A Judgment of Dragons

Starcats #1

by Phyllis Gotlieb

MEET PRANDRA AND KHRENG...They eat for the same bowl, could and preen -- then travel across Time, down through Space, to the most bizarre and dangerous worlds in the Galactic Federation. Even to Solthree, where they are met with some alarm...A starcat and rabbi tale, with dragons

Genres: Science Fiction, Fantasy, Fiction

265 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

Phyllis Fay Gotlieb, née Bloom, BA, MA was a Canadian science fiction novelist and poet.

The Sunburst Award is named for her first novel, Sunburst. Three years before Sunburst was published, Gotlieb published the pamphlet Who Knows One, a collection of poems. Gotlieb won the Aurora Award for Best Novel in 1982 for her novel A Judgement of Dragons.

She was married to Calvin Gotlieb, a computer science professor, and lived in Toronto, Ontario.

Reviews

[Peter Tillman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Martha Wells' short review from 2015:
"In the four novellas in this book, the aliens are large panther-like telepathic cats, who are trying to take their place in an intergalactic star empire. The stories are all from their point of view, and they end up solving unusual mysteries while coping with strange worlds and hostile alien entities. They often have to deal with equipment that isn’t designed for their bodies or eyes, and humans who want to see them as savage animals. These are great stories, and the alien viewpoint is fascinating and easy to sympathize with."

Alien cats! Martha Wells likes it! Need I say more?

Cover copy, from my Ace mmpb (1985, lightly edited):
"Meet Prandra & Krengh -- giant telepathic red starcats from Ungruwarhkh. They are bad tempered. They hold grudges. They are uninterested in anything that is not good to eat. They are the most unusual agents of the Galactic Federation!" Whoa.

The 4 short novellas are all original to this book. In the first, "Son of the Morning," Prandra & Krengh confront an alien time-vortex on their first visit to Solthree, and nicely outsmart a hostile alien while dealing with the locals in 19th century rural Poland. The village rabbi is convinced the big cats are demons! Just as I was hoping, Gotlieb's writing is far better than the pulpy plot would require. And those big red starcats are pretty charming.

The late Phyllis Gotlieb (1926-2009) never attracted many readers, sfaict. This fix-up is pretty darn good, and carries over (more accurately, foretells) elements from her masterwork, "Flesh and Gold" (1998) which I liked a lot: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

I just finished novella #2, "The King's Dogs," a rather meandering tale of the starcats' second visit to Solthree, and their adventures with a hidden Lyhhrt enemy. Spoiler alert: they solve the mystery! On to #3, another good one. The Starcats are definitely the best part, but this set of four linked novellas is pretty keen. better than what you might expect for a 1980 SF book, that amounts to a fix-up novel. Sadly, the final titular novella went off the rails, imo, and cost the book a half-star. Rating: 3.5 stars, rounded up, and I'll keep my copy for a possible re-read down the line. Recommended reading.

[Strix · Rating 5 out of 5]

A quick forward before I begin: this book is exactly what I look for when I want to read sci-fi. A creative setting, characters, and it's from an older obscure author. Who's a woman, to boot! Therefore this review is definitely biased because I'm the target audience.

A Judgment of Dragons is a set of four novellas that form a single novel. Despite being novellas you shouldn't start anywhere - they reference previous novellas and are meant to be read in chronological order.

They're about a pair of giant red leopard-like cats who come from a far-flung planet. They've been granted spaceflight by the Galactic Federation and welcomed as a member race - not just because they're sentient, but because so many of them are psychics. This book chronicles the journey of Khreng and Prandra, a married couple who travel to Earth in order to finalize the details of their membership in the GalFed - one of the biggest benefits to joining the GalFed is that they're offering food supplies to their planet. As, you see, the cats have overhunted their planet to the point where these poor cats have to fish in order to have anything to eat.

That's the framework for most of the novel - here are capsule summaries of the four novellas.

Son of the Morning: Prandra and Khreng approach Earth, and accidentally fall into a time vortex, landing in 19th century Poland. They have to solve a mystery in order to return, and this is where I first fell in love with the book, as the author's love of humanity shone through - the Jewish village is depicted remarkably well and her understanding of human insight, as filtered through these cats... gosh.

