The Cat's Pajamas

A rollicking and audacious collection of stories featuring Martian invaders, time travel, voodoo queens, giant Hollywood monsters, Dr. Moreau–like mad scientists, and more In The Cat’s Pajamas, James Morrow—called “the most provocative satiric voice in science fiction” by the Washington Post—takes the reader on thirteen wild and gleeful rides, each exploring a demented, dystopian, or provisionally desirable world. A tyrannical church wields terrifying power over people’s sex lives in the name of protecting “the rights of the unconceived.” The dead, raised by Caribbean magic, are put to benevolent use in a New Jersey suburb. A racist Supreme Court justice gets his karmic comeuppance. Columbus “discovers” a contemporary New York City. The island of Manhattan becomes a battlefield on which two alien races thrash out their philosophical disagreements. And in the remarkable title offering, a deranged doctor blesses his mutant creatures with ethical superiority, a simple matter of injecting them with a serum derived from the disembodied brain of the story’s living—and understandably bewildered—protagonist.