Michael Francis Flynn (born 1947) is an American statistician and science fiction author.
Nearly all of Flynn's work falls under the category of hard science fiction, although his treatment of it can be unusual since he has applied the rigor of hard science fiction to "softer" sciences such as sociology in works such as In the Country of the Blind. Much of his short fiction has appeared in Analog Science Fiction and Fact.
"The Forest of Time" charts, within the narrow confines of a 70-page novella, a whole world which could have been with its history and geography, culture and language ... a world where the Thirteen Colonies threw off the British rule but failed to unite, and developed into separate nation states. A world where Pennsylvania in the Twentieth Century is a nation speaking a German dialect, which often goes to war with its neighbors New York, Virginia and the Iroquois Confederation...
Firestar series
In 1996 he published the first of four near-future novels recording humanity's return to outer space. Firestar focuses on industrialist Mariesa van Huyten's obsession with funding a private space program, but follows a large cast of characters affected by her plans, including pilots, schoolchildren, and her teacher husband. This was one of several books that were published that year which found hope for the future not in government programs, but in private initiative. (Victor Koman's Kings of the High Frontier was another.)
Firestar also revealed Flynn as a serious history-builder: in one brief scene, the protagonist of In the Country of the Blind appears, tying the two stories together without fanfare.
The first two-thirds of Firestar conflict with our own recorded history (taking place in the "future" of the late 1990s), but should be considered future, rather than alternate, history.
The Wreck of the River of Stars
The Wreck of The River of Stars (2003) takes the story further into the future: by the late decades of the twenty-first century, the fusion drive has displaced the Magnetic sail, but on board the River of Stars - once a sailing luxury liner, now an obsolete, run down tramp freighter converted to fusion ... the "old sailors" hope for one more chance to show what they can do.
The January Dancer
A 2008 novel takes place several thousand years in the future, presumably advancing the same future history begun in previous works. Humanity has spread itself through two arms of the Milky Way Galaxy, and faster-than-light travel between stars is a rediscovered art following a recent dark age. When an alien artifact of subtle yet immense power is uncovered, rival factions vie to capture it and secure their vision of the future of humankind.
January Dancer is a finalist for the 2009 Prometheus Award
Up Jim River
This 2010 novel is a sequel to The January Dancer. As some readers of Flynn had suspected, both The January Dancer and Up Jim River are set in the Firestar universe, many thousands of years in the future.
Flynn's novel Eifelheim was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel and his novelette "Dawn, and Sunset, and the Colours of the Earth" was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novelette on March 29, 2007. The novella on which the novel was based was nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Novella in 1987.
In 1988, Flynn's novella "The Forest of Time" was also nominated for a Hugo Award. 1995 saw his story "Melodies of the Heart" nominated in the same category. He received a Hugo nomination for his novelette "The Clapping Hands of God."
Flynn has twice won the Prometheus Award, first for his novel In the Country of the Blind, and then for the novel Fallen Angels, co-written with Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, which also won the Seiun Award.
The story "House of Dreams" won a Theodore Sturgeon Award in 1998.
Michael Flynn was the first author winner of the Robert A. Heinlein Medal, a lifetime achievement award given by the Heinlein Society on the advice of its Awards Committee (Dr. Yoji Kondo, Chairman). Other Heinlein Medal winners include Greg Bear, Larry Niven, and Jerry Pournelle.
