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Wolverton, Dave

(1957-2022) US author who also wrote as David Farland, and who began publishing work of genre interest with "The Sky Is an Open Highway" in The Leading Edge for Fall 1985. He began to enter literary contests in that year, winning a few small competitions and then the Best of the Year award in the Writers of the Future Contest for 1986, with "On My Way to Paradise", which appeared in L Ron Hubbard's Writers of the Future, Volume III (anth 1987). This novella was the basis for his first novel, On My Way to Paradise (1989), a thoughtful but violent tale in which a Latin-American mercenary force is conscripted to fight for a conservative Japanese colony on another planet. It is packed with sociobiological speculation, and veers interestingly between Heinlein-esque and Cyberpunk scenarios, and is not altogether accepting of the Libertarian ideas which in part it dramatizes; it was runner-up in 1990 for the Philip K Dick Award.

Wolverton's first series, the Anee sequence comprising Serpent Catch (1991) and Path of the Hero (1993) confirmed him as belonging to the central extrapolative tradition of sf. Big and almost over-packed like its predecessor, the first volume is set on a Terraformed moon of a Gas Giant, whose continents are separated by eco-barriers, part of an experiment in closed environments and reconstructed geological eras. Genetically Engineered human scientists are driven from space by advanced aliens and forced down into the gigantic Zoo they have created, which has been designed to recreate extinct Terran species and preserve them; as the eco-barriers break down, interactions amongst the keepers and the kept ramify complexly (the future meeting the past) with Neanderthals and other prehumans, Dinosaurs, sea-serpents and so on, jostling furiously with each other. The protagonist of the second volume is half-human, half-Neanderthal, and must save his village. His next series – the Golden Queen sequence comprising The Golden Queen (1994) and Beyond the Gate (1995), both assembled as Worlds of the Golden Queen (omni 2005), all as by David Farland, plus Lords of the Seventh Swarm (1997) under his own name – is a wide-reaching Space Opera set in a human-dominated Galactic Empire whose Empress, a secret Clone of her murdered avatar, must attempt to preserve the status quo; she is soon replaced by a human orphan. The usual devices of this sort of tale – portals, evolving Weapons, immortal foes (see Immortality). Hive-Mind Alien races bent on universal conquest – are intriguingly mixed.

From around this point, Wolverton's career broke into three distinct concentrations. First, mostly as Farland, he wrote fantasy – most successfully with the ambitious Runelords sequence beginning with The Sum of All Men (1998; vt The Runelords 1998) and developing an ingeniously immoral system of Magic evidently rooted in Role Playing Games, whereby various abilities and characteristics may be transferred from often unwilling donors as "endowments" of strength, wit, charisma and so forth: characters with significant Superpowers depend on whole hospital wards of their variously debilitated but still living donors of attributes. The ninth Runelords volume, «A Tale of Tales», was first announced for 2012 but remains unpublished. Second, under his own name Wolverton published a number of Star Wars Ties beginning with The Courtship of Princess Leia (1994). Third, his initial involvement with the Writers of the Future Contest continued and deepened with the partial retirement of A J Budrys in 1991. Wolverton co-edited Writers of the Future Volume VIII (anth 1992) with Budrys; and then edited solo Writers of the Future Volume IX (anth 1993) and all subsequent volumes up to #37 in 2021 (using the David Farland pseudonym from #31 in 2015 onward); the series continued with other editors, initially Jody Lynn Nye and Dean Wesley Smith. An estimable portion of the stories to date were of professional quality. A Very Strange Trip (1999) with L Ron Hubbard is a novel based on the dead leader's notes. [PN/JC/DRL]

John David Wolverton

born Springfield, Oregon: 15 May 1957

died St George, Utah: 14 January 2022

works

series

Anee

Serpent Catch (reworked series)

Golden Queen

Star Wars

Star Wars Missions

Star Wars: Jedi Apprentice

Star Wars Episode 1 Adventures (highly selected; gamebooks are excluded)

The Runelords

The Mummy Chronicles

Ravenspell

individual titles

collections and stories

works as editor

series

Writers of the Future

individual titles as editor

links

Entry from The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (2011-current) edited by John Clute and David Langford.
Accessed 04:22 am on 14 January 2025.
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