SciFi novel about the distant future where Earth has been moved farther away from the sun & is criss-crossed with super fast tube trains. Also the men lost the gender wars & everyone has a cat-o-nine tails (a leg less house cat)
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Hi, welcome to SF&F. When did you read this? Do you remember the cover art?– DavidWCommented Oct 19 at 18:16
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6Earth is run by "females"? Is that human females a.k.a. "women"?Does the novel have a plot? Does anything happen?– user14111Commented Oct 19 at 18:23
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Read it 25yrs ago, do not recall the cover art or the base story plot. Just recall the main character awoke from cyrogenic sleep to find most of the population just gone & the enclaves of people were all female... NO ALIENS IN THE STORY, just the evolved house cats (cat-o-nine tails) & he travelled the earth in the unnderground tube trains iso other humans– Brian GrenobleCommented Oct 19 at 19:20
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1 Answer
A World Out of Time by Larry Niven From the article
the Sun has apparently evolved into a red giant and what might be Earth is in orbit around a super-hot Jupiter.
The Earth's climate has changed, especially its surface temperature; the poles are now temperate, while the former temperate zones reach temperatures of over 50 degrees Celsius (120+ degrees Fahrenheit). The Earth's axial tilt is still 23.5 degrees so the poles experience six years of night and six of day. Almost all remaining life has adapted to live in Antarctica.
The world is run by Boys, not Girls, though, although the main character is captured by a woman for a while.
She explains that the human species has fragmented; it is dominated by a race of immortal, permanently pre-adolescent males (the Boys), who are created by advanced medical techniques. Sometime in the past, they had defeated the equally immortal (though now extinct) Girls in the ultimate war of the sexes
This cover shows the legless cat and this article mentions them
Corbell goes to Earth in hopes of understanding the changes to the planet in the 3 million years he was gone, and discovers immortal children, animals like cat-snakes, teleportation systems, and a civilization in ruins which just might hold the key to returning his own youth.
This article mentions the trains:
Peerssa spoke. "Your speed is in excess of eight hundred kilometers per hour and still accelerating. A remarkable achievement.
"How do they do it?"
"At a guess, you are riding a gravity-assisted linear accelerator through an evacuated tunnel. You are about to pass beneath the Pacific Ocean..."
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1I remember the boys & they kidnapped our hero & got away from them using a spool of mono molecule filament set as a trap.... so when they chased him the filament chopped 'em up. Now i wonder just how badly my minor stroke of 15 yrs ago messed with my memory but i do thank you for reviving some long lost reading memories & i luv all David Nivven's works! Commented Oct 19 at 19:29
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1There are underground train things connecting the continents iirc, and the woman is woken up when they start getting used again by the MC. They're separate to the transporters which serve a different plot purpose.– moopetCommented Oct 19 at 19:33
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@BrianGrenoble Larry, not David. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Niven & en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Niven– PM 2RingCommented Oct 20 at 4:20
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@BrianGrenoble Are you sure you're not remembering the monofilament episode from Ringworld (also by Niven)? Commented Oct 20 at 23:07
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1It's not called monofilament in World Out Of Time, but their "thread" is very strong and practically invisible. and one character, helping the MC, uses it as a weapon to cut limbs and heads off of his pursuers. In one of those weird coincidences, I just read that book a few days ago and then saw this question posted. Commented Oct 21 at 0:40