Barry B. Longyear

Barry B. Longyear
Longyear in 2009
Born	Barry Brookes Longyear (1942-05-12) May 12, 1942 Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Period	1990–present
Genre	Science fiction
Notable works	Enemy Mine (1979) Sea of Glass (1987) Circus World (1980)
Notable awards	Hugo Award, Prometheus Award, Nebula, John W. Campbell Award, Analog

Barry Brookes Longyear (born May 12, 1942) is an American author who resides in New Sharon, Maine.

Career

Born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Longyear is known best for the Hugo- and Nebula Award–winning novella Enemy Mine (1979, Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine), which was subsequently made into an identically titled movie (1985) and a novelization in collaboration with David Gerrold. The story is of an encounter between a human and an alien soldier, whose races are at war. They are marooned together in space and have to come to overcome their mutual distrust in order to cooperate and survive. A greatly expanded version of the original novella as well as two novels completing the trilogy, The Tomorrow Testament and The Last Enemy, are gathered with additional materials into The Enemy Papers.

The novella helped Longyear to win the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1980. He was the only writer to win the Hugo, Nebula, and Campbell awards during the same year until this was matched by Rebecca Roanhorse in 2018.

He also wrote the series Circus World and Infinity Hold, several stand-alone novels, numerous short stories, and two books for the Alien Nation novelization series. His trilogy "Infinity Hold", "Kill All the Lawyers", and "Keep the Law", was released during 2002 in a single paperback volume titled Infinity Hold 3 by the Author's Guild in a Backinprint.com edition. His recent Jaggers & Shad mystery stories, featuring two detectives in the Artificial Beings Crimes Division (Devon Office), are set mostly in Exeter and the surrounding Devon countryside and villages. The first of the tales, The Good Kill won the Analog AnLab award for Best Novella in 2006 and Murder in Parliament Street won the same award for 2007. The Hook won the 2021 Prometheus Award.

The series Circus World chronicles the adventures of a space-going circus troupe whose spaceship crashes, marooning them on a deserted planet without contact with the outside world.

The series Infinity Hold concerns a society developing from a group of violent convicts dumped on a new planet without police or government.

Saint Mary Blue is a novel about the course of treatment of a man who has substance abuse and mental health problems, while resident in a treatment facility.

The God Box is a stand-alone fantasy novel with a protagonist who finds himself the keeper of a small wooden box that provides cryptic guidance from the gods. He must stay ahead of a deadly manhunt and play his role in an ancient prophecy. The box, if asked, takes what he does not need, and gives him what he does need—but what he needs and what he thinks he needs are usually very different. This lends itself to humorous and unexpected situations.

Longyear has also written a mystery series, The Hangman's Son trilogy (2011) and Rope Paper Scissors (2013), all featuring Joe Torio.

Published works

Stand-alone novels

• Sea of Glass (1987) ISBN 978-0595189656
• Naked Came the Robot (1988) ISBN 978-0595200689
• The God Box (1989) ISBN 978-0595121151
• The Homecoming (1989) ISBN 978-0802768636
• Jaggers & Shad: ABC Is for Artificial Beings Crimes (2010) ISBN 978-0615469560

Enemy Mine series

1. Enemy Mine (Asimov's Science Fiction, Sep 1979; 1980 Hugo, Nebula & Locus winner) ISBN 978-0595309764
2. The Tomorrow Testament (1983) ISBN 978-0595189663
3. The Last Enemy (1997) ISBN 978-0595348756
4. Collected in The Enemy Papers with additional material (1998) ISBN 1-56865-949-0

Infinity Hold series

1. Infinity Hold 1989 ISBN 978-0595092741
2. Infinity Hold\3 2002 (The complete Infinity Hold trilogy: Infinity Hold, Kill All the Lawyers, and Keep the Law)

Circus World series

1. Circus World (1980) ISBN 978-0595189670
2. City of Baraboo (1980) ISBN 978-0595121205
3. Elephant Song (1981) ISBN 978-0595121182

Recovery works

1. Saint Mary Blue (novel set in a treatment facility), SteelDragon Press, 1988 ISBN 978-0595138852
2. Yesterday's Tomorrow: Recovery Meditations for Hard Cases, Hazelden, 1997 ISBN 978-1568381602
3. "The Monopoly Man" (Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, January 2009)

Writing instruction

1. Science Fiction Writer's Workshop-I ISBN 978-0595225538
2. The Write Stuff Online Writing Seminar

Short story collections

1. Manifest Destiny (including "Enemy Mine" and others in the same future history) ISBN 978-0425045305
2. It Came from Schenectady ISBN 978-0595201723

External links

• Official website
• Barry B. Longyear at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database