Stephen Michael Stirling (born September 30, 1953) is a Canadian-American author of Alternate History and Military Science Fiction.
Themes in his work include the effect of culture on individual morality, the effect of technology on culture, and ... well, let's just say there's a reason one of his Fan Nicknames is "S&M Stirling".
Was once a member of the AlternateHistory.com forum (he was banned
), and its predecessor on Usenet, soc.history.what-if.
Works by S. M. Stirling include:
- Conan the Barbarian: staring in 2022 Stirling has been commissioned to write new adventures of the character.
- The Draka series, describing an Alternate History in which a melting-pot society of the losers from several wars forms itself into an Evil Empire and conquers the entire world.
- Emberverse series, in which a mysterious phenomenonnote renders inoperable all technology on Earth, leaving humanity to survive (or not) without it.
- The Flight Engineer trilogy, co-written with James Doohan, a Star Trek-influenced Military Science Fiction series.
- The General Series, co-written with David Drake, a future history inspired the actual history of 5th-century Byzantium.
- Island in the Sea of Time (Series), in which a mysterious phenomenon transports the island of Nantucket from modern times into the Bronze Age.
- The Lords of Creation series, in which the space probes of the 1960s discovered that the Planetary Romances were right all along: Mars and Venus are habitable, and inhabited by Humanoid Aliens. And dinosaurs.
- The Peshawar Lancers, stand-alone novel in which a series of comet strikes in the 19th century destroyed much of Europe and North America, and what's left of the British Empire is ruled from India.
- Two novels in The Ship Who... series
- The Shadowspawn, about an Always Chaotic Evil evolutionary offshoot of humanity that is the source of both the vampire and werewolf, and more generally every monster legend.
- The Black Chamber series, an Alternate History spy thriller with a re-elected Theodore Roosevelt led progressive America facing off against Imperial Germany and Japan.
- The T2 Trilogy, a tie-in series of sequel novels to Terminator 2: Judgment Day, exploring the ongoing struggles of the Connors after the film.
His writing provides examples of the following tropes:
- Author Filibuster: Averted, at least according to him. His standalone novel Conquistador contains a response to criticism of The Draka that reads, "There is a technical term for someone who confuses the opinions of a character in a book with those of the author. That term is idiot." (He has variously attributed the line to Larry Niven and Robert A. Heinlein.)
