Vonda N McIntyre, who has died aged 70, was foremost among a legion of new female science-fiction authors in the early 1970s inspired by humanist writers such as Ursula K Le Guin, Joanna Russ and Samuel Delany. With Dreamsnake (1978), she became only the second woman to win the Nebula award and the third to win the Hugo award for best novel.
Dreamsnake was the story of a young healer, Snake, who uses genetically modified serpents to deliver healing venom; a third serpent – the dreamsnake – is used when the patient is incurable. An error in trust leads to the death of her dreamsnake and Snake struggles to function fully as a healer.
Over the course of Snake’s journey to find a new dreamsnake, the novel explores the interpersonal relationships (not always traditional) of various communities, child abuse, fertility control and the emotional impact on Snake, who is feared by the people she heals almost as much as death.
McIntyre won a second Nebula for best novel (beating George RR Martin’s A Game of Thrones) for The Moon and the Sun (1997), an alternate history set in the court of Louis XIV, where the Sun King believes his immortality is assured if he devours the flesh of a certain sea creature. Caught by the explorer Yves de la Croix, Sherzad is no monster, but an intelligent sea-woman. She enthrals De la Croix’s sister, Marie-Josèphe, who defies all to free the captive.
The book was filmed in 2014 as The King’s Daughter, with Pierce Brosnan and William Hurt in the cast, but its release was delayed in order to complete the film’s special effects. A new date has yet to be set.
Vonda was born in Louisville, Kentucky, the daughter of Vonda (nee Keith) and Harrell Neel McIntyre. The family moved regularly, with Vonda growing up in Nahant, Massachusetts; Syracuse, New York; Rockville, Maryland; and The Hague in the Netherlands, before they finally settled in Bellevue, Washington, in 1961. She studied in Seattle and attended the University of Washington, earning a BS in biology but leaving in 1971, part of the way through her PhD graduate course in genetics, to take up writing.
Having grown up reading science fiction, McIntyre had written screenplays based on her favourite TV shows – The Man From UNCLE and Star Trek – in her mid-teens. She sold her first short stories in 1969, and in the summer of the following year attended the Clarion writers’ workshop at Clarion State College, Pennsylvania, where one of her instructors was Russ.
Inspired by her experience, and with the aid of Robin Scott Wilson, founder of the Clarion writers’ workshop, McIntyre established Clarion West writers’ workshop in Seattle and helped run it for three years (1971-73), with Le Guin as one of the tutors. McIntyre lived at Le Guin’s isolated cabin in Oregon and wrote her first novel, The Exile Waiting (1975), about a young female thief trying to escape a dystopian society on a far future Earth.
Her short story Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand came out of a 1972 Clarion West writing assignment to meld a story out of two randomly picked words – one pastoral and the other technological. It won the Nebula short story award and became the opening chapter of Dreamsnake.
The best of her early short stories, including the award-nominated Wings, The Mountains of Sunset, The Mountains of Dawn, Aztecs (which was expanded into the novel Superluminal) and Fireflood, were collected in Fireflood and Other Stories in 1979.
Invited to write a novel set in the universe of Star Trek, McIntyre produced The Entropy Effect (1981), which had its origins in an unproduced screenplay written when she was 18 and submitted shortly before the show was cancelled. It was followed by novelisations of the movies Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984) and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986), and another original novel, the New York Times bestseller Enterprise: The First Adventure (1986). McIntyre’s contributions to the Trek canon included giving Mr Sulu the name Hikaru, and naming Kirk’s mother Winona. She also wrote a Star Wars novel, The Crystal Star (1994).
Her Starfarer series – Starfarers (1989), Transition (1991), Metaphase (1992) and Nautilus (1994) – is concerned with humanity’s expansion into the universe, first contact with an alien species and, in the final title, efforts to join other alien cultures collectively known as “civilisation”.
In 1994, McIntyre accepted a fellowship to the Chesterfield Writer’s Film Project workshop, sponsored by Amblin Entertainment and Universal Studios. She spent a year living in Los Angeles, working on two screenplays, Illegal Alien and The Moon and the Sun, the latter the basis for her award-winning novel and the subsequent movie. McIntyre also worked on screenplays adapting Dreamsnake and Barbary, her 1986 young adult novel about an orphan girl sent to live on an orbiting research station.
In 2008, she was one of the co-founders of Book View Café, a publishing cooperative set up by a group of primarily fantasy and sci-fi authors to publish new books and reprint titles and ebooks, which now has 55 authors on its roster. As well as two new collections of stories, McIntyre’s contributions included the short story Little Sisters (2015), an original companion piece to her Nebula award-nominated Little Faces (2006), a far-future story of sentient spaceships, exploring how humans might deal with the immensities of interstellar space travel.
In February, McIntyre was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. She returned home and completed work on a new novel, Curve of the World, set in ancient Crete.
She was predeceased by her parents and a younger sister, Carolyn.
• Vonda Neel McIntyre, author, born 28 August 1948; died 1 April 2019
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