Author Notes to

Shrinkers & Movers

 

Here is another story I wrote for Kim Mohan’s colorful Amazing Stories, and I won’t try to hide the fact that I wrote the story because I had just moved from Binghamton, New York (Rod Serling’s hometown) to Delmar, New York, some 150 miles to the northeast. After many decades of life in Binghamton, the move required two forty-foot trucks and a dozen smaller trips in a van, and the whole move took three months and cost more than I care to count.

The legendary Charles L. Harness, outranked in years as I write this only by Jack Williamson, called this “a charming little tale, with some very clever yet unobtrusive touches, like the incorruptible tape measure, the falsetto cuckoo, trees on fastgrow, etc. This is a rarity in science fiction—a successful story with a moral: get a cat and don’t sweat the small stuff!”

I do plan to write a story about our cat, to be titled “El Gato Mapache.” I’m sure that Howard Waldrop will hold me to it.