Eye of Cat

By: Roger Zelazny

Narrated by: Jason Grasl

William Blackhorse Singer, the last Navajo on a future Earth, is called upon to aid in protecting an alien diplomat from a powerful and hostile member of his own species. With the aid of a shape-shifting alien known as "Cat," he carries out the mission, with one condition: when the mission is over, Cat wants a return bout with the man who captured him, a chase with Singer as the hunted instead of the hunter . . .

Eye of Cat takes a twist on the hunter turned hunted. William Blackhorse Singer is hired to protect an alien diplomat, then enlists the assistance of a shapeshifter he captured years earlier. The creature will only help on the condition that it gets a chance to try to trap Singer once the mission is completed.

©2001 Amber Limited Co (P)2024 Tantor

Billy Blackhorse Singer is an archetypal Zelazny protagonist.

this is a wonderful book, and it takes itself seriously and humorously at the same time, in a fashion I have come to associate with the best of Roger Zelasny's work. Do yourself a favor and listen to this.

One of Zelazny's Best

This is one of my longtime favorite Roger Zelazny novels where he takes his love of the Navajo culture and uses it to create a powerful tale set in the far future. Billy Singer is the last of his clan—a man out of time. He has spent most of his life hunting exotic alien lifeforms to bring back to a zoo on earth. All of that space travel has caused him to outlive everyone he knows. And so, the man that the reader meets in the opening chapters is depressed without knowing that he suffers this affliction, and he is seeking both meaning in his life and a place in it.

The opportunity to discover both is presented to him when the government asks him to stop a shape-changing alien assassin with telepathic powers. He clearly doesn’t think he has a chance of doing so, but in the back of his mind he comes up with an idea that might do the job. One of the creatures he put in the zoo was an alien shape-changer which he thinks of as "Cat." Singer has always suspected that Cat was actually sentient and he decides that this request by the government offers him a chance to find out. So, he breaks into the zoo, convinces Cat to talk to him, and then makes a deal to save the leader of earth. Cat (whose world has since been destroyed) wants to kill Singer. And Singer offers him his life in exchange for tracking and killing the alien assassin.

As if this wasn’t a great enough beginning, there are a whole bunch of human telepaths who have been recruited to try and identify and stop the assassin. I’m not going to write much about them, but they are great characters and I love how Zelazny uses their telepathy.

The first major crisis of the story comes about midway through the book when Cat claims his prize from Singer only to be disappointed. He doesn’t want to just kill Singer, he wants to beat him. He wants to hunt him and win the rematch between the two. And Singer discovers that he is not suicidal. He does want to live. And that hunt, and what Singer does to himself to survive, is what makes this such a memorable story.

If you like Roger Zelazny work, you’re going to love this novel.