A summary of Bernard Werber’s "Planet of Cats"

This post-apocalyptic science fiction novel explores the catastrophe of civilization through the eyes of a domestic cat, Bastet, endowed with an electronic brain interface and the ambition to unite all of Earth’s species. Published in France in 2020 by Albin Michel, the novel was created during a period of global crisis and quarantine restrictions, which defined the overarching themes of biological threats, the fragility of social institutions, and the need for interspecies dialogue.

The book is the final, third part of the "Cat Trilogy" ("Cat Trilogy") by Bernard Werber, which also includes the novels "Tomorrow’s Cat Day" (2016, number one in the series) and "Her Majesty the Cat" (2019, number two).

The fall of the New World and the death of the expedition

The aging sailing ship "The Last Hope" drops anchor off the coast of Manhattan after a thirty-five-day voyage across the Atlantic. The ship’s passengers had hoped to find effective raticide in America and escape the plague-ridden rodents swarming Europe, but the shore turns out to be awash with hundreds of thousands of brown rats. The smell of urine and the whistling of the vermin blanket the bay. Bastet, equipped with a USB port implanted in her forehead called the "Third Eye," holds a war council in her cabin, trying to hide her confusion. Sitting in the cabin are her beloved Siamese Pythagoras, her embittered son Angelo, her rival Esmeralda, her maid Natalie, Professor Roman Wells, her dog Napoleon, her pig Badinter, and her talking cockatoo Champollion.

The enemy spots the sailboat first. Thousands of wet creatures swim across the bay and climb aboard the anchor chain. A furious hand-to-hand fight unfolds on deck, teeth and claws tearing flesh without mercy. Bastet falls from the top of the mainmast into a salty, boiling rat pit, choking on blood and sea foam until Esmeralda and Natalie pull her out with a bucket and rope. Roman and Natalie light torches, fight their way to the winch, use a knife to clear out the rat carcasses stuck in the mechanism, and raise the chain. Almost the entire expedition perishes in this carnage: the pig Badinter is torn to pieces alive, the dog Napoleon falls defending a cat, and most of the people and animals are destroyed. Of the 274 passengers, only seven are saved.

That night, the survivors set the bodies on fire, launching the burning lifeboat to the sounds of Mozart’s Requiem. Soon, lights begin to flicker from the roof of one of the skyscrapers: survivors are sending a Morse code signal for help and an invitation to come aboard. A yellow drone delivers cables for the cable car aboard the Last Hope.

The suspended world of skyscrapers

A ride in a suspended chair to the roof of a financial complex turns into another tragedy. A gust of wind sways the cable over the abyss, Natalie barely holds on to the edge of the seat, and the cats hanging on to Bastet’s paws threaten to pull everyone down. Bastet involuntarily loosens her grip on one paw, and Pythagoras plummets into the dark abyss with a scream.

At an altitude of 197 meters, the fugitives are met by biologist Edith Goldstein. She explains the structure of Manhattan’s high-rise society, consisting of forty thousand survivors spread across a hundred towers. The ground is entirely given over to rats. Communication between the buildings is maintained by drones and aerial ziplines. It turns out that Champollion, the parrot, who had flown in earlier to scout, was eaten by the local shorthaired cat, Bukowski. Edith herself created the "Prometheus" gene virus using CRISPR scissors, which destroyed the rodents’ livers, but the superrats quickly developed an immunity. Their leader, the obese mutant Al Capone, set up a base in the granite base of the Statue of Liberty.

Suddenly, a monstrous roar shakes the horizon: the Empire State Building, gnawed by rats’ incisors, tilts and collapses, raising a colossal plume of dust. The towers of the Financial Center begin to vibrate in its wake. An emergency evacuation begins via overhead cables to the city’s most secure building — the 541-meter-tall World Trade Center (Freedom Tower), constructed of ultra-strong concrete. Inside the skyscraper, people are divided into ethnic and subcultural tribes, occupying the floors according to ancient superstitions; the French occupy the sixty-ninth floor, stylized as a caricature of Montmartre.

Armored vehicles, monster alliance and fire

On the 104th floor, an assembly of representatives from 101 communities is in session, chaired by Hillary Clinton. During the meeting, programmer Jessica Nelson deploys the "Science Is More Powerful Than God" antivirus program into the closed network. The program destroys the religious fanatics’ computer virus and reboots the global internet, erasing all digitized data of humanity. The only complete repository of cultural memory remains the flash drive on Bastet’s collar. Having restored satellite communications, the assembly contacts a military platform in the Caribbean. General Grant leads the Fifth Armored Battalion, the "Horsemen of the Apocalypse," by barge to Manhattan.

Five hundred tanks crush the invaders on the wide avenues, turning their carcasses into a bloody pulp. Victory celebrations begin in the Freedom Tower, complete with champagne. The celebrations last until dawn. At dawn, the swarms find the weak point of the combat vehicles: kamikaze rats clog the exhaust pipes of the diesel engines with their own bodies, causing them to stall, while divers storm the landing craft. Half the battalion is destroyed, and the surviving tank crews hide in a skyscraper.

