Steve Perry

Steve Perry was born August 31, 1947, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and worked a string of jobs -- swimming instructor, lifeguard, martial arts instructor, private investigator, and nurse -- before becoming a full-time writer. Over five decades he published more than fifty novels and numerous short stories, moving comfortably between original science fiction and franchise fiction. He is also a longtime practitioner of Silat, an Indonesian martial art, and its movement and philosophy visibly shaped the fighting systems he invented for his fiction.

Perry's own Matador series, launched in the 1980s, follows a covert operative fighting a corrupt interstellar government, and remains the fullest expression of his original science fiction. He also wrote Conan and Aliens tie-in novels and contributed television scripts, including an Emmy-nominated episode of Batman: The Animated Series.

He is best known to media-tie-in readers for two franchise runs. In the Star Wars expanded universe, he wrote Shadows of the Empire (1996), a bestseller that filled the story gap between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, plus the Death Star novel (with Michael Reaves) and the MedStar duology. In the Tom Clancy universe created with Steve Pieczenik, Perry wrote the original run of Tom Clancy's Net Force, a near-future thriller series about an FBI cybercrime unit, with several entries reaching the New York Times bestseller list before the series was later continued by Jerome Preisler.