The Moon and the Sun won the Nebula Award for Best Novel of 1997. McIntyre's novel Dreamsnake won the Nebula Award and the Hugo award. The World Science Fiction Convention awards the Hugo after a vote by readers, while SFWA, the professional organization for SF and Fantasy writers, presents the Nebula. Dreamsnake has been published in thirteen languages, including Japanese and Polish.

In 1994, the Chesterfield Film Company offered her a fellowship in its Writers Film Project, sponsored by Universal Studios and Amblin Entertainment. She spent a year in Los Angeles working on two screenplays. The results are The Moon and the Sun and Illegal Alien. She has also adapted Dreamsnake and Barbary as movie screenplays.

The Moon and the Sun is set in 1693 at the court of Louis XIV, in Versailles, where McIntyre travelled to do research. The period is as rich as the chateau; in order to prevent the screenplay of The Moon and the Sun from growing beyond the dreaded 120-page limit, she also wrote the story as a novel.

Pocket Books published The Moon and the Sun in hardcover in September 1997 and in paperback in 1998. "I'm pleased with the way the novel came out," McIntyre says, "and amazed at the amount of research it took. The cover painting, by Gary Halsey, is the best cover I've ever had. In fact, it's the best cover I've ever seen. I bought the painting, and at the publication party (which was also my birthday) at the University Bookstore in Seattle, my friends gave me a gift certificate for a gilded carved baroque frame. They knew I wouldn't get away with my usual strip of brushed aluminum for this painting!"

She recently traveled to Crete, Thera, and Cyprus to research her novel in progress, The Curve of the World.

McIntyre's other novels include The Exile Waiting, The Entropy Effect, Superluminal, and Barbary. The Exile Waiting was nominated for the Nebula; excerpts from Superluminal, "Aztecs" and "Transit," received Hugo and Nebula nominations. The Starfarers Quartet, the story of alien contact specialist J.D. Sauvage and her colleagues in rebellion aboard the campus starship Starfarer, begins with Starfarers, continues with Transition and Metaphase, and concludes with Nautilus. Starfarers is one of the few novels ever to inspire a fan club before being written. Pocket Books will reprint both Dreamsnake and the Starfarers Quartet in the fall of 1999.

Her collection, Fireflood & Other Stories, includes the Nebula award-winning "Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand," plus ten other stories. With Susan Janice Anderson, she edited Aurora: Beyond Equality, an anthology of humanist science fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin, James Tiptree, Jr., A.R. Sheldon, Marge Piercy, David J. Skal, P.J. Plauger, and others.

McIntyre wrote the best-selling novel versions of the screenplays for three of the popular Star Trek movies: The Wrath of Khan, The Search for Spock, and The Voyage Home. Her audiotape adaptation of The Voyage Home, narrated by George Takei and Leonard Nimoy, was nominated for a Grammy. The Crystal Star continues the adventures of George Lucas' creations Luke Skywalker, Leia Organa, Han Solo, and Chewbacca, and the next generation of Star Wars characters.

She graduated as a Bachelor of Science from the honors program of the University of Washington. With several short-story sales to her credit, she spent a summer at the Clarion Writers Workshop. After a year of graduate work in genetics, she ventured out on her own as a free-lance writer.

She has exhibited hunters and jumpers, organized conferences, observed humpback whales in Alaska, and rafted in the white water of Idaho. She earned shodan (first degree black belt) in the martial art Aikido.

Though she prefers fiction, she has written articles ranging from "Observation of a Psychic" for The Skeptical Inquirer to "The Straining Your Eyes through the Viewscreen Blues" for Nebula Award Stories 15 to "Virus Attack," which was reprinted from CompuServe in several computer newsletters.

She will spend Winter Quarter of the year 2000 as Evans Chair at The Evergreen State College. She has twice been writer-in-residence at Clarion West, the Seattle daughter of Robin Scott Wilson's original Clarion, Pennsylvania, writers workshop. She was visiting novelist at Humboldt State College's Future Fiction Hypercard interactive novel project. She has spoken at Northwest Bookfest, Rutgers University, Antioch West, the University of Washington, the Harbourfront International Author's Festival, and the Melbourne Writers Workshop. She has given readings from Seattle to Brighton, England; Durango to Winnipeg. She was a judge for the first James Tiptree, Jr., Memorial Award. She recently travelled to Auckland as Guest of Honor of the New Zealand national sf convention, and to Finland, as guest of Finncon, part of the Jyvaskyla Arts Festival.

A card-carrying member of the American Civil Liberties Union, she also belongs to SFWA, the Cousteau Society, the Space Studies Institute , the Planetary Society, the Authors Guild, and the National Organization for Women. Along about the Winter Solstice every year, she "adopts" a pgymy marmoset for her sister, an orca for her father, and an island in the Gulf of Mexico for her mother. Like many writers, she always has a fiddly hobby. At the moment, she has two: writing web pages for other sf/f writers; and beaded sea creatures.

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Monday September 08 2003