Bio: Formerly a research chemist who worked for a pharmaceutical company, Mary Ann Steele grew tired both of the corporate culture and the crowded East. She moved to a small town in Wyoming where she taught physics, chemistry, geology and astronomy in the local public secondary school for seven years. She and her husband, a local rancher, have two sons. When the first child arrived, Mary Ann ceased teaching, so as to be home when her sons got off the school bus. When the boys grew older, she created and taught a popular hands-on science program for the third, fourth and fifth graders in the same rural school district in which she had taught earlier. Living with her husband on a small, family-owned cattle ranch, the author now divides her time between ranch work and writing.
Over a fifteen-year-long span, Mary Ann wrote nine futuristic novels: a series of narratives in which many of the characters keep reappearing. Those nine books form an ongoing saga of character-driven action, adventure and romance. Although each novel stands alone, Mary Ann wrote them simultaneously, not sequentially, in a sustained burst of creative effort that bordered on obsession. At times, she admits wryly, the characters seemed more real to her than her neighbors.
The personalities of the major characters grow in depth and complexity as the saga unfolds. Two mutually hostile worlds populated by the descendents of spacefaring, Earth-born, galactic pioneers form the setting. Although a wealth of research went into the creation of the imagined technology, the science remains muted. The stories focus on the interactions among a host of purely imaginary personalities living action-filled lives in a fictional, futuristic realm.
