Breed to Come is one of Norton’s better-loved books. It was published in the early Seventies, shortly before what is effectively a companion volume (and was packaged so in Baen Books’ ebook revival of Norton’s works), Iron Cage. Whereas Iron Cage frames itself as a human variation on a cat locked in a cage and dumped out of a car, with aliens as the villains who cage the humans, Breed to Come tells the story of an Earth abandoned by humans and inhabited by intelligent animals.
The primary protagonist is Furtig, a mutated cat who lives in a colony related to a famous explorer and leader, Gammage. The People, as they call themselves, have evolved somewhat functional hands—at the cost of their ancestral claws—and the ability to walk upright as well as on all fours. They coexist more or less peacefully with mutated pigs, have an adversarial relationship with local tribes of mutated dogs, and open enmity with the mutated rats who infest the ruined cities of the Demons.
The Demons, it quickly becomes clear, were humans. They are long gone. Some went into space. Those who remained on Earth either killed one another off or died of the same disease that caused some of their livestock, lab animals, and pets to develop enhanced intelligence.
Gammage may or not be still alive when the story begins. Furtig is an intrepid hunter and explorer himself, with mental abilities that he does not at first realize are exceptional. He is not otherwise remarkable by his people’s standards, and is not terribly surprised when he fails to win a mate in a ritual trial by combat. He has already decided to seek out Gammage, if he still lives, and join his effort to raise the People’s profile in the world.
This in fact Furtig manages to do, after a series of fairly standard Norton adventures: battles with the evil Rattons, encounters with the Barkers and the Tuskers, and lengthy subterranean expeditions. He not only finds Gammage but one of his own close relatives who had been missing and presumed dead, and a colony of further mutated cats, some of whom have even lost most of their fur, but who have evolved fully functional hands.
Gammage has a mission, not only to master Demon technology but to use it against the Demons themselves. He believes that the ones who escaped into space are coming back in response to the beacon that they left behind, and he wants to be ready for them. He is convinced that this will happen soon.
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Furtig is not sure he believes in that, but he is on board with the appropriation of technology. This does not mean that he fits easily or well into Gammage’s colony. The “In-born” seem aloof and arrogant to him, and most of them command knowledge that he lacks, as well as possessing much more facile fingers.
His situation improves considerably when it becomes apparent that he has psychic abilities. He can track other People with his mind, and see distant places by focusing his mind on them. This is tremendously important for scouts who are trying to retrieve Demon records from areas taken over by the Rattons.
Three-quarters of the way through the story, everything changes. It’s been thoroughly foreshadowed and clearly set up, but it’s still a bit startling to suddenly get, in italics, the viewpoint of the secondary protagonist, Ayana, a human woman on a spaceship headed for Earth. There are four in the crew, two men and two women, and she is the medic.
Ayana is fundamentally a decent person. Her culture is not. It’s clearly totalitarian, it scores and assesses people and assigns them jobs and mates without choice or appeal, and if a person doesn’t fit the mold, she’s mentally altered until she does. The male Ayana has been bound to is, to put it bluntly, a macho asshole, and her role is to tone him down and keep him in line as much as possible.
The four scouts have been sent to reconnoiter the planet their ancestors abandoned half a millennium before, to discover whether it can be re-colonized. Humans are close to destroying the world they fled to, in much the same way they destroyed Earth. Now they need a new planet to poison.
One of the first things Ayana’s mate Tan does after they land is capture a pair of young Tuskers from their mother—and cook and eat them. Ayana has an awful feeling about that, and warns the others that maybe these aren’t just food, but Tan mocks her and the other two pay no attention. Tan also, while exploring, catches video of Furtig and another one of the People escaping, injured, from a Ratton attack, but they don’t realize for some time what or who they’re seeing. Ayana has an inkling, but again, can’t convince the others.
All too quickly, the invaders and the natives clash. Tan allies with the Rattons and captures and tortures some of the People. Ayana goes rogue, discovers that she was right—these “animals” are highly intelligent—and joins forces with them to overcome Tan and the evil, wicked, disgusting Rattons.
It’s clear by then that something in the air of Earth corrupts human minds. They lose their ability to think rationally, and they become aggressive and destructive. It’s worst for Tan, but the others are affected as well.
Ayana takes control of the scout force, overcomes Tan, and blasts off to her home world. Humans will not come back, she promises the People. This world is as toxic to them as they are to it.
All in all this is quite a dark book. As engaging as the People are, and as laudable as Gammage is in his efforts to raise their technological level and unify the different species (but not the evil, disgusting Rattons–why, yes, that bothered me; I dislike this kind of reflexive demonization), the basis of the worldbuilding is the complete depravity of the human species. All they ever do is smash and ruin and destroy. They use and abuse other species, treat them abominably, cage and torture them, and kill and eat sentient beings without stopping to ask if they might, in fact, be sentient.