The King's Dogs: Now back in their era, they land on Earth and finalize the deal with the GalFed. Then someone is murdered. This is the purest murder mystery in the novels, and it introduces Kinnear as a recurring character - he's a detective who initially isn't sure if the cats murdered someone or not.

Nebuchadnezzar: On their way back to their home planet, the cats stop to help out a friend alien with a smuggling ring. This novella has a more Mission Impossible kind of vibe, and is perhaps the darkest of the set - but in a good way.

A Judgment of Dragons: The titular story, and what a story! The cats are home and working to set up the food situation, as well as resolving tribal differences and familial issues when, well - dragons. Judgment. You'll see: it's beautiful.

The writing is fantastic, and it occasionally turns into poetry for some of the more alien moments, which is a really cool effect - and not one you see in modern works as much! I found myself blazing through a story at a time, lying around to digest and savor what I'd just read, then repeating.

I loved the dynamic of the main couple - they've had children, they miss them but this mission is important, and they're just... they're cats! They're strange and quixotic but also really good at untangling strange situations. I got really attached to Prandra especially, as she got closer to some of the villains in profound ways and seeing her mate support her was just...

I got invested in this book, can you tell? Wildly creative sci-fi that also pulls at the heart-strings is everything I want out of life, and then these cats are cats and you can't forget it. Phyllis Gotlieb got the psychology dead on here so you don't think they're humans wearing fur. It's brilliant. Please read it!

There are sequels and I'll read and review them when they arrive. Which should be soon!

[Ebenmaessiger · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Son of the Morning” (1972): 10
- I’m gonna treat this fixup like a fixup and take the novellas individually, and good for it, because there’s no way I can imagine Gotlieb sustaining the hectic brilliance on display in “Son of the Morning”, a madcap story of uplifted spacecats saving a Biedermeier-era shtetl from the pogrom-inducing mania of a rogue extra-dimensional entity, with only the help of a espish-sensitive rabbi and brain in a vat.

[Patty · Rating 5 out of 5]

Science-fiction from the 1970s, consisting of four novellas connected by their main characters, Prandra and Khreng. Prandra and Khreng are a married couple and members of an alien species that looks exactly like bright red leopards, except that they're intelligent, capable of speaking (although they always do so in the present tense, which annoyed me for the first dozen pages and then I came to really like), and telepathic. They've recently been contacted by the Galactic Federation (similar to Le Guin's League of All Worlds or Star Trek's United Federation of Planets), who has agreed to help out with the lack of food on their home planet in exchange for some of their strongest telepaths – including Prandra herself – coming to work for GalFed.

The novellas follow one after the other chronologically and are strongly linked.
In 'Son of the Morning' Prandra and Khreng are on their way to visit Earth for the first time when they're accidentally caught in a time vortex that sends them back to a small Jewish village in early 1800s Poland. They must figure out how to get back to their present without anyone realizing they're there, while also outmaneuvering another alien who's interested in instigating a pogrom for its own amusement.
'The King's Dogs' follows them to a GalFed school where Prandra can be trained in telepathy. Someone is murdering other students and teachers, framing Prandra and Khreng in the process. They have to find the real murderer before blame settles on them.
In 'Nebuchadnezzar', Prandra and Khreng are on their way back home, but they stop at another planet to help out a friend they made at school. They get caught up in violence between two rival gangs of drug smugglers.
Finally, in 'A Judgment of Dragons', Prandra and Khreng return to their home world, where they deal with helping the rest of their people try to adjust to the massive cultural change that is becoming part of a galaxy-wide economy, reintegrate with their now-adult children, deal with the prejudice of one of the GalFed employees, and, oh yeah, face down an omnipotent alternate-dimensional alien power that wants to possess them all.

