Space Cat Meets Mars

Ruthven Todd's Space Cat Meets Mars is a space adventure for 6 year olds, told almost entirely from the point of view of a very unimpressed cat.

Flyball is a seasoned space cat. He has been to the Moon plenty of times and he has just come back from Venus, and frankly he finds space travel dull.

He travels with Colonel Fred Stone in a ship called the Halley. He has a hammock, magnetic pads strapped to his paws and a helmet he considers fit only for goldfish.

Then something goes wrong. An asteroid catches the ship. The starboard rockets stop firing. Fred does his sums, looks worried, and aims them at the one place he might be able to land and mend things.

Mars.

What Flyball actually wants on Mars is a mouse. He has been hoping for one on every planet so far and has been let down every time.

What he gets is lichens the size of trees, mushrooms bigger than truck wheels, and a grasshopper the size of a sparrow that lands in front of him and refuses to be frightened.

That's the running joke and it's a very good one. Nothing on Mars will run away from him. A ladybird as big as he is looks at him solemnly and goes back to its fungus. Where is the fun in a creature that won't play?

Then he finds a mouse. Right shape, ears and tail in the right places, and plated in something like chrome. It plays with him for a while. It's much cleverer than an Earth mouse and far too heavy to bite.

He is also quietly worried about his tummy, because Fred has mentioned that he's been eating a lot and moving very little (Flyball checks, in private, with one paw).

It's from the nineteen fifties, and the Mars in it is the Mars people imagined then. Canals full of water, air you can breathe if you stay low down, fish. None of that will bother your reader and you might rather enjoy explaining it.

It follows earlier journeys the library doesn't have, but the first page tells you everything you need.

If a calm, funny animal abroad is the thing, try Stanley in Space. An ordinary family gets a phone call from the President and ends up rather further from home than planned.