There are, it’s true, some who aren’t all bad, who try to do the right thing. They don’t make up for the overall awfulness of their species, and the world as a whole is better off without them. Better to leave it to the animals, who aren’t totally pure or perfect either, but who (except for the evil disgusting Rattons) are generally good and reasonable people.
Right about now, I have to admit, this looks more accurate than not. The human species has been working exceptionally hard of late to trash the planet and itself.
And yet, though this is a favorite with some of our regular commenters, I find I like other Norton novels and universes better. It’s not her worst by any means, but for me it’s not a favorite. It reminds me strongly of her collaborative Star Ka’at series for younger readers. These were published in the same decade, as if these particular themes preoccupied her to the extent of writing and rewriting them several times over.
She did have a strong apocalyptic streak, and frequently wrote about the destruction and abandonment of Earth. What’s different here is the fact that humans are completely unredeemable. There’s no possibility of saving them or of restoring them to their native planet. Wherever they go, they destroy their environment and eventually themselves.
Nor are they, as a species, capable of treating other life forms as partners, let alone equals. Ayana does collaborate with the People and their allies, but that’s a kind of atonement for what her ancestors did to them before abandoning the ruined planet. She does not stay, and she undertakes to prevent humans from ever coming back to use and brutalize the new rulers of Earth.
That’s not to say everything is awful on this altered planet. Norton takes great care to depict the People as cats. They don’t think or act like humans. They’re their own thing, clearly based on their original species. Their social structure and their gender divisions suggest what was known at the time of cat behavior.
She has great female characters, too. Although her main protagonist is male, he has multiple female friends, teachers, and allies. Ayana is as complex a character as Norton was able to portray, with a real moral dilemma and a profound and painful epiphany as she learns the truth of what humans did to Earth and its animals.
Still, in my personal lineup of Norton novels, I find I lean more toward the Star Ka’at version of the complicated relationship between humans and cats. Norton did human-animal companionship so well. I miss it here.
Next time I’ll be switching genres again, with the portal fantasy Here Abide Monsters.
Judith Tarr’s first novel, The Isle of Glass, appeared in 1985. Since then she’s written novels and shorter works of historical fiction and historical fantasy and epic fantasy and space opera and contemporary fantasy, many of which have been reborn as ebooks. She has even written a primer for writers: Writing Horses: The Fine Art of Getting It Right. She has won the Crawford Award, and been a finalist for the World Fantasy Award and the Locus Award. She lives in Arizona with an assortment of cats, a blue-eyed dog, and a herd of Lipizzan horses.
I’m all for Cat people! I like Dogs too, but I’m also fond of rats.
This is one of many books/concepts I really enjoyed, but barely remember the content now. I used to like those old books about intelligent animals, new mutant breeds, Silverberg’s New Springtime, etc.
Norton’s early post-apocalypse novels, those boy survival adventures, were written during the worst part of the Cold War with atom bombs a very real possibility. The evil was outside, and even those pesky Russians who have survived the Cthulhu monsters of the ocean just wanted to survive with other humans, even the “enemy.” This novel is a dark night of the soul for her with such utter contempt for humanity. I’m glad she cheered up a bit later or pretended to.
@3 This was published in 70s, so more into her early feminist period.
The Swedish roleplaying game Mutant had antropomorphic, mutated animals in a post-apocalyptic world (though humans were not extinct there) that had mostly forgotten how to use old technology. I had never seen it anywhere else before. Guess this is where they got the idea.
A book I vaguely remember reading, once, in the late 70’s when I was in my early teens. Probably the reason I didn’t read any more of her work.
@@.-@. She had an early feminist period? I can’t say I ever picked up on that in her books. She managed to sneak female characters into those adventures and later books until she could get away with female main characters, and she certainly opened the way to those of us authors who realized that girls could have adventures, too. But feminism?
I loved this one! Cats!
I love this one! Cats!
As a child, I read this as more optimistic as I identified with the cat characters. They are people, just not humans.
As an Aspie, I’ve always been capable of identifying with non-humans, ugly people, or people the author doesn’t want me to identify with.
I also read this book as a child (around the time it came out) and loved it. I hadn’t remembered it as being so dark, but like Wub, I reflexively identified with the animal characters. I don’t recall my thinking back then, but having just come off the Vietnam War and in the midst of growing societal realization that the biosphere was in deep trouble, maybe I just took for granted that given our capacity for greed, short term thinking and general depravity, things would not end well. When I was allowed to name the new family cat, I called her Furtig. My mother was mystified, but allowed it. Furtig lived a long life and was a Good Cat.
Back in the 80s between comic book depictions and the many books I could dig up with this theme, I truly wished there were human/animal hybrids running around.
Timeline placement on this one is difficult. It has a bit of the feel of Star Man’s Son-2250 AD but humans have died out/abandoned Earth long ago. It’s possible the evolution of the species here takes place sometime either long after all the other stories or sometime in the period before Star Rangers where Earth was lost and long forgotten and we may be seeing the “aggressive effect” shown here affecting the regular humans with xenophobia in that story.