It's a very 70s series in some of its elements and concerns; why was telepathy such a big deal for a few decades and now hardly ever appears in modern sci-fi? Not to mention the whole cat thing. It seems like modern aliens are usually not "cats, but smart", but go in more experimental directions. When there are aliens at all, that is; they seem rarer in today's sci-fi. Comparing A Judgement of Dragons to C. J. Cherryh's The Pride of Chanur, which also features spacing-faring cat-aliens, Gotlieb's version feels a lot more like real cats, more distinct from the human characters. For all the silliness of some of the premises (and check out that extrememly metal cover) there's excellent ideas and characters here. Gotlieb's writing oftens skirts around the main issues, alluding to them rather than stating them straightforwardly, which gives the stories a delicacy and power that's impressive. I thought the first story, 'Son of the Morning', was the best, simply because it's such an unusual setting for alien battles and invisibility cloaks, and yet it works so well and lends such an authentic human sensibility to fantasy.

There are apparently two sequels that I'd love to read, but we'll see; I only managed A Judgement of Dragons itself due to a very lucky find in a second-hand store.

[William Leight · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a somewhat strange book (with an extremely misleading title, although "Judgment of Energy Beings", though more accurate, is less poetic), but, I would say, in a good way. Our heroes, Prandra and Khreng, come from a race of bright red, jaguar-sized cats, who are both intelligent and in many cases (especially the females) telepathic. This has brought them to the attention of the Galactic Federation, which is happy to supplement what their planet lacks in terms of food in return for the services of a large pool of telepaths. Prandra and Khreng are their people's emissaries to GalFed, which is sending them to Earth to learn about animal husbandry and acquire a number of frozen cow embryos for use in starting some herds of cattle: Prandra is also receiving supplementary training as a telepath and has agreed to a second life with GalFed as a brain in a jar (telepaths are still useful in such a state). In the first story in this book, the shuttle that is taking them from their ship down to earth is accidentally diverted into a time warp and they end up in 17th or 18th century Poland, trying to stop an invincible energy being from causing a pogrom out of some combination of boredom and malice. Upon their return to their own time, they are sent to the Siberian GalFed station that was their original destination, where they have to solve a murder mystery. Then they take it upon themselves to try to help a friend, one of a species of intelligent molluscs, whose planet is menaced by the activities of drug dealers. Finally, upon their return to their own planet, they have to mend the rifts within their own society, as well as deal with many more of the energy beings and a Being (the capital B is deliberate) that is as much more powerful than the energy beings as they are than Prandra and Khreng's people. The stories are all fairly effective, with the second and third being the strongest, with some rather clever plotting (the second in particular manages to construct a mystery in which it seems impossible that anyone at all could have committed the murders). The first and fourth are somewhat weaker, as almost always happens when godlike beings are introduced, as they inevitably distort the plot: the first isn't that bad as there's only one of them, but the titanic climax of the final story seems just a little too much, and the light that it throws on the character of Prandra and Khreng's people could have been obtained in some other fashion. Mostly, of course, via Prandra and Khreng themselves: they, and in particular their interactions with each other, are what really make this book worth reading. Gotlieb does an excellent job of making them believable not just as intelligent cats but as characters, and their repartee -- by turns affectionate, playful, and grumpy -- is definitely the book's strongest point. Gotlieb also does very well with their interactions with other characters: well enough, I feel, that the point she wants to make in the last story about the independence of the intelligence cats is already made without introducing the Being who simply serves to distort the scale of the story. Nonetheless, despite this misstep the book is a lot of fun to read and definitely encouraged me to seek out more of Gotlieb's work.

[Kerry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Phyllis Gotlieb is compatible with Spinoza. The capacity to be good, to have emotions, and to think rationality is what is human, and these are properties of any sufficiently complex organism. And so, Gotlieb's characters, whether the sluglike Yirli, the protoplasmic Lyhhrt, the powerful Qumedni, the reptilian Khagodi, the feline Ungrukh, and all the other wierd aliens in her books, are "human." The common humanity of her aliens is an idea that runs through almost all of Gotlieb's science fiction, and it is what makes her such an interesting writer. Superficially, her work is reminiscent of the talking rabbits of Watership Down—though Gotlieb’s GalFed approach is considerably more sophisticated.

A Judgment of Dragons, published in 1980, follows the fortunes of an Ungrukh couple, Prandra and Khreng through four connected novellas. The Ungrukh are uplifted leopards. They are as intelligent as the most intelligent Solthree humans (i.e., us); they are described as psychodynamically simple, with reference to the crystalline clarity of their thinking and lack of hangups; the females, mostly, have powerful ESP ability.

