Bill Fawcett

Mayfair Games took Bill Fawcett on as a partner soon after the company started in 1981. He co-designed its railway game Empire Builder and steered it into role-playing supplements. Born in 1947, he has made his living since largely by packaging and editing books, brokering among much else the arrangement that placed Magic: The Gathering novels with HarperCollins, and writing popular histories of military and political blunders. Cats in Space and Other Places is one of his anthologies, edited for Baen Books in 1992 and divided between tales of cats and tales of aliens who resemble them. It gathers Cordwainer Smith's 'The Game of Rat and Dragon' and 'The Ballad of Lost C'mell', Fritz Leiber's 'Space-Time for Springers' and 'Ship of Shadows', Robert A. Heinlein's 'Ordeal in Space', Ursula K. Le Guin's 'Schrödinger's Cat', A. E. van Vogt's 'Black Destroyer' and Arthur C. Clarke's 'Who's There?', with further contributions from C. J. Cherryh, Anne McCaffrey, David Drake and Jody Lynn Nye, whom Fawcett married in 1987.