Vonda N. McIntyre

Author of Fireflood, The Moon and the Sun, and Superluminal

Photograph by Gary L. Benson

In 1994, The Chesterfield Film Company offered her a fellowship in its Writers Film Project, sponsored by Universal Studios and Amblin Entertainment. She spent the year in Los Angeles working on two screenplays. The results are The Moon and the Sun and Illegal Alien. She has also adapted Dreamsnake and Barbary as movie screenplays.

The Moon and the Sun is set in 1693 at the court of Louis XIV, in Versailles, where McIntyre travelled to do research. The period is as rich as the chateau; in order to prevent the screenplay of The Moon and the Sun from growing beyond the dreaded 120-page limit, she also wrote the story as a novel. "I'm probably the only person in the universe," she says, "who will perceive this book as science fiction."

Pocket Books published The Moon and the Sun in hardcover in September 1997. "I'm pleased with the way the novel came out," McIntyre says, "and amazed at the amount of research it took. Dave Stern, my editor, just sent me the cover proof, and it's wonderful. Gary Halsey, the artist, has done the most beautiful cover I've seen in a long, long time."

The Starfarers Series, now complete, is a quartet of novels narrating the story of alien contact specialist J.D. Sauvage and her colleagues in rebellion aboard the campus starship Starfarer. The series begins with Starfarers, continues with Transition and Metaphase, and concludes with Nautilus. Starfarers is one of the few novels ever to inspire a fan club before being written. Bantam Spectra published the complete quartet and re-released Dreamsnake at the same time, making McIntyre their entire paperback lineup for October 1994.

In the following month, Bantam Spectra published McIntyre's Star Wars novel, The Crystal Star, which continues the adventures of George Lucas' creations Luke Skywalker, Leia Organa, Han Solo, and Chewbacca, and the next generation of Star Wars characters.

McIntyre's other novels include The Exile Waiting, The Entropy Effect, Superluminal, and Barbary. The Exile Waiting was nominated for the Nebula; excerpts from Superluminal, "Aztecs" and "Transit," received Hugo and Nebula nominations.

Her collection, Fireflood & Other Stories, includes the Nebula award-winning "Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand," plus ten other stories. With Susan Janice Anderson, she edited Aurora: Beyond Equality, an anthology of humanist science fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin, James Tiptree, Jr., A.R. Sheldon, Marge Piercy, David J. Skal, P.J. Plauger, and others.

McIntyre wrote the best-selling novel versions of the screenplays for three of the popular Star Trek movies: The Wrath of Khan, The Search for Spock, and The Voyage Home. Her audiotape adaptation of The Voyage Home, narrated by George Takei and Leonard Nimoy, was nominated for a Grammy.

She graduated as a Bachelor of Science from the honors program of the University of Washington. With several short-story sales to her credit, she spent a summer at the Clarion Writers Workshop. After a year of graduate work in genetics, she ventured out on her own as a free-lance writer.

She has exhibited hunters and jumpers, organized conferences, observed humpback whales in Alaska, and rafted in the white water of Idaho. She earned shodan (first degree black belt) in the martial art Aikido.

Though she prefers fiction, she has written articles ranging from "Observation of a Psychic" for The Skeptical Inquirer to "The Straining Your Eyes through the Viewscreen Blues" for Nebula Award Stories 15 to "Virus Attack," which appeared in several computer newsletters.

She has twice been writer-in-residence at Clarion West, the Seattle daughter of the original Clarion, Pennsylvania, writers workshop. She was visiting novelist at Humboldt State College's Future Fiction Hypercard interactive novel project. She has spoken at Rutgers University, Antioch West, the University of Washington, the Harbourfront International Author's Festival, and the Melbourne Writers Workshop. She has given readings from Seattle to Brighton, England; Durango to Winnipeg. She was a judge for the first James Tiptree, Jr., Memorial Award. She recently travelled to Auckland as Guest of Honor of the New Zealand national sf convention, and to Finland, as guest of Finncon '95, part of the Jyvaskyla Arts Festival.

A card-carrying member of the American Civil Liberties Union, she also belongs to the Cousteau Society, the Space Studies Institute, the Planetary Society, the Authors Guild, and the National Organization for Women. Last Christmas, she "adopted" a pgymy marmoset for her sister, an orca for her father, and an island in the Gulf of Mexico for her mother.

For more information on Vonda N. McIntyre, her books, awards, career, and the "real story", an unofficial biography, vist her site at: http://www.oz.net/~vonda/index.html