When science fiction author Pamela Sargent was a young girl growing up in Ithaca, New York, she met two people who would have a great impact upon her chosen career. One was her baby-sitter Audrey, and the other was Bobby Swayze, a boy who lived next door. Audrey was a student at Cornell University and later became the first woman to graduate from that institution's school of architecture, despite the wishes of her parents and her professors' negative attitude about women architects. "My parents couldn't have picked a better role model for me if they had tried," Sargent declared in her Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series (CAAS) entry. Bobby Swayze, the author later wrote, "was the first person to reveal the science fictional world to me." A fan of the early television series "Captain Video," Bobby got the young Sargent interested in the genre, as well as such other...