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| Steve Miller | |
Steve Miller, who, with co-author and wife Sharon Lee, wrote more than 30 novels, including 20 in their Liaden Universe series, died February 20, File 770 reported. He was 73. Announcing his death on the pair's website, Lee noted: "We had known his health was failing, and he told me a couple months ago that he'd written an obit. I found it on his computer last night."
Miller wrote that in pursuing his life-long interest in writing and science fiction, he attended the Clarion West writing workshop in 1973 where he studied with genre greats Peter Beagle, James Sallis, Harlan Ellison, Terry Carr, Vonda McIntyre, Ursula LeGuin, and Joanna Russ, shortly after which he joined the University of Maryland Baltimore County's Albin O. Kuhn Library staff as the founding Curator of Science Fiction. Following his stint as a library curator, he worked as a freelance writer for many Baltimore region weekly and monthly newspapers.
In 1978, he and Lee declared themselves partners in life and in writing, Miller wrote in his obituary, adding: "In the next while they opened Dreams Garth and Book Castle, a science fiction themed used bookstore and art gallery business. They married in November 1980, and moved from Maryland to Skowhegan, Maine, in October 1988 after the publication of their first joint novel, Agent of Change, the first in what was to become a long series of space opera novels and stories set in their original Liaden Universe. In 1992, they moved to Winslow; and to Waterville in 2018."
After the move to Maine, Miller continued to pursue his writing career and also became increasingly involved in computers, starting Circular Logic BBS, which became one of the state's largest independent BBS systems, and joining the Oakland Public Library as children's librarian and IT specialist, a part-time position. He eventually became internet librarian for Unimation, a startup in Unity that folded in 1995 during the dotcom winnowing. After that he transitioned to publisher and writer, a career he continued until his death.
Last summer, the Portland Press Herald profiled Miller and Lee, noting that they "still write science fiction novels together, but with the luxury of time and space. Both write full-time and each have their own writing office, at opposite ends of their ranch house in Waterville. Nowadays, they sometimes leave finished pages on the dining room table for the other to read over. They've collaborated on some 100 stories and books over the years, including 25 novels in the popular Liaden Universe series," the most recent of which, Salvage Right, had just been published.
In 2012, they won the Edward E. Smith Memorial Award for Imaginative Fiction--also known as the Skylark--given by the New England Science Fiction Association to writers who have "contributed significantly to science fiction" both through their work and their personalities.
The co-authors told the Press Herald that one of the reasons their writing collaboration had worked so well was that neither was concerned with getting credit for a well-written chapter or particularly imaginative plot twist. "I think what helps keep our process, and therefore our marriage, relatively peaceful is that we're each committed to achieving a correct outcome," said Lee. "The story has to be right. The story isn't about me, and it isn't about Steve. It's about the characters who live in the book."