It’s the birthday of Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018), whose speculative fiction had both vast commercial success and strong literary cred and who is perhaps best known for her 1969 novel, The Left Hand of Darkness, set in a world of androgynous people who shift between male and female. Le Guin (originally Kroeber) was born [...]
(I am reposting last year's post, partly because I am especially fond of it and partly because I don't have time to write about Michael Ondaatje today, the important Canadian author whose birthday it also is.) It’s the birthday of one of science fiction’s most prominent authors, Stanisław Lem (1921-2006), whose first name required me [...]
It’s the birthday of Gillian Bradshaw (b. 1956), who writes historical fiction set everywhere and everywhen from Ancient Egypt and Ancient Greece to Sub-Roman and Roman Britain and who also writes fantasy, science fiction, and children’s lit. Bradshaw was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in Santiago, Chile, and Michigan, where she attended the [...]
It’s the birthday of science-fiction author Anne McCaffrey (1926-2011, #nicelonglife), the first woman to win a Hugo Award (1968) and the first woman to win a Nebula Award (1969). McCaffrey is best known for her Dragonriders of Pern series which features, you know, dragons. And the people who ride them. McCaffrey was born in Cambridge, [...]
It’s the birthday of one of science fiction’s most prominent authors, Stanisław Lem (1921-2006), whose first name required me to figure out how to get a Polish “L with stroke” out of my keyboard, so that’s six or seven minutes of my life I’m not getting back. Lem is best known for his novels Solaris [...]
It’s the birthday of science fiction and psychological thriller author Daniel Keyes (1927-2014), best known for writing Flowers for Algernon, which won a Hugo Award in 1960 as a novella and a Nebula Award in 1966, after being expanded into a novel. (Is that cheating? It seems like cheating. But it’s a great story so [...]
It’s the birthday of science fiction author Octavia E. Butler (1947-2006), the first science fiction author in the entire universe to be awarded a MacArthur genius grant (1995). She was also one of few African-American women writing in a genre dominated by white men. Her books sold more than a million copies and were widely [...]