Vonda McIntyre

Coming rapidly after a cancer diagnosis eight weeks ago, Vonda McIntyre’s death on April 1 was announced on her Caringbridge page by Jeanne Gomoll:

Vonda N. McIntyre died at 6:25 pm, Pacific Time, in no pain and surrounded by friends. The funeral home has collected her body which will be cremated. Vonda was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer on February 7; her death came swiftly, just short of two months later. Vonda’s posse and local friends will get together for a brief gathering within the next couple days. A reception that is open to the public will be scheduled within about a month and will be announced here on CaringBridge as soon as the details are known. Good-bye, Vonda.

McIntyre won her first Nebula Award in 1973, for the novelette ‘”Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand”. This later became part of the novel Dreamsnake (1978), which won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards. She won a third Nebula in 1998 for The Moon and the Sun. Overall, McIntyre was a five-time Hugo nominee and eight-time Nebula nominee.

After attending Robin Scott Wilson’s last Clarion Writers Workshop at State College, PA in 1970, she transplanted the idea to Seattle. She later said that “Neither James Sallis nor I could bear the idea that the workshop would die. We both got Robin’s blessing to start workshops. Jim’s was at Tulane, and the one I helped run was at the University of Washington. I called the Seattle one ‘Clarion West’; it seemed a good idea at the time.”

The Tulane workshop only lasted the one year. The Seattle Clarion West lasted three years, before McIntyre found it too difficult to continue managing the conference while being a graduate student. (The Clarion West Writers Workshop was resumed by different organizers in the 1980s.)

McIntyre’s debut novel, The Exile Waiting, was published in 1975. She wrote many Star Trek and Star Wars novels. In 1976, McIntyre co-edited Aurora: Beyond Equality, a feminist/humanist science fiction anthology, with Susan Janice Anderson.

A movie, The King’s Daughter, based on Vonda McIntyre’s The Moon and the Sun, is still awaiting its U.S. release. (IMDB says sometime in 2019.)

She won SFWA’s Service Award in 2010, and the Science Fiction Research Association’s Clareson Award in 2015.

Vonda McIntyre was a guest of honor at Sasquan, the 2015 Worldcon.

McIntyre was a very popular convention guest who always loved to pitch in with the committee to get things ready. I thought it was a tribute to her that one year when she was the guest of an LA convention she helped stuff registration bags — and when that was done seemed a little astonished that people didn’t have more for her to do!