My first book was Space Cat by Ruthven Todd. I really loved the whole Space Cat series. I loved it so much that I decided to write a fan letter to the author. He never replied. My mother was upset by that and vowed to answer all her fan mail. She still does to this day. Her first fan was an eighty year-old veteran of the Royal Flying Corps of WWI, named Pat Terry. When he first wrote, he was paralyzed from the waist down and had to write lying on his back with a notepad held at arm’s length. With such dedicated fans as he, it was not at all hard to find the time to respond. As the numbers of her fans increased, my mother had to spend less time responding to fan mail — or else spend less time writing the new books every letter clamored for! I remember her proudly showing me her copy of the F&SF magazine with The Lady in the Tower in it. All I saw was a magazine with a picture of a banana floating on a field of stars — nothing at all like the picture of a cat romping in a spacesuit on the Moon.
