Born as Mars turned direct in June 1984, Maureen Avis has always lived between two worlds. The daughter of a jazz musician father and a theoretical physicist mother, she grew up with one foot in the rhythmic soul of the past and the other in the cold, bright stars of the future.
Maureen is the author of The Mayfly Mutiny, the first in a series of dystopian novels that pay homage to the science fiction writers who shaped her imagination, from Jules Verne to Isaac Asimov. Her work often explores the hidden fractures of the human experience, a theme she carries with her literally. Above her left eye lies a faint, jagged reminder of a childhood winter in Chicago: a scar earned from a rock-laden snowball. Today, it is partly masked by a silver bar piercing, which Maureen calls "an act of terraforming my own history."
She went to England as a student, intending to stay a year, and came home with the spelling, the vocabulary and, according to her mother, the accent. None of it has worn off since. Maureen now divides her time between Seattle and wherever the work takes her, writing speculative fiction with one eye on the stars and the other on the cracks running through life here on Earth.