Mary Rosenblum

• Date of birth: June 27, 1952
• Place of birth: Levittown, New York
• Date of death: March 11, 2018
• Place of death: La Center, Washington

Biography

Mary Rosenblum was born Mary Freeman in Levittown, New York, in 1952 but grew up in Allison Park, Pennsylvania, a small suburb of Pittsburgh. She was an avid reader during her childhood, and at the age of thirteen she discovered a library of Galaxy and Astounding Science Fiction magazines during a vacation with her cousins. The discovery led her to fall in love with science fiction, although she could not identify with the male adolescent readership at which the mid-twentieth-century science-fiction magazines were aimed. She became a writer because she yearned to retell the stories with female protagonists.

Rosenblum enrolled at Reed College in 1970 and earned a bachelor's degree in biology in 1975. After graduation, she performed biomedical and biological research and worked at the Oregon Primate Center. She married fellow Reed alumnus Charles Rosenblum, with whom she had two sons before divorcing.

As she began reading more current fiction, she discovered female science-fiction writers whose works contained more believable female characters. Her online autobiography mentions James Tiptree Jr. (the pseudonym of Alice Sheldon), Ursula K. LeGuin, and Vonda McIntyre as particularly influential. After Sheldon’s premature death, Rosenblum learned that she had met the author, who was her aunt Frances’s friend.

Like many science-fiction fans, Rosenblum wrote fiction for years before submitting any for publication. She finally took the plunge in 1988, sending a short story to Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact magazine. The story was rejected for its weak ending, but the editor, Stan Schmidt, liked it enough to recommend her to the Clarion West Writer’s Workshop in Seattle, a science-fiction writers’ seminar which connects the best seasoned writers in the genre with promising new writers in order to develop their talent. One of her mentors at the six-week workshop, Gardner Dozois, bought “Second Chance,” a short story she wrote there.

“Second Chance” would not appear in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction until December, 1992, but the sale opened doors, and in June, 1990, Rosenblum’s “For a Price” was published in that magazine. During the next decade, she sold an average of four stories a year. In 1996, her novella, Gas Fish, won Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction readers’ poll and was nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, San Francisco Chronicle, and Homer Awards.

In 1993, Rosenblum published her first novels, the Compton Crook Award–winning The Drylands, a story of a drought in the Pacific Northwest that produces psychic mutations, and Chimera, a cyberspace thriller about a young woman who saves the life of a man whom mysterious and powerful people wanted dead. The Baltimore Science Fiction Society recognized Rosenblum's debut novel with its 1994 Compton Crook Award. In The Stone Garden (1994), artists in the asteroid belt sculpt whole asteroids into works of art, but something makes these sculptures peculiarly receptive to human emotion and no one is sure what they really are. In Horizons (2006), Rosenblum explores life in “platforms,” cities in Earth’s orbit that struggle for independence from the World Council. Richly varied in type and style, Rosenblum’s fiction presents believable characters for whom a reader can care and is worthy of the classic magazine fiction that hooked her on the genre.

In the late 1990s, Rosenblum turned to the mystery genre with a series of novels about landscaper-turned-detective Rachel O'Connor. The quartet—Devil's Trumpet (1999), Deadly Nightshade (1999), Bleeding Heart (2000), and Garden View (2002)—was published under her maiden name. Rosenblum also two short-story collections, Synthesis and Other Realities (1996) and Water Rites (2007).

In addition to writing fiction, Rosenblum taught, provided freelance editorial services, gardened, raised livestock, trained dogs, and produced cheeses. The Clarion West graduate returned to the program in 2008 and 2012 as an instructor.

A licensed pilot from 2010, Rosenblum became an aviation enthusiast and safety advocate, serving as president of the Oregon Pilots Association for a time. She died prematurely in a small-plane crash on March 11, 2018, in La Center, Washington, at the age of sixty-five.

Bibliography

Bailey, Everton, Jr. "Pilot Killed in Crash Was Accomplished Author, Fixture in Oregon Aviation Community." The Oregonian/OregonLive, 13 Mar. 2018, www.oregonlive.com/clark-county/index.ssf/2018/03/pilot‗killed‗in‗crash‗was‗acco.html. Accessed 20 Nov. 2018.

"In Memoriam: Mary Freeman Rosenblum '74." Reed Magazine, Sept. 2018, www.reed.edu/reed-magazine/in-memoriam/obituaries/2018/mary-freeman-rosenblum-1974.html. Accessed 20 Nov. 2018.

"In Memoriam - Mary Rosenblum." SFWA, Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America, 12 Mar. 2018, www.sfwa.org/2018/03/in-memoriam-mary-rosenblum. Accessed 20 Nov. 2018.

Rosenblum, Mary. "Author Spotlight: Mary Rosenblum." Interview by Robyn Lupo. Lightspeed Magazine, no. 22, Mar. 2012, www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-mary-rosenblum. Accessed 20 Nov. 2018.

Sclair, Ben. "Godspeed Mary Rosenblum." General Aviation News, 9 Apr. 2018, generalaviationnews.com/2018/04/09/godspeed-mary-rosenblum. Accessed 20 Nov. 2018.