Elizabeth Moon

Elizabeth Moon is an American science-fiction and fantasy author and U.S. Marine Corps veteran whose own military service has informed much of her fiction, including her contribution to Anne McCaffrey's Planet Pirates trilogy. Planet Pirates grew out of a shared-universe experiment in which McCaffrey developed the trilogy's premise — interstellar piracy and a genetic-plague conspiracy threatening the Federation of Sentient Planets — then co-wrote each novel with a different collaborator; Moon co-wrote the opening volume, Sassinak, which follows a girl sold into slavery by pirates who grows up to become a decorated Fleet officer. Beyond her collaboration with McCaffrey, Moon is best known for her own extensive Vatta's War and Familias Regnant military science-fiction series, and for The Speed of Dark, a standalone novel narrated by an autistic man facing pressure to undergo an experimental treatment that would alter his cognition, which won the Nebula Award and is widely regarded as one of the most sensitively handled depictions of neurodivergence in genre fiction. Moon's military background gives her science fiction a level of tactical and organizational detail that distinguishes it within the genre, a quality that carried directly into her work co-writing Sassinak's military academy and command narrative for McCaffrey's shared universe.