Cat Country

Lao She

Aug 2013 · Sold by Penguin Group Australia

About this ebook

When a traveller from China crash-lands on Mars, he finds himself in a country inhabited entirely by Cat People. Befriended by a local cat-man, he becomes acquainted with all aspects of cat-life: he learns to speak Felinese, masters cat-poetry, and appreciates the narcotic effects of the reverie leaf - their food staple. But curiosity turns to despair when he ventures further into the heart of the country and the culture, and realizes that he is witnessing the bleak decline of a civilization.
Cat Country, Lao She's only work of science fiction, is both a dark, dystopian tale of one man's close encounter with the feline kind and a scathing indictment of a country gone awry.

About the author

Lao She was born in 1899 to a poor Manchu family in Beijing. He left China in his mid-twenties to teach Chinese at the University of London, where he stayed for the next five years. Mr Ma and Son, also published by Penguin, was his third and final novel written during his London years, and was serialized in 1929.

Lao She continued to teach and write upon his return to China. He soon became an established and respected author renowned for his humorist style, but it was not until 1932 that he ventured into the realm of satire and science fiction with his searing dystopia Cat Country. He committed suicide in Beijing in 1966, a few years after being labelled an anti-Maoist and counter-revolutionary by the Red Guards.