It won the Nebula short story award and became the opening chapter of Dreamsnake. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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 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. 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.

Vonda was born in Louisville, Kentucky, the daughter of Vonda (nee Keith) and Harrell Neel McIntyre. 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.

She enthrals De la Croix’s sister, Marie-Josèphe, who defies all to free the captive. Caught by the explorer Yves de la Croix, Sherzad is no monster, but an intelligent sea-woman. 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. 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.

Dreamsnake vonda mcintyre