I thought it only appropriate to feature one of our Guests of Honor this week after winning the Bid vote to become the seated 2019 Worldcon 77! This week we spotlight Diane Duane, Ian McDonald has already been the subject of a post.
Diane Duane was born in New York, but currently resides in County Wicklow, Ireland with her husband, northern Irish writer, Peter Morwood.
Diane’s first novel, The Door Into Fire, was published in 1979 and was nominated for the John W. Campbell Award. She has sold more than fifty other novels in her own universes and numerous others. Duane’s best-known works include her long-running (since 1983) “Young Wizards” series—its tenth novel, Games Wizards Play, having been published in February of last year—and the nine bestselling Star Trek novels for which, among many other works, she was recently awarded the Grand Master / lifetime achievement award of the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers. More or less accidentally, she’s acquired the distinction of having written for Star Trek in more formats than anyone else alive. Duane has appeared a number of times on the New York Times Bestseller List, and has garnered numerous awards for her YA writing from such organisations as the American Librarians’ Association and the New York Public Library.
Her TV and film writing has included characters ranging from Jean-Luc Picard to Batman and from Siegfried the Volsung to Scooby-Doo. Her most recent such accomplishment involved running Sean Bean around a post-apocalyptic New York landscape in tight leather pants, in the SyFy miniseries The Lost Future. (She tried to leave Sean alive at the end, she really did, but sometimes things just don’t work out…) She is presently working on another couple of miniseries scripts, the eleventh Young Wizards novel, and the long-awaited final book in the Middle Kingdoms sequence, The Door Into Starlight.
In her spare time Diane gardens, cooks, hangs out on Twitter and Tumblr, and studies astronomy, food history, and her husband!
This week we feature her contribution to the International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Wretch Day in 2007, “Parting Gifts.” It is a short work, set in the Middle Kingdoms universe.
