Author Vonda N. McIntyre Dead at 70
Author Vonda N. McIntyre has passed away just eight weeks after being diagnosed with cancer. She was 70 years old.
News of her death came via a journal entry by Jeanne Gomoll at CaringBridge.org:
Vonda N. McIntyre died at 6:25 pm, Pacific Time, in no pain and surrounded by friends. The funeral home has collected her body which will be cremated. Vonda was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer on February 7; her death came swiftly, just short of two months later. Vonda’s posse and local friends will get together for a brief gathering within the next couple days. A reception that is open to the public will be scheduled within about a month and will be announced here on CaringBridge as soon as the details are known. Good-bye, Vonda.
Born in Louisville, KY, her first rejection slip came when she was fourteen years old (a Fantastic Four comic book script), and her first sale was the short story “Summer, 1969” at age 20. After graduating with honors from the University of Washington and going to graduate school to study genetics, according to her web site, she “discovered that as a research scientist she made a very good SF writer.”
RELATED: A Conversation with Vonda N. McIntyre
She went on to win the Nebula Award in 1974 for the novelette Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand (Analog, October 2917), which was also nominated for the Hugo and Locus Poll Awards that year. That story later became part of Dreamsnake (Houghton Mifflin, 1978), which won both the Hugo and Nebula for Best Novel. McIntyre also won the Nebula for The Moon and the Sun (Pocket, 1997). Overall, she garnered five Hugo and eight Nebula nominations.
Besides her original work, she also swam in the licensed tie-in waters, with the Star Wars novel The Crystal Star and five Star Trek books — The Entropy Effect and Enterprise: The First Adventure along with novelizations for three films. (McIntyre was also responsible for Sulu getting the first name Hikaru, which became canon after author Peter David visited the set of Star Trek VI and convinced Nicholas Meyer to use it.)
Her novel The Moon and the Sun is currently being adapted as the film The King’s Daughter, starring Pierce Brosnan.
During a panel on science fiction in television, McIntyre grew frustrated with a fellow panelist’s negativity toward genre TV shows and started pontificating about the show Starfarers, which she claimed was an amazing miniseries that almost no one had seen because of poor scheduling. Completely made up on the spot, the “show” became a series of four novels.
McIntyre referred to the work as “my Best SF TV Series Never Made”.
