I’m reading Ragamuffin by Tobias Buckell. His first book, Crystal Rain, was also good, but proves that he really sucks at picking titles.  It’s set in the future, and it’s a pretty good read because it combines space travel, nanotechnology, and primitive human technology, because aliens whupped our asses pretty good and some human colonies had to start over.

One thing in Ragamuffin that struck me is how on at least one planet, an alien race has more or less adopted humans as viable pets.  It isn’t a large part of the book, it’s more of a casual reference – on this planet, either all of the humans live in an “emancipated” colony that they’re not allowed to leave, or they’re pets for the alien race.  So that got me thinking about “domesticated” humans and how weird that would be.

I look at my cats as living the life.  My sister this weekend was professing that if reincarnation were true, she’d like to be a housecat because life is so ridiculously easy.  Would human pets be the same way?  Once you get past thinking about getting spayed or neutered, could you just live your life day to day as a pet?  I’m not sure I could, but I bet this alien race could breed it into their pets.  And thinking about breeding humans as pets is a whole different thought process.

Seems like this idea, or a subset of it, has been done before.  The first thing I think of is Planet of the Apes and all of its subsidiaries.  What other books, movies, stories have humans as the low-man on the totem pole, or at least not the highest spot?  Pet humans is subject matter that, in the next fifteen minutes, is very thought provoking to me.