Prandra and Khreng are very well drawn characters with whom we can sympathize. They are feline, certainly, but ethical as well intelligent, with a sense of humor capable of irony. Their home planet of Ungruwarkh lacks good nutrition, and GalFed is teaching them to grow crops which will then be used to raise food animals—in return for their ESP services to GalFed. Prandra and Khreng are ambassadors to GalFed, or at least intermediaries between their own people and GalFed.

The rich texture of Gotlieb's writing permits her to represent complex thought patterns and ways of communicating. The narrative intricacy of her work rewards a slow, careful reading.

A Judgment of Dragons is the first volume of the Ungrukh Trilogy. Judging by this first book, the Ungrukh Trilogy is likely to be as good as Gotlieb's stupendous Lyhhrt Trilogy. As I have read Gotlieb's novels, I have thought many times that her GalFed universe would be a particularly appropriate setting for an RPG. Since her alien characters are all "human," it makes sense that they could be played effectively by actual humans. A Judgment of Dragons certainly reinforced this notion.

[Bill · Rating 4 out of 5]

Canadian writer/ poet, Phyllis Gotlieb has written some of my favourite SciFi stories, especially Sunburst. A Judgment of Dragons contains four short stories featuring the giant red cats from the planet Ungruwarkh, the male, Kreng and his telepathic mate, Prandra. Unfortunately, the first story, Son of Morning, was also contained in another book of short stories I'd already read, Son of Morning and Other Stories, but it was still nice to be reintroduced to Prandra and Kreng with that story and then to continue with three other stories featuring the irrepressible pair; The King's Dogs, Nebuchadnezzar and A Judgment of Dragons. The four stories could just as easily have been one novel as the stories follow on one after the other as the two cats go to GalThree (AKA Earth) so Prandra can learn to use her esp powers better and they can obtain assistance from the Federation in helping the planet Unruwarkh become more self sufficient. Prandra and Kreng are wonderful characters, grumpy, loving and just fun to read about. Each story is almost a mystery, as the two find themselves in situations that need resolution. The supporting cast; Espinoza, an esp brain who accompanies the in the first story, Kinnear, a blunt security official in the 2nd and 4th stories and others, are all excellent as well. The stories were very enjoyable and just added to my love of Gotlieb's writing. Check her out.

[Lucy Cummin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Complex and seriously fun. The main characters, Prandra and Khreng, sentient felines, the females capable of powerful telepathy are not cuddly! Their origins are mysterious too . . . On assignment for the Galactic Federation, a pair end up in Poland, in a shtetl, in the middle ages and in a predicament that only the rabbi can help them get out of. That's the first story. Oh and the dragons are . . . really scary . . . and not really dragons exactly the way we've come to think of them. These entities live out in the universe. I have no doubt that Cherryh is a disciple. ****

[Clement Kent · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really wanted to give this a 5 star rating, but it reads with that telegraphic brevity of older science fiction. Themes are started but not fully worked out. An important character changes from malevolent to benign with no hint of why. But, for fans of cats and interesting aliens, this will be a good read. I liked the first of 4 chapters because it uses a Doctor Who style time warp to visit Jewish life in Poland before the great pogroms.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this trilogy out of order. I read the third book first so now I went back to read the first book second.

I was surprised to find that it's a really a series of short stories describing how the starcats got their allies. I also like that they think purely in the present tense. It really adds simplicity.

I'm enjoying the books.

[Meredith Morgenstern · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting sci-fi, though not fully coherent at times. I'm not sure where the dragons were, but I liked the telepathic cats. Not my favorite but still a fun read.

[Monica · Rating 3 out of 5]

While I do enjoy the large alien red cat protagonists, I really was not a fan of the writing style. This book is also composed of 4 novellas and to be honest I only really found the 4th one to be interesting, and the most readable.

[S.M. Wheeler · Rating 4 out of 5]

A solid case of "Jesus fuck, what did I just read?", but a good one. Further review to follow.