A review by singlecrow
Cat Pictures Please and Other Stories by Naomi Kritzer

5.0

The title story in this collection, "Cat Pictures Please", won the 2016 Hugo for best short story and completely deserved it. It's a short and cheering tale about how Google, having woken up to sentience, just wants to help people -- and for people to give it cat pictures. This collection has much the same sort of theme across the board. People, or AIs, often living in the hardest of times, do their best to be kind, and the point is not that they can save everyone, but they can save one person, or make one thing better. I felt much better for reading it. Some of the stories are better than others, of course - a couple do scream "early work" - but most of them are among the best short stories I've read. My favourites, other than the eponymous, are "Ace of Spades", "The Golem", "Artifice", "Comrade Grandmother", "Bits" and "So Much Cooking".