Heya Everybody,
I've been a subscriber to this list for a couple
of months now and haven't posted much except, in a
fit of shameless self-promotion, to brag, so my
introduction is long overdue.
Vonda N. McIntyre, feminist, sf writer; I had the
great and inadvertent good fortune to get started
writing right after the wave of feminist sf
writers of the late 1960s dispersed the prevailing
(if erroneous) belief that sf wasn't for women (as
readers, writers, or characters). So I got to walk
through doorways and holes in brick walls that
others had broken through before I ever got there.
(I am eternally grateful to writers such as Le
Guin, Wilhelm, Russ, Delany, for making the field
a lot wider and bigger; and I admire earlier
writers such as Norton, Brackett, and Bradley for
succeeding in a field and at a time when women
were not supposed to succeed at what they were
doing, especially this.)
I don't remember learning to read, but the first
thing I remember reading is an sf novel.
(Heinlein... what can I say, it was the early
1950s.) I'm convinced that the novels of Andre
Norton, bless her heart, kept me sane in junior
high school.
I like to think I've cracked if not broken a few
walls in terms of subject matter, in sf, though
sometimes when I'm sitting there nursing my aching
head and somebody comes along and slips right past
me through that hole I began, it's a little
demoralizing.
I helped put on the first incarnation of Clarion
West, in 1971-2-3 in Seattle: a direct descendent
of Robin Scott Wilson's original Clarion in
Clarion, Pennsylvania, at which I was a student in
1970 (its last year).
After that I spent a couple of years living in a
cabin four miles down a logging road, which is
about what you need after babysitting a writing
workshop for three years.
I've taught at the second incarnation of Clarion
West a couple of times, but I didn't reincarnate
it: Marilyn Holt and J.T. Stewart deserve that
credit, as well as credit for the courage to do it
even after I warned them about the difficulties,
the time-sink aspects, &c.
I have one-half of a mummified PhD in genetics, a
first-degree black belt in Aikido, and 23 acres of
reforested former clear-cut on the Olympic
peninsula. The clear-cut is the only entity of the
three with any likelihood of revivification.
My original novels include _The Exile Waiting_,
_Dreamsnake_, _Superluminal_, the Starfarers
quartet, and, most recently, _The Moon and the
Sun_. Contrary to a number of sf reference books,
"Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand" was _not_ my first
published short story.
I've written a bunch of media tie-in novels, which
are fun to do (nobody should do them who doesn't
find them fun) and which subsidized several of my
original novels. Naturally I don't think that Star
Trek books are causing the end of science fiction
as we know it, but that's a rant deserving of its
own message. (One that I wrote but haven't decided
whether to post.)
Eileen Gunn wrote a biography of me that she
kindly allowed me to post on my web page. I like
to think it has few facts but much truth. The link
to my web page is in my .sig.
Best,
Vonda
http://www.sff.net/people/Vonda
Some official good news at
http://www.bookwire.com/pw/bestbooks97.article$3946
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu May 25 2000 - 19:07:04 PDT