About the Author
DIANE DUANE was born in Manhattan in 1952, a Year of the Dragon. She was raised in the New York City suburbs, on the south shore of Nassau County on Long Island, where all through her childhood she wrote to amuse herself. In high school she won a New York State Board of Regents Science and Nursing scholarship, and her first studies in college were toward a degree in astrophysics. A total inability to handle calculus and other higher math drove her instead into the arms of the biological sciences, and she used the nursing half of her scholarship to attend Pilgrim State Hospital School of Nursing on Long Island, from which she graduated in 1974 as a registered nurse with an honors specialty in psychiatry. She spent the next two years practicing the art at Payne Whitney Clinic of New York Hospital.
Feeling the need for a change of pace, she spent the next couple of years working as assistant to television and science fiction writer David Gerrold. During this period she wrote her first novel, The Door into Fire, which saw print for the first time in 1979. One book led to another, as so often happens, and since then she has written more than thirty novels, various comics and computer games, and fifty or sixty animated and live-action screenplays for characters as widely assorted as Batman, Jean-Luc Picard, Siegfried the Volsung, and Scooby-Doo.
Together with her husband of fifteen years, Northern Irish-born novelist and screenwriter Peter Morwood, she lives in a townland in the far west of County Wicklow in Ireland, in company with three cats and four seriously overworked computers-an odd but congenial environment for the staging of space battles and the leisurely pursuit of total galactic domination. She gardens (weeding, mostly), collects recipes and cookbooks, manages the Owl Springs Partnership's website, dabbles in astronomy, language studies, computer graphics, and fractals, and tries to find ways to make enough time to just lie around and watch anime.