Katherine MacLean - Profile

Profile

Damon Knight wrote, "As a science fiction writer she has few peers; her work is not only technically brilliant but has a rare human warmth and richness." Brian Aldiss noted that she could "do the hard stuff magnificently," while Theodore Sturgeon observed that she "generally starts from a base of hard science, or rationalizes psi phenomena with beautifully finished logic."

According to The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, she "was in the vanguard of those sf writers trying to apply to the soft sciences the machinery of the hard sciences".

Her stories have been included in anthologies and a few have had radio and television adaptations. One collection of her stories has been published.

Born in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, MacLean concentrated on mathematics and science in high school. At the time her earliest stories were being published in 1949-50, she received a B.A. in economics from Barnard College (1950), followed by postgraduate studies in psychology at various universities. Her 1951 marriage to Charles Dye ended in divorce a year later, but during that time, one of her stories was published under Dye's name. She married fantasy writer David Mason (1924-1974) in 1956. Their son, Christopher Dennis Mason, was born in 1957, and they divorced in 1962.

MacLean taught literature at the University of Maine and creative writing at the Free University of Portland. Over decades, she has continued to write while employed in a variety of jobs—as book reviewer, economic graphanalyst, editor, EKG technician, food analyst, laboratory technician in penicillin research, nurse's aide, office manager, payroll bookkeeper, photographer, pollster, public relations, publicist and store detective.

It was while she worked as a laboratory technician in 1947 that she began writing science fiction. Strongly influenced by Ludwig von Bertalanffy's General Systems Theory, her fiction has often demonstrated a foresight in scientific advancements.