Michael Flynn, (born 1947), sometimes published as Michael F. Flynn, worked full time as a statistician and wrote science fiction as a sideline for several years. He turned to writing full time in the mid-1990s.

Nearly all of Flynn's work falls under the category of hard science fiction, although his treatment of it can be unusual since he has applied the rigor of hard sf to "softer" sciences such as sociology in works like In the Country of the Blind.

In 1996 he published the first in a series of near-future novels recording man's return to space. Firestar focuses on industrialist Mariesa van Huyten's obsession with funding a private space program, but follows a large cast of characters affected by her plans, including pilots, schoolchildren, her teacher husband, and others. This was one of several books that were published that year which found hope for the future not in government programs, but in private initiative. (Victor Koman's Kings of the High Frontier was another.) Flynn's was the most complex and realistic treatment of the subject.

Firestar also revealed Flynn as a serious history-builder: in one brief scene, the protagonist of In the Country of the Blind appears, tying the two stories together without fanfare.

At this point, the first two-thirds of Firestar must be considered as alternate history, since they take place in the "future" of the late 1990s.

The Wreck of The River of Stars(2003) takes the story further into the future: by the late decades of the Twenty-First Century, the fusion drive has displaces the solar sail, but on board the River of Stars - one a sailing luxury liner, now an obsolete, run down tramp freighter converted to fusion - the "old sailors" hope for one more chance to show what they can do.

The Forest of Time charts, within the narrow confines of a 70-page novella, a whole world which could have been with its history and geography, culture and languague - a world where the Thirteen Colonies threw off the British rule but failed to unite, and developed into separate nation states. A world where Pennsylvania in the Twentieth Century is a nation speaking a German dialelct, which often goes to war with its neighbors New York, Virginia and the Iroquois Confederation...

Though not widely popular, Flynn is a respected writer who crafts solid, intricate plots populated with interesting characters.

Bibliography

Short fiction

• "Eifelheim" (1986) (nominee for Best Novella Hugo Award, 1987)
• "The Forest of Time" (1987) (Hugo Best Novella nominee, 1988)
• "Melodies of the Heart" (1994) (Hugo Best Novella nominee, 1995)

Novels

• In the Country of the Blind (1990, revised 2001) (Prometheus Award and Compton Crook Award)
• Fallen Angels (with Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle) (1991) (Prometheus Award)
• Firestar cycle
  • Firestar (1996)
  • Rogue Star (1998)
  • Lodestar (2000)
  • Falling Stars (2001)
• The Wreck of The River of Stars (2003)

Collections

• The Nanotech Chronicles (1991)
• The Forest of Time and other stories (1997)

1947 births | Living people | Science fiction writers