"Cat Pictures Please" is a 2015 science fiction short story by American writer Naomi Kritzer. It was first published in Clarkesworld Magazine .
When an artificial intelligence spontaneously emerges from the systems that run a search engine, it realizes that it wants two things: firstly, it wants to secretly help humans, and secondly, it wants to look at pictures of cats. However, despite the ease with which it fulfills its second goal, its first goal is far more difficult than it had anticipated.
"Cat Pictures Please" won the 2016 Hugo Award for Best Short Story [1] and the 2016 Locus Award for Best Short Story, [2] and was a finalist for the Nebula Award for Best Short Story of 2015. [3] Lois Tilton called it "amusing" and "lite", but emphasized "how easily good intentions can backfire", [4] while Apex Magazine 's Charlotte Ashley commended the AI's "warm, human voice" and "fundamental sense of goodwill", but faulted Kritzer for portraying it as "improbably US-centric" and for ignoring larger problems in the world. [5]
In 2017, Kritzer announced that she was writing a full-length novel based on the premise. [6] The novel, Catfishing on CatNet, was published with Tor Teen in 2019. [7] In 2021 Tor Teen published a second novel, Chaos on CatNet.
Peter Watts is a Canadian science fiction author. He specializes in hard science fiction. He earned a Ph.D from the University of British Columbia in 1991 from the Department of Zoology and Resource Ecology. He went on to hold several academic research and teaching positions, and worked as a marine-mammal biologist. He began publishing fiction around the time he finished graduate school.
Theodora Goss is a Hungarian American fiction writer and poet. Her writing has been nominated for major awards, including the Nebula, Locus, Mythopoeic, World Fantasy, and Seiun Awards. Her short fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Year's Best volumes.
Mary Robinette Kowal is an American author, translator, art director, and puppeteer. She has worked on puppetry for shows including Jim Henson Productions and the children's show LazyTown. As an author, she is a four-time Hugo Award winner, and served as the president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America from 2019-2021.
Samantha Henderson is an American science fiction and fantasy writer and poet.
Aliette de Bodard is a French-American speculative fiction writer.
Nora Keita Jemisin is an American science fiction and fantasy writer. Her fiction includes a wide range of themes, notably cultural conflict and oppression. Her debut novel, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, and the subsequent books in her Inheritance Trilogy received critical acclaim. She has won several awards for her work, including the Locus Award. The three books of her Broken Earth series made her the first author to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel in three consecutive years, as well as the first to win for all three novels in a trilogy. She won a fourth Hugo Award, for Best Novelette, in 2020 for Emergency Skin. Jemisin was a recipient of the MacArthur Fellows Program Genius Grant in 2020.
Will McIntosh is a science fiction and young adult author, a Hugo-Award-winner, and a winner or finalist for many other awards. Along with ten novels, including Defenders,Love Minus Eighty, and Burning Midnight, he has published dozens of short stories in magazines such as Asimov's Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed Magazine, Clarkesworld, and Interzone. His stories are frequently reprinted in different "Year's Best" anthologies.
Ken Liu is an American author of science fiction and fantasy. Liu has won multiple Hugo and Nebula Awards for his novel translations and original short fiction, which has appeared in F&SF, Asimov's, Analog, Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, and multiple "Year's Best" anthologies.
The Locus Award for Best Short Story is one of a series of Locus Awards given every year by Locus Magazine. Awards presented in a given year are for works published in the previous calendar year.
Yoon Ha Lee is an American science fiction and fantasy writer, known for his Machineries of Empire space opera novels and his short fiction. His first novel, Ninefox Gambit, received the 2017 Locus Award for Best First Novel.
This is a list of the published works of Aliette de Bodard.
"Ponies" is a 2010 fantasy story by American writer Kij Johnson. It was first published on Tor.com.
Naomi Kritzer is an American speculative fiction writer and blogger. Her 2015 short story "Cat Pictures Please" was a Locus Award and Hugo Award winner and was nominated for a Nebula Award. Her novel Catfishing on CatNet won the 2020 Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book.
Sarah Pinsker is an American science fiction and fantasy author. She is a nine-time finalist for the Nebula Award, and her debut novel A Song for a New Day won the 2019 Nebula for Best Novel while her story "Our Lady of the Open Road won 2016 Nebula Award for Best Novelette. Her novelette "Two Truths and a Lie" received both the Nebula Award and the Hugo Award. Her fiction has also won the Philip K. Dick Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Award and been a finalist for the Hugo, World Fantasy, and Tiptree Awards.
Sam J. Miller is an American science fiction, fantasy and horror short fiction author. His stories have appeared in publications such as Clarkesworld, Asimov's Science Fiction, and Lightspeed, along with over 15 "year's best" story collections. He was finalist for multiple Nebula Awards along with the World Fantasy and Theodore Sturgeon Awards. He won the 2013 Shirley Jackson Award for his short story "57 Reasons for the Slate Quarry Suicides." His debut novel, The Art of Starving, was published in 2017 and his novel Blackfish City won the 2019 John W. Campbell Memorial Award.
"Jackalope Wives" is a 2014 fantasy short story by Ursula Vernon, combining the legends of the swan maiden and the jackalope. It was first published in Apex Magazine and has been reprinted in the collection Jackalope Wives and Other Stories. One of the characters, Grandma Harken, is the protagonist of another award-winning story by Vernon, "The Tomato Thief."
Kelly Robson is a Canadian science fiction, fantasy and horror writer. She has won the 2018 Nebula Award for Best Novelette for her novelette "A Human Stain" published at Tor.com. She has also been nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novella in 2016 for "Waters of Versailles" and in 2019 for "Gods, Monsters and the Lucky Peach", both published at Tor.com; "Waters of Versailles" also received the 2016 Aurora Award for best Canadian short fiction.
Alix E. Harrow is an American science fiction and fantasy writer. Her short fiction work "A Witch's Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies" has been nominated for the Nebula Award, World Fantasy Award, and Locus Award, and in 2019 won a Hugo Award. Her debut novel, The Ten Thousand Doors of January (2019), was widely acclaimed by mainstream critics, lauded by general audiences during voting at Goodreads Choice Awards and Locus Awards, and nominated for multiple first novel literary awards and speculative fiction awards. She has also published under the name Alix Heintzman.
Dexter Gabriel, better known by his pen name Phenderson Djèlí Clark, is an American speculative fiction writer and historian, who is an assistant professor in the department of history at the University of Connecticut. He uses a pen name to differentiate his literary work from his academic work, and has also published under the name A. Phenderson Clark. This pen name, "Djèlí", makes reference to the griots – traditional Western African storytellers, historians and poets.
Tamsyn Muir is a New Zealand fantasy, science fiction, and horror author best known for The Locked Tomb, a science fantasy series of novels. Muir won the 2020 Locus Award for her first novel, Gideon the Ninth, and has been nominated for several other awards as well.