Naomi Kritzer's "Catfishing on the CatNet": an AI caper about the true nature of online friendship

Back in 2016, Naomi Kritzer won the Hugo award for her brilliant, endearing story Cat Pictures Please, in which an AI with an insatiable craving for cat pictures explains its view on the world and the way that it makes humans' lives better; now Kritzer has adapted the story into her new novel, the equally brilliant, superbly plotted YA thriller Catfishing on CatNet.

Steph doesn't know much about her dad: only that he tried to murder their family by burning the house down when she was little, and that she and her mother -- a gifted infosec freelancer who can earn a living writing cryptographic tools from anywhere -- have been on the run from him ever since.

Every few months, her mother discovers -- through some unknown means -- that Steph's dad is catching up with them and then they get into the van in the middle of the night and drive a minimum of 250 miles, then turn off the highway and drive another 25 miles, then settle in whatever town they've found themselves in. It's a lonely and chaotic life, with few friends and little stability, and the fact that Steph can get out of a particularly terrible new town by misbehaving at school in a way that triggers police interest (and thus another middle-of-the-night move) isn't much comfort.

Steph has one source of stability: CatNet. Her mom will let her use her laptop (through an anonymizing VPN) to login to the social networking service, where the currency is cute pictures of cats (or other animals: Steph's fond of bats). Read the rest