Melissa Scott

One could say that well-known author Melissa E. Scott ’81 fell into science-fiction writing.

Scott first encountered the genre after a gym-class incident that left her with a broken arm and a gig as a library monitor.

“I’m not the world’s most coordinated human being,” she says.

A precocious child who learned to read at three, Scott recounts becoming immersed in thrillers while at the library.

“From then on, I was pretty much hooked,” Scott says.

Scott, a native of Little Rock, Ark., went on to become a pioneer of gay and lesbian fiction who has written 20 science fiction and fantasy novels so far.

A consistent theme of Scott’s novels is how society defines a person, who gets to set the definition, and how people shape their mental landscape.

Fellow science-fiction writer and close friend Susanna J. Sturgis says, “Melissa manages to pull together an array of strong influences, some of them apparently contradictory, like military history, theater, costuming, music, not to mention being an Arkansan in New England, a lesbian in a straight world, a science-fiction writer in the gay and lesbian world.”

Scott says she draws inspiration for her books from “pretty much anywhere and anything.”

Anne Fausto-Sterling’s essay “The Five Sexes: Why Male and Female Are Not Enough” galvanized Scott to write “Shadow Man,” of which the premise is that there are human beings who have mutated into seven sexes. One of the planets in the book only recognizes the male and female sexes.

Scott says she identifies with all of her characters—sometimes in ways she doesn’t realize immediately. Scott recalls a recent writing workshop she gave at her old high school. At the event, a student asked her if she had ever used her writing to work out an emotional issue. Although her first instinct was to say “no,” Scott realized at that moment that the relationship between two characters in one of her books, “Burning Bright,” was similar to the one between she and her friend, who died of AIDS.

“You can’t not identify with the character and write them well,” Scott says.

Don Sakers, author of science-fiction novels such as “Dance for the Ivory Madonna,” writes in an e-mail that he is fond of the endless mornings sitting in Scott’s kitchen brainstorming ideas for science-fiction stories.

“We would start with an outlandish idea—such as, what if there were an alien race whose life cycle literally followed Freudian psychology?—and beat it back and forth in a sort of verbal volleyball, going off on tangents, adding new ideas and different points of view, ranging over everything from history to chemistry to religion.”

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

Scott’s interest in identity blossomed at Harvard, where she says she found the diversity she had been looking for.

“She had lots of bright friends [in Arkansas] but [at Harvard] the whole atmosphere wasn’t all about football and parties like other high schools in the South are,” says Scott’s mother, Elaine.

As an undergraduate, Scott lived in Canaday Hall and Leverett House and concentrated in history.

“The thing I loved most about Harvard were the classes and the sheer availability of libraries. I loved that I could take such obscure and interesting subjects taught by people who spent their lives studying those subjects,” she says.

Scott, who was on the junior varsity fencing team, suspects that her freshman dormmates were assigned to Canaday according to their first names. She says, “On my floor we had two Lisas, a Louisa and a Melissa. Downstairs we had John, John, Jim, and Joe, all Jewish. Across the firedoor were Andy, Andy, Steve, and Steve. There were rooms like this all over Canaday.”

When she was an upperclassman, Scott met her future life partner and literary collaborator, Lisa A. Barnett, who attended the University of Massachusetts in Boston. The pair has co-written three fantasy-mystery novels—“Point of Hopes”, “Point of Dreams” and “The Armor of Light”—as well as a short story called “The Carmen Miranda Gambit.”

Barnett died this May from breast cancer that spread to her brain.

“What a rare and wonderful partnership they had,” Sturgis says. “It just crackled with energy—they inspired not only each other but all of us who were lucky enough to be in the vicinity.”

Scott says that she and Barnett had planned two more books in the “Point” series, which Scott will write once she can pen Barnett’s characters with a “lighter hand.”

STRING THEORY

For Scott, writing is but one of her many passions.

Scott was once part of a band, now broken up. She calls her group a “sub-basement band” since she says they were not good enough for a garage. Her band’s dream was to play in the Elvis Room, where they only needed 20 minutes of music to get a gig.

“We never got 20 minutes. We didn’t even have a bass player or a singer,” she says.

Knitting is another passion of hers. During the past winter, Scott participated in the Olympics’ knitting competition. Knitting Olympians chose a project that was “an achievable challenge” that they began at opening ceremonies and had to complete by the time the Olympic flame is extinguished.

Her late partner’s mother taught her to knit, Scott says.

“There’s a great deal of pleasure when working with yarn; it ends up being something more than a pile of paper. There’s a whole world inside a book, but its pages are not terribly satisfying to fondle.”

—Staff writer Doris A. Hernandez at dahernan@fas.harvard.edu.