All Your Human Are Belong to Us: Cats, Authors, and Science Fiction and Fantasy

Since I've already talked about cats in SFF in this "top 10 cats" post, I decided to go after this subject from a different angle:  authors.  On Monday and Tuesday of this week, I conducted an informal survey on the relationship between authors, their cats, and genre.  The results were both familiar and unusual.*

As expected, most of the authors who own cats mentioned that the natural independence of the feline species makes them perfect pets for an otherwise introverted or attention-limited group.  The "cats are not like dogs" sentiment came up several times, though some authors expressed a love of the canine species as well, prompting me to consider whether a "authors who don't own cats" survey would be equally as compelling.  In any case, what we already kind of knew came up in almost every single case:  cats are independent, and authors like having an uncompromising furry creature that is perfectly fine being ignored but won't let you get away with being a neglectful turd (truth).