After you review Here Abide Monsters, you could check out Moon Called, Brother to Shadows, and Yurth Burden which are stories also set in the far future of her universe. Moon Called is an especially strange one and I’d be interested to read your opinion on it.
@12 In the book she says it’s been five hundred years since humans abandoned Earth. Does that help?
@13 Thank you! I’ve got Yurth Burden in a bundle with Here Abide Monsters, so was planning to read those next. I have the others on my list. I’ve made a note to move them up the line.
I guess the question is: when did humans abandon Earth…? In The Beast Master, (circa 1400 “After Flight”) humans were told Earth was a blasted nuclear wasteland in the war with the Xik. I suspect that was propaganda as The Guild seemed to have access to a secret breeding/genetic tinkering program for mutant, psionic Earth animals in Catseye, where one can speculate it wasn’t as destroyed or abandoned as humans thought/were told. The “co-written” sequels to the original Beast Master novels (Beast Master’s Ark, Circus, & Quest) had a corps of conservationists/ecologists searching for Earth animals in colonies with the intent to create a genetic database to repopulate the Earth as part of a restoration/re-terraforming plan.
It seems that plan may have gotten eventually co-opted by The Guild who may have “disappeared” navigational data on Earth to cover their illegal activities and hide it’s location
By 2483 A.F. Earth is already considered “legendary” (Dread Companion).
Star Rangers is set in 8050 A.D. (which, if 2025 A.D. when The Stars Are Ours! is set (according to Star Man’s Son-2250 A.D.), is year “0” of the “After Flight” calendar system, would make it 6025 A.F.) and Earth has been “rediscovered” by humans there after being long lost… that leaves a good 3000 and some-ish year window when Earth was “abandoned” and “lost”.
So circa 3950 A. F. Waystar, the headquarters of the Jacks (the “space pirates” arm/allies of The Guild) is raided by the Patrol (in Uncharted Stars), that may have severed all human contact with Earth, causing panic and fighting in the remaining Guild members marooned there, wiping out the last of the humans on Earth? Maybe 500 years after that is when this story takes place? This is a lot of speculation on my part but I find it fascinating to weave together nonetheless.
When I was in Middle School, I got into Planet of the Apes–not just the movies, but the new stories in the magazine published by Marvel–and the Jack Kirby comic series Kamandi, the Last Boy on Earth. (It’s really infuriated me how DC practically mocks this comic nowadays; they did a round-robin style year-long miniseries of Kamandi a few years back, most of the issues deriding the series instead of seriously creating good science-fantasy stories). I found this book in the school library and checked it out over and over.
I felt that there must be radiation in the ruins that was affecting the Rattons badly and that it would do the same to the People if they stayed long-term in the ruins. It did cause them to develop more dextrous hands, but they were losing their fur just as the Rattons were. In the end, as I recall, Gammage’s colony left the ruins to face the challenges of their world on their own, with their own inventiveness and intelligence rather than trying to dig up and use what was left behind by others. There was also an alliance of all the sentient beings together except for the Rattons for the first time. I would have liked to explore that world some more. How many more sentient species might there be across the whole planet? And just because the Rattons in that region had turned bad living in the ruins so long doesn’t mean they were like that everywhere.
I looked for this book for years.I read it in the very early 80s (I’m a huge fan of Andre Norton and own several of her series). I was born in the late 60s. I couldn’t remember the title or author, but I remembered the story. In any case, I checked it out from my Jr. High School library around 1982-ish. First series I read I started at 8 with Tolkien, then the Sword of Shannara series (which is also post-apocalyptic), Then there’s the prequels to Shannara, a Knight of the Word, Running with the Demon, and Angel Fire east, which segued into how Shanara’s world came to be in other books. Now here we are in 2023, and the human race is all about greed, power, and stepping on others to get it. If we don’t destroy the entire planet for all species with nuclear weapons, we are certainly on track to destroy ourselves. I’m not saying there aren’t good people, there are tons, but without the power to stop what the powerful are doing, even though they are the minority. We make extinct species after species in the name of greed, and the ‘me me me, more more more” attitude that is overwhelming in the human race. I rescue cats and sugar gliders. Abuse, neglect, thrown away because they’re sick, it doesn’t end and it’s sickening. I can see, without humans, another species could become dominant. And probably should, if they learn from the endless mistakes and carelessness of humans.
I finally got to read this book in the early 80s. The copy in the library was missing and it was out of stock. This is back in the day. But I love cats. There’s one on my lap now. The book I pictured in my mind was Planet of the Apes only with domestic animals. Furtig reminded me of Huck Finn of the felines. I got lost in the character imagining myself as a cat on a great adventure of discovery. I had two cats over the years by that name, both were feral. The book itself was more like Battlefield Earth only with the humans being the bad guys. Growing up reading comic books Allowed me to enjoy the adventure with a sense for the fantastical suspension of disbelief. This of course was before cynical thinking took over. To me Breed to Come was more about irony. Like Planet of the Apes this was about human folly and the realization that we never learn from our mistakes