In addition to the AI, the principal narrator is 16-year-old high school student Stephanie, who has difficulty forming friendships because her mother moves her from town to town at almost random intervals to evade Stephanie’s stalker/arsonist father. Now Kritzer has resurrected that voice (or one very much like it) in her YA novel Catfishing on CatNet, which not only is just as ingratiating as the story, but is far more ingenious in terms of plot and point of view. Naomi Kritzer’s 2015 Hugo Award-winning story “Cat Pictures Please” may have been a bit thin on plot, but the appealing, ingenuous voice of its AI narrator left many readers hoping to hear more, while the very idea of a helpful, well-meaning AI (an idea which Kritzer credited to Bruce Sterling’s “Maneki Neko”) seemed like a welcome antidote to the beaten-to-pulp cliché of human-hating digital Frankensteins.
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