Vonda N. McIntyre - Biography

Biography

Vonda N. McIntyre, daughter of H. Neel and Vonda B. Keith McIntyre, earned a degree in biology from the University of Washington in 1970. That same year, she attended the Clarion Writers Workshop, founded at the Clarion University of Pennsylvania in 1968. McIntyre went on to do graduate work in genetics.

In 1971, McIntyre founded the Clarion West Writers Workshop in Seattle, WA with the support of Clarion founder Robin Scott Wilson. She contributed to the workshop until 1973.

By 1973, McIntyre had won her first Nebula Award, for the novelette "Of Mist, and Grass and Sand"; this later became part of the novel Dreamsnake (1978), which won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards. The novelette and novel both concern a female healer in a desolate, primitivized venue.

McIntyre's debut novel, The Exile Waiting, was published in 1975. She has also written a number of Star Trek and Star Wars novels, including Enterprise: The First Adventure and The Entropy Effect. She wrote the novelizations of the films Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.

It was McIntyre who came up with Hikaru as the first name of the Star Trek character Mr. Sulu, which became canon after Peter David, author of the comic book adaptation, visited the set of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country and convinced director Nicholas Meyer to insert the name into the film's script.

While taking part in a science fiction convention panel on SF in TV, McIntyre became exasperated at a fellow panelist's extreme negativity toward existing SF TV shows. She asked the panel and audience if they had managed to see Starfarers, which she claimed was an amazing SF miniseries that had almost no viewers due to bad scheduling on the part of the network. No such show existed, but after reflecting on the plot she described, McIntyre felt it would make a good novel, and went on to write Starfarers as well as its three sequels, later referring to it as "my Best SF TV Series Never Made". An enterprising fan went so far as to make a TV commercial advertising the fake series.