Well, phooey on vanishing pages. But I've done some scans for a future writeup - here's the 1982 paperback cover -- and here's a new one I just found, a 1996 omnibus of the first two books where the cover model looks more like the Vampire Lestat than Cat!
And yes, I'm well aware of the relativism of dark/brown in classic English texts -- I'd interpret those descriptions differently if they were in something like T.H. White or Enid Blyton. But the society in the Cat books is very clearly multiracial -- the only character whose ethnicity is clearly stated is a slightly anvilly North American Indian in the third book, but there are enough descriptions of skintone, hair, eyes, surnames with recognizable ethnic/national associations, to make it clear that this isn't an all-white future.
I haven't combed through the books yet to get all of the physical descriptions, but if my memory serves correctly "brown" is the word that's used most for Cat, "dark" only shows once or twice. Hydrans skin tones are compared to "nutmeg", "golden", "burnished brass", or "spice", and Cat looks Hydran so it seems a safe bet that his skin's a similar medium warm brown with golden or reddish undertones.
I did already go through just to see how early on in the text you get a physical description, and in the first book in particular it's not a case where it sneaks up on you -- it's on the first page! The prologue of Psion, which is the only bit where we ever see him in a third-person POV, has this bit when Contract Labor are looking for fresh meat in the slums and homing in on Cat trying to sleep in an alley:
Dirt grayed his worn clothes, the pale curls of his hair, the warm brown of his skin.
That's the fourth paragraph of the book. Two paragraphs later we get the first mention of his eyes, the one feature the artists all seem to latch on to:
His eyes came open slowly, intensely green eyes with long slitted pupils like a cat's.
In the second book, his appearance is described only a short ways in to the first chapter -- page 17, after a few earlier passing mentions of his slit-pupilled eyes and "halfbreed's face" that "wasn't put together right by human standards", we get a closer look when he's being grilled by some Corporate Security types:
My own face appeared suddenly in the air behind him: a little younger, a lot thinner, hair curly and white-blond, skin brown, eyes green and slit-pupilled.
It takes a little longer to get that level of detail in the third book; you don't get that full of a look until partway through chapter two. Once again, though, in the pages leading up to this there are passing mentions of his slit-pupilled green eyes and Hydran appearance, coming along with our first good look at some of the unmixed Hydrans that he so closely resembles. And surprise surprise, the hair length thing that was also off on the cover of Dreamfall is mentioned here, long before the other passage I'd remembered where the length was implied in how his hair was getting restyled:
I stared at the double image of my face, the file-match side by side with the realtime image, looking at them the way I knew the guards would look at them. Seeing my hair, so pale in the artificial light that it was almost blue. I'd let it grow until it reached my shoulders, pinned it back with a clip at the base of my neck, the way most students of the Floating University had worn theirs. The gold stud through the hole in my ear tonight was about as conservative as I could make it, like my clothes. The light turned my skin an odd shadow-color, but it was no odder than the colors the guards' skins had turned in the light.
But then again, Dreamfall's cover is one of the few that gets the hair color right -- it's repeatedly described as pale, white-blond, lighter than even the very light blonde of some pale human characters -- but most of the covers show deeper golden blonde shades instead of a true whitish platinum. But the shorter spiky style here is one he only wears during Catspaw...
no subject
And yes, I'm well aware of the relativism of dark/brown in classic English texts -- I'd interpret those descriptions differently if they were in something like T.H. White or Enid Blyton. But the society in the Cat books is very clearly multiracial -- the only character whose ethnicity is clearly stated is a slightly anvilly North American Indian in the third book, but there are enough descriptions of skintone, hair, eyes, surnames with recognizable ethnic/national associations, to make it clear that this isn't an all-white future.
I haven't combed through the books yet to get all of the physical descriptions, but if my memory serves correctly "brown" is the word that's used most for Cat, "dark" only shows once or twice. Hydrans skin tones are compared to "nutmeg", "golden", "burnished brass", or "spice", and Cat looks Hydran so it seems a safe bet that his skin's a similar medium warm brown with golden or reddish undertones.
I did already go through just to see how early on in the text you get a physical description, and in the first book in particular it's not a case where it sneaks up on you -- it's on the first page! The prologue of Psion, which is the only bit where we ever see him in a third-person POV, has this bit when Contract Labor are looking for fresh meat in the slums and homing in on Cat trying to sleep in an alley:
Dirt grayed his worn clothes, the pale curls of his hair, the warm brown of his skin.
That's the fourth paragraph of the book. Two paragraphs later we get the first mention of his eyes, the one feature the artists all seem to latch on to:
His eyes came open slowly, intensely green eyes with long slitted pupils like a cat's.
In the second book, his appearance is described only a short ways in to the first chapter -- page 17, after a few earlier passing mentions of his slit-pupilled eyes and "halfbreed's face" that "wasn't put together right by human standards", we get a closer look when he's being grilled by some Corporate Security types:
My own face appeared suddenly in the air behind him: a little younger, a lot thinner, hair curly and white-blond, skin brown, eyes green and slit-pupilled.
It takes a little longer to get that level of detail in the third book; you don't get that full of a look until partway through chapter two. Once again, though, in the pages leading up to this there are passing mentions of his slit-pupilled green eyes and Hydran appearance, coming along with our first good look at some of the unmixed Hydrans that he so closely resembles. And surprise surprise, the hair length thing that was also off on the cover of Dreamfall is mentioned here, long before the other passage I'd remembered where the length was implied in how his hair was getting restyled:
I stared at the double image of my face, the file-match side by side with the realtime image, looking at them the way I knew the guards would look at them. Seeing my hair, so pale in the artificial light that it was almost blue. I'd let it grow until it reached my shoulders, pinned it back with a clip at the base of my neck, the way most students of the Floating University had worn theirs. The gold stud through the hole in my ear tonight was about as conservative as I could make it, like my clothes. The light turned my skin an odd shadow-color, but it was no odder than the colors the guards' skins had turned in the light.
But then again, Dreamfall's cover is one of the few that gets the hair color right -- it's repeatedly described as pale, white-blond, lighter than even the very light blonde of some pale human characters -- but most of the covers show deeper golden blonde shades instead of a true whitish platinum. But the shorter spiky style here is one he only wears during Catspaw...