Sylvia Engdahl
Sylvia
Engdahl is the author of six science fiction novels, first
published by Atheneum in the 1970s as Young Adult (teen) books but also
liked by many adult readers. All have been reissued by different
publishers in the 21st century and are currently in
print.
She is a
long-term advocate of space colonization, which she has always believed
is essential to human survival, and first developed her concept of the
Critical Stage — the point at which a planetary civilization
simultaneously gains both the capability for space travel and the power
to destroy itself — in 1956, the year before Sputnik. Her 1971
novel The
Far Side of Evil (updated in 2003) is based on this concept.
Sylvia was born in Los Angeles and received her degree in 1955 from the
University of California at Santa Barbara. After teaching for a
short
time, she switched to the then-new field of computer programming,
starting as a trainee with the RAND Corporation (later the System
Development Corporation), which was developing the SAGE Air Defense
System. For ten years she did assembly-language systems and utility
programming for SAGE, ultimately becoming a Computer Systems
Specialist.
In 1967 she left programming and moved to Portland, Oregon, where
during the late 1970s she did graduate work in anthropology focused on
the evolutionary significance of space colonization. Her first novel Enchantress
from the Stars, which deals with her views on how mature
extraterrestrial civilizations would view less advanced ones, was a
1971
Newbery Honor Book, winner of the Children’s Literature Association’s
1990 Phoenix Award given “from the perspective of time” to the best
book
for children published in the year 20 years prior to the award date,
and
a finalist for the 2002 Book Sense Book of the Year in the Rediscovery
category.
Her later novels are for older readers and the
2000 edition
of
her trilogy Children
of the Star was issued as adult SF. This trilogy is about the
difficulty of survival in a colony that lost most of its technology
after the destruction of its home world by natural disaster. The most
recent of her books to be republished is Journey
Between Worlds, a romance intended to interest teenage girls in
the
importance of colonizing Mars.
Sylvia has also
written nonfiction
for young people. Her 1974 book The
Planet-Girded
Suns: Man’s View of Other Solar Systems, dealt largely with the
history of belief in extraterrestrial intelligence; it is now out of
print but available free online. In
the 1970s she coauthored teen
books on
genetic engineering and particle physics, and recently she has edited
anthologies for high schools on Extraterrestrial
Life, Genetic
Engineering, and Cloning.
From 1985 to 1997 Sylvia was an online faculty and staff member of Connected
Education, Inc., one of the earliest organizations to offer
college-level online courses, where for several years she taught
“Science Fiction and Space Age Mythology”, a Media Studies course
dealing with pop-culture SF, for graduate credit from the New School
for
Social Research in New York. Her lecture
material for that course can be found at her website.
Among the
other things in the Space
section of her website are her essay “Space and Human
Survival”, which has been online since 1997 and has had over 30,000
visitors since the counter was added in 2000, and her large collection
of quotations dealing with why
humankind must expand into space. She now lives in Eugene, Oregon,
where
she continues to write.
Read Sylvia’s MySpace blog.
Listen to her on The Space Show,
and again on the The Space Show.
Listen to her on WCBN’s
Living Writers.
Read her interview with SFF World.
Read her
advice to aspiring writers.
Read her online
essays and short fiction.
Read her
Frequently Asked Questions.
Purchase
signed copies of her books!
