Csdrhrt

I've been getting into Wing Commander again lately and reading Niven's Known Universe, and Andre Norton is a life long favourite. All of these have something in common, they all have an intelligent, spacefaring race, or races, that are described as "catlike" or even specifically feline in nature. So I've started wondering who was the first to use this "space-cat" idea and in what work?

In my opinion it is The Cats of Ulthar by HP Lovecraft (c) 1920. Wikipedia summarizes as:

"The Cats of Ulthar" is a short story written by American fantasy author H. P. Lovecraft in June 1920. In the tale, an unnamed narrator relates the story of how a law forbidding the killing of cats came to be in a town called Ulthar. As the narrative goes, the city is home to an old couple who enjoy capturing and killing the townspeople's cats. When a caravan of wanderers passes through the city, the kitten of an orphan (Menes) traveling with the band disappears. Upon hearing of the couple's violent acts towards cats, Menes invokes a prayer before leaving town that causes the local felines to swarm the cat-killers' house and devour them. Upon witnessing the result, the local politicians pass a law forbidding the killing of cats.

The sentience here is inferred from the action: they can act collectively, communicate (through prayer and each other), seek revenge, and coordinate a plan: all this is abstract level thought.

This will be a theme in Lovecraftian horror. These cats of Ulthar reappear in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, in the alternative reality of the Dreamlands where they converse, war, and more. Here the cats display very human like qualities and are only different from human actors in their eldritch qualities of being feline and other. I don't know if the travel between earth and the Dreamlands is by definition space travel as the Dreamlands are more or less an alternative dimension.

This is shaky SF at best but H.P. Lovecraft in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath had sentient Earth cats traveling to the moon where they were menaced by evil cats from Saturn. It was written late in his career and not published until 1943.

In short, rhe story definitely included sentient alien cats in space but it isn't usually classified as science fiction.

IMHO the latest possible date for the first "catlike" or "feline" intelligent aliens in science fiction would be 1952, the year when The Mixed Men AKA Mission to the Stars by A. E. Van Vogt was published http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?229641.

In that novel a planet of a star in the Large Magellanic Cloud is inhabited by intelligent beings with centaur-like body shapes and catlike features. An alien classification system similar to that in the Hospital Station series by James White or the Lensman series by E.E. Smith is used and the aliens are classified as CC meaning catlike centaur.

The aliens in that planet aren't advanced enough to have interstellar travel, but since the Earth Empire apparently rules millions of planets back in the Milky Way Galaxy and aliens with the CC classification are apparently common, it is possible that many space travelling catlike aliens have been encountered in history.

The Mixed Men AKA Mission to the Stars (1952) contained several stories published earlier as well as new material written for the novel. Thus it is possible that the catlike centaur aliens go back to an story published earlier, possibly "The Storm" in the October 1943 issue of Astounding Science Fiction http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?467362.

Another intelligent catlike being is the antihero or antagonist in the first science fiction story published by A.E. Vogt, "Black Destroyer", in the July, 1939 issue of Astounding Science-Fiction http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?416043. Coeurl doesn't come from a space travelling civilization, but tries to steal space travel technology from humans and create a space travelling civilization of his species. "black destroyer" was revised and included in the novel The Voyage of the Space Beagle (1950) http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?84014

So in the works of one science fiction writer, A.E. Van Vogt, his earliest catlike intelligent alien beings would date to either 1952, 1943, or 1939. However, they do not totally match the original question since their cultures are not yet spacefaring a the times of the stories.

Probably the earliest reference to intelligent cat-like beings in literature is the legend of Oedipus and the Sphinx. But they've found cave paintings in Europe depicting cat people that they estimate are around 30,000 years old. So a long freakin' time!