Chapter 1.
Walkers… 007

Chapter 2.
Wetland Park … 041

Chapter 3.
Cheese Tabby… 077

Chapter 4.
Desert and Sunspot Adventures… 109

Chapter 5.
Trauma… 149

Chapter 6.
The World of the White Rat… 187

Commentary | Inayoung (Literary Critic) On Weakness… 208

Author's Note … 222

A sci-fi film about a grandmother mercenary galloping through the invisible world of a ruined world.
Ye So-yeon's first full-length novel depicts human nature, which oscillates between love and doubt.
"A scale unimaginable in one person's head" _ Yes24 Crema Club Reader Review

Ye So-yeon, who emerged into the Korean literary world in 2021, was praised as a writer who created a wondrous travel narrative for seniors in the 《Modern Literature》 New Writer Recommendation.
His "Love and Defects," published in the winter of 2022 in the contemporary literature, is a genealogy of love made of flesh and blood, and has garnered critical attention, being included in the quarterly review of Munhakdongne (spring 2023 issue), the novel of the season of Literature and Society (spring 2023), and the problematic work of the month of Munhak Sasang.
『Novels: Spring 2023』, which includes "Love and Defects," was a bestseller in all bookstores this spring and was loved by many readers.


Just the fact that she was nominated for the “2023 13th Munji Literary Award” makes Yesoyeon one of the most anticipated authors for her next work.
He has been fiercely exploring the cracks that arise from the multifaceted nature of human relationships, and his latest work, "Cats and Desert Sisters," published by Hubble, expands the boundaries of fiction beyond humans.
Cheese, a non-human robot cat, is the one who foresaw the end of the world before humans and is the one who struggles the most to prevent it.
Cheese, a robotic agricultural cat who was given the memories of a living cat, refuses to give up on her love for humans in a dystopian world where all animals have become extinct.
In "Cats and the Desert Sisters," a barren desert devastated by war coexists with the fortress of Traum, which maintains a rich and comfortable environment by occupying limited resources.
This coexistence of desert and fortress awakens us to the terrifying truth that a dangerous world is inevitably necessary for a safe world.


Amitabh Ghosh, a social anthropologist and author who has studied the relationship between the climate crisis and fiction, laments the reality that while novelists publish numerous essays on the climate crisis to maintain a progressive image, they neglect to address the climate crisis, the most pressing issue facing humanity, in their specialized field of fiction.
"Cats and Desert Sisters" actively responds to the urgent call from environmentalists for the climate crisis to be treated not simply as a backdrop to fiction, but as a central character. The powerful gallop of a small army of grandmother mercenaries and robot cats amidst a barrage of fire, coupled with crises like sandstorms, showcases the overwhelming scale of climate science fiction.
"The Cat and the Desert Sisters," which reflects thorough research on the climate crisis, is an extreme dark tour that will captivate readers this summer. When it was serialized as original content on Yes24's e-book platform Crema Club, it was mentioned as the most anticipated work of the year on social media such as Twitter, creating a fresh response.


"A novel that retains wit and respect in a gray future" _Choi Jin-young (novelist)
"A drama created by breaking down and reconnecting the boundaries between doubt and faith." _In Ah-young (literary critic)
A female narrative that turns the hourglass of a world headed toward destruction, a counterattack by small beings.

Miso, one of the characters in Jinyoung Choi's masterpiece, "Where the Sun Sets," says in the epilogue that we must know what love is in order to fight.
Author Jinyoung Choi has explored the realms of death and love, the never-ending wounds of human life, to the extreme.
He wrote a recommendation saying that while reading "The Cat and the Desert Sisters," all his predictions were wrong, and that "the wrongness was refreshing and welcome."
Author Jinyoung Choi also states that “there was a time when the destruction of humanity was nothing more than a fantasy,” but “now it is closer to a prophecy than a fantasy,” and that “The Cat and the Desert Sisters” is a “cold yet warm story” about this.


What shines between the composure and coolness of the main characters in 'The Cat and the Desert Sisters' is not their 'strength' but their 'weakness'.
They fight to protect each other, and even though they get hurt, they never give up on their love.
"Cats and the Desert Sisters" deals with the journey of grandmother mercenaries and a robot cat left behind in the desert after the armistice agreement, and the way they overcome their desperate situation is not through hatred, but through love for one another.
There has been a heated debate in many studies, with opposing views on whether violence is inherent in human nature or whether the pursuit of love and peace is inherent in human nature.
Anthropologist Richard Wrangham argues that as human socialization has become more advanced, we can no longer kill each other in a fit of anger like wild animals in everyday life, but that repressed violence continues to erupt and recur in the form of mass killings such as war.
The main characters of "Cats and Desert Sisters", mercenaries Chang, Asha, and Marley, have endured 40 long years on the battlefield, bearing indelible scars of violence on their bodies. As a result, they maintain that the coexistence of humans and non-humans inevitably leads to the violence of anthropocentrism.
In a world built on violence, love is the most dangerous emotion, meaning disarming others, but it is also a powerful weapon that can protect one another.


