How Seattle science-fiction pioneer Vonda N. McIntyre blazed an imaginative trail for diversity
Decades before the current debates over gender and sexuality, the late Seattle science-fiction writer Vonda N. McIntyre flipped the script on those subjects.
“In many of her stories, there are characters that, by the end of the book, you go, ‘You know, I don’t think it was ever established whether they were male, or female, or something in between,’” fellow science-fiction author Una McCormack says in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast. “And it’s done with such a light touch that you would never notice.”
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Five years after McIntyre died of cancer at the age of 70, McCormack is playing a lead role in shining a spotlight of her legacy for a new generation. She helped arrange for the publication of “Little Sisters and Other Stories,” an anthology that includes McIntyre’s first published short story (from 1970), her last piece of published fiction (from 2015) and eight more tales from the decades in between.
McIntyre made her mark on science fiction in several ways: She wrote three novelizations of Star Trek movies (II, III and IV), plus two original Star Trek novels. She founded Seattle’s Clarion West Writers Workshop, which will be celebrating McIntyre and the new anthology with a virtual panel presentation next month.
Perhaps most significantly, McIntyre was part of a movement that brought feminist perspectives to science fiction — and often put women characters at the center of the action. (Another noted Pacific Northwest author, Ursula K. LeGuin, was also part of the movement and frequently collaborated with her.)
McCormack argues that McIntyre’s writings weren’t just about feminism. “She was extremely ahead of the curve in the representation of disability, or ‘other-bodied-ness,’” McCormack says. “In ‘The Exile Waiting’ [McIntyre’s first novel], we see a huge diversity of shape and form that humanity can take. So I think she’s ahead of the curve on a lot of things.”
McIntyre turned to science-fiction writing after studying biology and genetics at the University of Washington — and her interest in those subjects shows through in some of the stories included in “Little Sisters.” (“Elfleda,” for example, is told from the point of view of a genetically engineered centaur who has been created to cater to the whims of tourists.)
McCormack, whose 11th Star Trek novel is due to come out in November, says she got a kick out of how McIntyre wrote about humpback whales in her novelization of “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.”
“The material with Spock meeting the whales, and the whole whale encounter with the alien probe — it’s all wonderful, and radically decenters the humans in the story,” McCormack says. “It’s like they’re not relevant to this.”
The bottom line? Even when McIntyre wasn’t writing about Star Trek, her stories reflected the philosophy that Mister Spock lived by: infinite diversity in infinite combinations.
“What I draw from this is a robust statement of the reality of human diversity,” McCormack says. “We make the case that it’s a good thing — but it’s also a true thing. Humans are diverse. We are diverse in terms of how our bodies move and operate, how they change, in our sexualities, in how we were in the past, how we were in the future. She states this robustly as fact. She doesn’t get into the arguments. It’s the basis on which her stories operate.”
“Little Sisters and Other Stories” by Vonda N. McIntyre is set for release on May 21. Clarion West is presenting “The Roots and Future of Feminist Science Fiction,” a free virtual panel discussion focusing on McIntyre’s work and other major influences on the genre, at 11 a.m. PT on Saturday, June 8. In addition to McCormack, the panelists include Nicola Griffith, SJ Groenewegen and Nisi Shawl. Advance registration is recommended.
The lead illustration is based on a photograph of McIntyre from the Science Fiction Writers of America, which was converted into a watercolor-style artwork by Media.io, and then augmented with images of a “futuristic neon Seattle skyline with the Space Needle” generated by Microsoft Copilot.
Stay tuned for future episodes of the Fiction Science podcast via Apple, Spotify, Player.fm, Pocket Casts and Podchaser. My co-host for the Fiction Science podcast is Dominica Phetteplace, an award-winning writer who is a graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop and currently lives in San Francisco. To learn more about Phetteplace, visit her website, DominicaPhetteplace.com.