In Robert A. Heinlein's science fiction novel The Rolling Stones, flat cats are a species of Martian animal.
In the chapter "Free Enterprise", the character Mr. Angelo, a shopkeeper on Mars, introduces Castor and Pollux Stone to a flat cat:
Angelo tickled it with a forefinger; it began to purr like a high-pitched buzzer. It had no discernible features, being merely a pie-shaped mass of sleek red fur a little darker than Castor's own hair. "They're affectionate little things and many of the sand rats keep them for pets - a man has to have someone to talk to when he's out prospecting and a flat cat is better than a wife because it can't talk back. It just purrs and snuggles up to you."The boys take the flat cat onto the family space ship, where it soon has eight "kittens", each of which soon gives birth again, until the ship is overwhelmed with flat cats. The family solves the problem by rounding up the flat cats and putting them into the storage hold at low temperature, where they hibernate. They are later revived and sold to miners in the asteroid belt.
Heinlein's flat cats are often said to have been the inspiration for The Trouble with Tribbles, an episode of the Star Trek television series. (Heinlein himself said he may have gotten the idea from the 1905 story Pigs is Pigs by Ellis Parker Butler.) David Gerrold, the author of the Star Trek episode, claims that he had read the Heinlein book years before writing his screenplay, and was not consciously aware of the similarities, until a routine studio clearances review prompted a contact with Heinlein who, graciously, admitted the similarities but also waived all rights.
Famous quotes containing the words flat and/or cat:
“I don’t like your miserable lonely single “front name.” It is so limited, so meagre; it has no versatility; it is weighted down with the sense of responsibility; it is worn threadbare with much use; it is as bad as having only one jacket and one hat; it is like having only one relation, one blood relation, in the world. Never set a child afloat on the flat sea of life with only one sail to catch the wind.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“A cat that catches mice does not meow.”
—Chinese proverb.