dependable USS Fowl Play.

After the early evening Fleetwide Nap Time (FNT), the task force engaged the Gorn approximately 6.4 AU out from the system’s binary helix and earned a resounding victory. Cats occupying the bridges, engineering decks and gunneries of all three ships broke out catnip — the good stuff laced with silvervine, not that weak ‘nip made by domestic companies — and were toasting each other when their consoles meowed warning of approaching ships.

The celebration was short-lived as the flotilla was ambushed by a larger Gorn force that emerged from the shadow of an icy moon orbiting the system’s most impressive gas giant. The Felid Fleet was victorious once more in the ensuing combat, but at a cost: both the USS Sparta and the USS Voidclaw sustained heavy damage, while Star Commander Buddy was able to avoid enemy fire by ~~hiding behind the other ships~~ conducting a tactical retreat. Crew members from the other ships reported hearing Star Commander Buddy crying over the fleet-wide comms channel during the battle.

“I believe the commander was saying he was too young and handsome to die,” said Lt. Silverpaw, a science officer serving on USS Sparta. “We heard the commander’s own officers trying to calm him down, but the rumor — and again, I’m not saying this is definitely true — is that he soiled the captain’s chair before his XO was able to get him off the bridge and into his cabin.”

Star Commander Buddy, however, recounted the events differently.

“On Stardate 2262.45, the fleet under the command of Star Commander Xysto engaged with a Gorn expeditionary force that had been raiding colonies in the Outer Realm. While our forces engaged the first Gorn detachment, those sneaky lizards had a second group of ships flank us in an ambush pincer movement. Both the USS Sparta and USS Voidclaw were heavily damaged in the ambush, but my own USS Fowl Play evaded enemy fire due to my deft maneuvering and brilliant tactical handling. Taking command of the fleet, I was able to save the day. In fact, my leadership was so effective that before the battle was done, I declared I was going to have a nap and left the mop-up duties to my executive officer as I retired to my quarters.

“I recommend the admiralty give me medals and commendations and stuff, and ignore the obviously false and defamatory reports of my jealous rivals, who have concocted an absurd story about me ordering my ship to hide behind the others. I haven’t done that since I was a kitten!”

After action reports indicate Star Commander Buddy’s USS Fowl Play resumed its course in time for the regularly scheduled Fleetwide Nap Time (FNT) and returned to Starbase 12, home of the Feline Federation’s most widely celebrated restaurants, including Cluckin’ Clancy’s Turkey Extravaganza.