“We inherited hell.”
_Yesoyeon, 『Cat and the Desert Sisters』

In her commentary on “The Cat and the Desert Sisters,” critic Ina Young found the survival keywords of a dystopian world similar to hell in the “weakness” of the mercenaries who were drafted as children and are now grandmothers, and the “inhuman” aspects of robot cats and animaloid moles (beings with an organic mixture of robot properties and animal body tissues).
According to Kevin Leland, many evolutionary biologists predict that humanity will soon become extinct because of our inherent flaws, such as our cunning and violent nature.

“Are you still using the word human?”
“Then let’s go find a place that is not humane.”
_Yesoyeon, 『Cat and the Desert Sisters』

As critic Inayoung In said, Yesoyeon's strength lies in the fact that this novel is "a drama created by constantly breaking down and reconnecting not only the boundaries between humans and non-humans, but also the boundaries of mutual suspicion and trust."
The grandmother mercenaries, whose entire body resembles a battlefield due to the traces of old injuries and aging, and the cat robot Cheese, who survived by finding parts on their own in a waste pile and repeatedly data mining, chose each other, but their relationship is not unconditionally affectionate, and it is not a pure and trusting one.
Critic Ina Young interpreted their relationship as one in which “no matter how close they become, they cannot let go of their suspicions about each other.”
He also says that they were able to survive because they “knew that they were the weakest pieces on the chessboard called the world,” and that “only those who acknowledge their own weakness can understand the weakness of the world and have the faith to move forward.”


“I stopped denying that I was weak.”
A female survival game that goes against the odds of war.

In "We Cannot Be Silent," a compilation of interviews with various women connected to the war, what Ukrainian female soldier Tanya Kobzar learns on the battlefield is surprising.
“Learning how to use a weapon is easier than making borscht (a traditional Ukrainian red soup made with beets).
The existence of female soldiers, forgotten not because they have been weathered by time but because history has deliberately erased them, dates back to the armies of Athens and Sparta in the 4th century BC.
More than two million women served in all branches of the armed forces during both world wars, a pattern that is also evident in the Ukrainian War, the largest land conflict since World War II.
In a science fiction talk, critic Ina Young says that while first-world heterosexual, non-disabled men experience a sense of oneness with the world, feminist interpretation is the work of reading the cracks in that world, and that life changes depending on how the cracks are transformed or recognized.
In literature, even just changing the gender of a familiar male character can have a significant effect in making readers aware of the gap.
This is why we must more actively imagine female soldiers, who have been excluded from war science fiction that mythologizes the horrific history of war, through this novel.


Pope Francis added ecological sin to original human sin.
Just by being alive, humans commit violence against this blue planet and its life forms.
This reminds us not of the absolute power or strength that humans possess, but of their vulnerability in not being able to survive without coexistence with other living beings.
In "The Cat and the Desert Sisters," humans have finally consumed all the animals and plants.
The extinction of all life forms except humans, one of the most important settings in the worldview of this story, is not a story of the distant future mentioned in author Jinyoung Choi's recommendation, but a prophecy, and it is also a prophecy of the imminent extinction of humanity.


It is not the vested interests of Traum who monopolized technological resources, but the grandmother mercenaries and the cat robots who are quick to recognize that there is still a bottom to sink into in the ruined world of "Cats and Desert Sisters."
Ecocide, which occurs when humans destroy the ecosystem that is their survival condition, and genocide, which is the annihilation of humans, are in a circular relationship.
As human rights deteriorate, environmental degradation worsens, and the more severe the environmental destruction in a country, the more severe the human rights deterioration, as proven by numerous research cases, including the UN Environment Assembly report.
Professor Cho Hyo-je said in “Ecocide: The Crime of Silence,” “When the environment deteriorates, human rights violations against women occur frequently.
“Gender-based violence is on the rise, particularly due to climate change and long-term climate change,” she points out, arguing that environmental and infrastructure destruction caused by war creates a survival crisis that disproportionately affects women.
This is also well expressed in the powerful opening of “Chapter 1: Walkers” of “The Cat and the Desert Sisters.”
In the process of securing the resources necessary for survival in the desert, not only the protagonists, who are now grandmothers, but also the female mercenaries become targets of sexual crimes even by other mercenaries.
In order to survive, they leave the Walker community and become fugitives.


As revealed in “Chapter 4: Desert and Sunspot Adventure,” the reason they can’t completely trust people is because they’ve trained for decades to survive without easily trusting anyone.
This reminds me of the training of the twins in "The Three Lies of Existence", who slap each other on the cheek and say they love each other.
Training to distance ourselves from the love that sweetly enchants our existence in a miserable reality with no future.
Because the twins who were abandoned at their grandmother's house were too fragile to love and be loved.
The sisters in "The Cat and the Desert Sisters" were not sisters from the beginning.
Sold to different countries for different reasons, they crossed the chessboard of God without even a shred of comfort to offer each other comfort in their difficult lives.
The one who teaches love again to the weary is not a human, but a cat robot named Cheese.
They transform the caves beneath the barren desert into a mysterious hydroponic space, growing ginger and wild strawberries to provide for their mercenary sisters.


In a massive sandstorm reminiscent of the movie "Dune" and a seemingly calm land with soaring radiation levels, the weak protagonists survive until the end by exchanging each other's memories as if they were nutrients.
After the sandstorm passes, the Granny Mercenaries and the cat robot Cheese realize that they survived because they were together.
Love again, with your immunity to love maximized.
Their meeting and journey, like countless other encounters and journeys in this world, was another miracle and a prayer.