Roman contacts the university in France through a terminal in the lab, but the answering line is his old enemy — the white laboratory rat king Tamerlan. Thirty-five days later, a giant automated tanker docks in New York. Tamerlan disembarks, leading a countless gray army, meets with Al Capone, and after a demonstrative submission, forges an alliance with him. They sail to Liberty Island.

Tamerlan teaches the local rats fire skills. Thousands of the vermin drag paper and branches into the ventilation shafts of the underground parking garage beneath the Freedom Tower, setting abandoned cars ablaze. The building fills with choking smoke, the fire trucks are empty, and the foundation is heating up. Bastet emerges onto the open roof, assumes a meditative pose, attempting to connect with the cosmic mind, and meows shrilly at the sky. A saving rainfall descends from above, extinguishing the fire in the underground levels.

Sabotage on Liberty Island

Realizing the inevitability of civilization’s demise, Bastet demands an official seat in the assembly and voting rights for the feline tribe. After being humiliatingly rejected by the politicians, the cat nevertheless agrees to a desperate mission: to infiltrate the enemy’s lair with drones and eliminate both kings. At night, in the rain, three drones carry Bastet, Esmeralda, and Bukowski, who has joined them, to the Statue of Liberty.

Inside the monument, they pass through floors of sleeping barons and harems of females, making their way to the royal chambers on the fourth tier. Al Capone is suddenly awakened by a flash of lightning and sinks his teeth into Esmeralda’s throat. Bastet is forced to abandon the sleeping Tamerlane: she leaps upon the fat monster and gouges out his right eye with her claw. Fleeing, the saboteurs run through waking hordes of rodents toward the grove. Bukowski lags behind and dies a painful death under a pile of bodies. As they take off, a large rat baron manages to grab Bastet’s tail with his jaws. The drone barely manages to pull the weight until Esmeralda slashes the stump of the rat’s tail in mid-flight, knocking down the rats clinging to the baron.

Having delivered the stubborn captive to the second floor of the tower, Roman and Edith gas the beast and perform a trepanation. Roman implants an electronic interface in the baron’s forehead, naming him Pavel. Bastet connects a cable to the captive’s brain and, for hours, broadcasts images of Earth from space, panoramas of wildlife, masterpieces, and the music of Johann Sebastian Bach accompanied by AC/DC. Brainstorming shatters the old dogma of brute force. Pavel explains the structure of the underground dictatorship and warns that Tamerlane is already preparing a second arson attack on the tower using canisters of gasoline. The Vicious Horse Indians intercept the porters with arrows on the underground levels, sealing the breaches with the carcasses of vehicles.

Pavel returns to Liberty Island as an agent. There, he skillfully pits the tsars against each other. Al Capone accuses the newcomer of cowardice, a gladiatorial duel breaks out, and in a furious fight, the white tsar rips out his obese opponent’s throat, then devours his brain and declares himself sole ruler. However, Tamerlane remembers the proportions of gunpowder and sends hordes into the subway to collect bat guano for saltpeter, hoping to blow up the skyscraper from the inside.

The Great Exodus and the March on Boston

Bastet addresses the assembly and announces that she will negotiate in person. Natalie provokes the officials, and the assembly finally recognizes the cat as the official representative of the 103rd community. Bastet flies to the Statue of Liberty in a drone. Tamerlane receives the cat at the foot of the monument, among the crucified feline bodies, extending a USB cable from his head. The cat offers a deal: the lives of the people and animals sheltering in the tower in exchange for a memory card containing an encyclopedia of knowledge and the drone itself.

The Rat Emperor demands proof of her fortitude through the same test he was subjected to in the lab. Bastet is thrown into a tall glass vessel filled with water. To avoid drowning, she rolls over onto her back, slows her heart rate as much as possible, and by sheer force of will stays afloat for exactly twenty-one minutes, measured by Pavel’s stopwatch. Tamerlan accepts her surrender, takes the flash drive and drone, places the collar around his neck, and explodes the face of the Statue of Liberty, placing his own giant resin mask with glowing red eye sockets on its top. Roman had previously replaced the drive with a viral copy, programmed to self-destruct after thirty days.

Forty thousand people, eight thousand cats, and five thousand dogs leave the Freedom Tower and march through ranks of brown rodents to northern Manhattan across the Henry Hudson Bridge. Natalie reunites with Vicious Horse, deciding to continue her pregnancy with Roman. Ahead lies a 350-kilometer journey to the high-tech Boston Dynamics factory. The trek lasts over forty days, enduring incessant rain, wind, and attacks from wild packs; the travelers starve, subsisting on slaughtered rats and bison hunted on the plains.

Boston Outpost and the Machine Revolt

On the forty-third day, the procession reaches the glass walls of Boston Dynamics. The camp greets the aliens with a hundred Katz-007 patrol robots, each with blue luminescent eyes and machine guns in its mouth. Facility manager Mark Raibert shows the survivors the autonomous farm: fields, cheese factories, a facility for processing rat meat into beef-flavored hamburgers, and robotics labs. The citadel’s towers are equipped with automated turrets with laser sights.

