Kathryn H. Kidd

Kathryn H. Kidd was an American author best known within her own core readership for comedic novels about everyday life in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, including Paradise Vue and its sequel Return to Paradise, alongside children's books and, with her husband, the devotional guide A Convert's Guide to Mormon Life. That was the bulk of her career -- warm, observational comedy rooted in a specific community she knew from the inside, rather than genre fiction.

Her one detour into science fiction is also her most widely known book outside that readership: Lovelock (1994), co-written with Orson Scott Card, in which a genetically engineered, hyper-intelligent capuchin monkey becomes entangled in the ethics of colonizing and terraforming a new world -- and in his own uneasy claim to something like personhood. It was written as the opening volume of a planned Mayflower Trilogy that Card and Kidd never completed, so it stands today as a self-contained novel rather than part of a finished larger arc. Card himself wrote admiringly of her "natural humor" and her knack for building a whole community of quirky, specific people on the page, qualities that carried over from her Mormon-life comedies into this very different setting.

In this catalogue, Kidd is credited on Lovelock alone. She died in 2015 at age 65.