Science Fiction Writer
ROBERT J. SAWYER
Hugo and Nebula Winner

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Kingsbury, Donald (MacDonald), American-born Canadian, born 12 February 1929

Kingsbury was born in San Francisco, but moved to Montreal in 1948, before making his first SF sale. Until his retirement, he lectured in mathematics at McGill University. A hard-SF writer, Kingsbury is noted for his boosterism of space exploration, and his oh-so-competent engineer heroes. All his short fiction has appeared in Astounding/Analog: "The Ghost Town" (June 1952), "Shipwright" (twenty-six years later, in April 1978), "To Bring in the Steel" (July 1978), and the Hugo-nominated "The Moon Goddess and the Son" (December 1979). Terry Carr reprinted the latter three stories in his The Best Science Fiction of the Year anthologies. The version of "Shipwright" appearing there is the original, unexpurgated text; Analog had run a less-racy version. [In 1995, Kingsbury published the novella "Historical Crisis" as a riff on Isaac Asimov's Foundation series.]

In 1982, Analog serialized Kingsbury's first novel, Courtship Rite, a sweeping saga of an energy-poor planet where multiple marriages are the norm and cannibalism is a sacred ritual. Courtship Rite, often compared to Frank Herbert's Dune for its depth of world-building and its concern with ecological themes, was a Hugo nominee. It won the Compton Crook Memorial Award for Best First Novel of the Year. In the United Kingdom, the novel was published as Geta, the name of Kingsbury's planet.

Kingsbury's second novel, an expanded version of The Moon Goddess and the Son, appeared in 1986. His third novel, The Survivor, appeared as the bulk of the shared-world anthology Man-Kzin Wars IV in 1991. [His fourth novel, Psychohistorical Crisis, winner of the Prometheus Award, expanded from the novella "Historical Crisis," was published by Tor in 2001.]

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