Princess Arjumand
Book 1997 · To Say Nothing of the Dog (Connie Willis)
Victorian Persian cat whose accidental rescue by a 21st-century time traveller threatens to unravel a temporal-paradox subplot involving Coventry Cathedral.
Princess Arjumand is the Victorian Persian cat at the heart of Connie Willis's 1997 Hugo and Locus Award–winning novel To Say Nothing of the Dog (the title borrowed from Jerome K. Jerome's 1889 Three Men in a Boat). The plot: time-traveller Ned Henry is sent to 1888 to retrieve an artefact and accidentally rescues a cat being drowned in the Thames by her owner Tossie Mering — an act that risks altering the timeline that produces the modern world. Most of the book's comedy and mystery hinges on whether Princess Arjumand belongs in 1888 or in the 2057 of Henry's home era. The cat is unusual in fiction for being treated with rigorous science-fiction temporal-causality logic.
0 words. Sources: see /methodology.
Tags
persian
fictional
connie-willis
time-travel
victorian
science-fiction
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