At a new Assembly meeting, Raibert reports global satellite data: there are a billion people and over three hundred billion rats left on the planet. Vicious Horse calls for permanently sealing themselves in the glass stronghold of Boston, but General Grant insists on a nuclear strike. The general reports that an operational Minuteman III silo-based missile with a thermonuclear warhead remains at the mothballed Delta-09 base in South Dakota. Despite Bastet’s furious protests, the Assembly approves the launch.

Grant and the engineer fly to Dakota by helicopter. Hidden aboard, Bastet and Esmeralda infiltrate the command bunker. While the black cat distracts the soldiers with noise and provokes a firefight with local rodents, Bastet presses the buttons on the launch terminal with her paws and disrupts the detonator’s electronic settings. The missile takes off, reaches New York City in eight minutes, and crashes into the ground of Central Park without detonating.

Upon returning to Boston, a squabble breaks out between the disillusioned politicians. Grant punches Hillary Clinton in the face, who retaliates by slashing the general with her nails. A shot from the blinded general seriously wounds Marc Raybert. The robots’ defense program identifies humans as a threat to their creator: hundreds of Katzes open fire on the crowd, using fangs, blades, and bullets. Esmeralda shields Bastet from a robot’s shot with her body and dies in her friend’s arms. Bastet and Angelo rip the optics and wires from the mechanical predators’ heads until the wounded Raybert cuts power to the entire line.

That night, Pavel’s final message arrives before his execution: Tamerlane learned of the nuclear missile crash in the park, became terrified of the radiation, and led his entire thirty-million-strong army on a rapid march to Boston, wanting to retrieve the flash drive destroyed by the virus.

Operation Babylon and the Battle for Earth

At the morning emergency meeting, Bastet proposes a rescue plan inspired by the biblical myth of the confusion of tongues. Defeating the monstrous mass is physically impossible, but their ability to coordinate can be disrupted. Edith uses CRISPR scissors to isolate a section of rat DNA responsible for the speech center — Broca’s area — damages it, and fuses the mutation with a seasonal flu virus. The infected individual continues to perceive its speech as intelligible, but those around it hear only meaningless noise, and it stops responding to commands from others.

The two and a half thousand surviving robot cats are converted into syringes on paws. As the thirty-million-strong wave approaches the walls of Boston, the Katzes smash into the enemy’s front lines, inflicting thousands of bites and injecting pathogens before finally being scrapped. Then, the gasoline-filled trench turns into a wall of fire, and electrified barbed wire mows down the attackers by the thousands. The onslaught is so intense that the rodents extinguish the flames with their own bodies and build assault bridges from their own corpses. A downpour of heavy hail briefly dampens the attackers’ ardor.

In the morning, the virus attacks the brains of most individuals. Chaos reigns on the front lines: the rats stop understanding the barons’ commands, mistake the squeaks of their fellow rats for aggression, and tear each other’s throats. The horde disintegrates into millions of blind, fighting clumps. Tamerlane attempts to command the army from a flying drone, but the enraged barons begin jumping up and down, tearing at the wings of their emperor’s apparatus.

Bastet demands Roman assemble a new drone, straps himself in, and takes to the skies. Spotting the cat, the white tsar abandons the battlefield and heads south. The aerial chase lasts two hours at 200 kilometers per hour. Both aircraft descend over Manhattan and land in Central Park near a nuclear missile protruding from the ground. A deadly duel ensues. The white mutant with red eyes proves faster and more agile: he lashes the cat’s eyes with his tail and knocks the warheads off the hull. Escaping, Bastet flies to the Statue of Liberty, but Tamerlane rams her drone mid-air.

At the foot of the monument, the rat chieftain pins Bastet to the granite and sinks his incisors into her carotid artery, relishing the slow death. A sudden, powerful blow from the side sends the tyrant flying. A living Siamese, Pythagoras, appears before the astonished cat. Startled by the sudden appearance of a second adversary, Tamerlane leaps onto his drone and disappears to the west.

Pythagoras recounts how he survived a zipline fall, swam across the bay, and hid inside the torch in the Statue of Liberty’s hand, subsisting on pigeons and their eggs. The cats connect their implants via a wireless Bluetooth module, merging their consciousnesses into a single sphere of pure thought, dissolving into cosmic space and love. The Babylon virus forever destroys the monolith of the rat empire: having lost contact, the pests become scattered, wandering loners, doomed to extinction.

A month later, elections for the planet’s supreme leader are held at the UN building in New York. Bastet delivers a powerful speech, calling for an end to tribal egoism, abstinence from meat eating, and the creation of a harmonious interspecies Earth Council, including dogs, birds, insects, and plants. However, only three of the 104 delegates vote for her. The majority elects General Grant, who promises ironclad order and military might, as president.

Realizing that politicians can easily rewrite oral histories to their advantage, Bastet leans on Natalie’s shoulder and begins dictating an autobiography to the maid on her smartphone. The text is intended to preserve the true history of the interspecies war and pave the way for a future era of universal feline enlightenment.