The impetus for this post was a panel at this year’s Chicon/Worldcon. The focus of that panel was a bit broader, looking at cats across sci-fi and fantasy—not anthropomorphized, humanoid felines, which are their own unique subset of fictional races, and not other felines like lions and panthers, but Standard Issue Cats in human-dominated worlds.

There were a lot of great questions raised at that panel, like how storytellers use cats in their narratives, the difference between an animal and human character, and the broader role of pets and animals in general in human-centric sci-fi worlds. So I decided to take a closer look at some of my favorite space cats to see how their creators answered those questions.