As someone who buys quite a few stories and rejects a whole lot more, I’ve been accused of practically every bias imaginable. Most of these accusations are mutually contradictory and they often tell me more about what’s irking the letter writer or the blogger than they do about what’s actually appearing on the pages of Asimov’s. The strangest claim of all, though, came from a man who edgily maintained I had a preference for stories with cats.
Well, I know it’s ill advised to respond to critics, but I really spluttered over that one. I will confess that I grew up in a household surrounded by pets. It seemed that we always had two dogs, two cats, two turtles, and at least two rodents of some sort. I loved most of those pets, but, since we were fairly typical children, we left all the cleaning and feeding and trips to the vet to our mother. She did all the work even if, ostensibly, the turtles belonged to my sister Judi, the mice and gerbils were my sister Tory’s, one dog belonged to my sister Lynn, and the other had been a gift to me on my fourteenth birthday. While my mother swore she’d draw the line at playing nursemaid to an old animal, she cared for all those pets tirelessly. In the end, my old dog outlived her by several years.

I did not find myself in a situation where I could care for an animal until long after I’d left home. When we purchased our co-op, my husband and I made sure that the building allowed dogs, but I didn’t really think about a pet until my first child began begging for a cat. Her father could not deny his three-year-old much of anything, so, on Christmas Eve, Santa rescued a cat from certain annihilation at the Center for Animal Control. Alas, though the cat turned out to be an expert mouser it was not child friendly. Without small animals to hunt, it took to stalking our daughter. Darting like a flying squirrel, it would swoop out of nowhere to pounce on her tiny feet. When she began to carry a pillow in front of her for protection, we realized something had to change. Eventually, the cat moved into the home of a childless friend of ours and has lived there happily ever after.

Our younger daughter has been begging for a dog for several years now. She’s always loved them, and she formed an especially deep attachment to Connie Willis’s bulldog Smudge when we visited Connie and her family a couple of years ago. I sympathize with my daughter, but I’m not currently prepared to assume the role of family gamekeeper. Besides, she doesn’t help her case by planning out the outfits she’s going to dress her dog up in.

Sometimes, I think the solution is to look to the artificial pets predicted so presciently by Philip K. Dick. I try to tell my seven-year-old that if a Tekno Dog was good enough for your sister, a Zhu Zhu Pet will have to satisfy you. Electronic pets may not be perfect—the Neo Pets and the Littlest Pet Shop Online tend to crash my computer, while the Tamagotchi and the Neo Pets are nearly as much work as the real thing. They may not even save me from my mother’s fate—I finally banned the Neo Pets when I realized that I was going online once a day to keep my older daughter’s neglected virtual pets “alive.” Still, there is something endearing about a chittering, beeping hamster that doesn’t require any sawdust. I won’t even object if my little one decides to dress it up in haute couture. Yet, even I will admit that a person tends to find more emotional comfort petting a kitten than they do petting a Furby.

There are a lot of famous science fiction editors who co-exist with pets. Stanley Schmidt, the editor of Analog, usually has a pet snake; Ellen Datlow, the well-known anthologist and former fiction editor of Omni and Sci Fiction, has always owned a couple of lovely kitties; my predecessor, Gardner Dozois, and his wife Susan Casper are also partial to felines. One of their cats was even named for the title character in the classic story, “The Ballad of Lost C’Mell.” None of these editors’ feelings for their pets seems to have clouded their judgement when it comes to buying great stories.

And my reluctance to commit to a living animal doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy stories about the real thing. I’ve read a lot of fine cat stories by authors like Cordwainer Smith, Fritz Leiber, Jack Skillingstead, and Andre Norton. From Connie Willis and Clifford Simak to Nancy Kress, Kathleen Ann Goonan, and Robert Reed have come lots of great stories that feature dogs. At Asimov’s, we’ve run a fair amount of stories about monkeys and birds, too. I’ve loved so many of these stories. I can remember the first time I read “Desertion” and “All Cats Are Gray.” I nearly cried over “The Last of the Winnebagos,” and I was utterly charmed by “Space-Time for Springers” and “26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss.” Putting a cat or a dog or even a mouse into a story isn’t going to seal the deal on a sale to the magazine, but sending in a story that affects me as deeply as “Flowers for Algernon” certainly will.