Jody Lynn Nye

Jody Lynn Nye (born 1957) is an American science fiction writer.

She is the author or co-author of approximately forty published novels and more than 100 short stories.

She has specialized in science fiction or fantasy action novels and humor.

Her humorous series range from contemporary fantasy (The Magic Touch and Mythology 101) to military science fiction (Strong Arm Tactics and a new series beginning with View from the Imperium).

About one-third of her novels are collaborations, either as a co-author or as the author of a sequel.

Born 1957 in Chicago, Illinois, Nye says that she "always told stories" to her younger brothers, cousins, and friends, and as a junior camp counselor.

Anne McCaffrey inaugurated the long-running Pern series in 1967; Piers Anthony the long-running Xanth series in 1977.

ISFDB catalogs the four Crossroads Adventures as novels, the two Guides as reference books, and all six as contributions to the Pern and Xanth series.

McCaffrey alone wrote one Doona novel that was published in 1969.

McCaffrey alone wrote The Ship Who Sang, a collection published in 1969.

Asprin alone wrote 12 novels in the MythAdventures series that were published from 1978 to 2002.

McCaffrey alone wrote two Dinosaur Planet novels that were published in 1978 and 1984.

She and Elizabeth Moon inaugurated the Planet Pirates subseries in a novel that was published a few months before McCaffrey and Nye's.

Her first published writings were technical articles on broadcasting in the magazine "Video Action" during the 1980s.

She first wrote fiction for the "Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine game" and the Role-Aids line of game supplements published by Mayfair Games.

Late in the eighties Nye wrote six companion books for the Dragonriders of Pern series by Anne McCaffrey and the Magic of Xanth series by Piers Anthony.

The first four were "branching-path" gamebooks in the Crossroads Adventure series, two set on Pern and two in Xanth.

For the Pern guide, Nye explained in its introduction, her team (without Clouse) had visited McCaffrey two years earlier, for ten days during October 1987.

In the living room Nye, editor Bill Fawcett (Nye's husband), illustrator Hamilton, and McCaffrey's son Todd Johnson discussed Pern with its creator and Hamilton sketched under her direction.

They produced "a companion volume to her work, intended to help you visualize the setting and background for her chronicles."

Then simultaneously November 1989, Ballantine Books published The Dragonlover's Guide to Pern by Nye with McCaffrey and Avon Books published Piers Anthony's Visual Guide to Xanth by Nye and Anthony.

Todd Cameron Hamilton and James Clouse were the illustrators for both Guides, as Hamilton had been for Roger Zelazny's Visual Guide to Amber published by Avon one year earlier.

Before The Dragonlover's Guide was finished, McCaffrey and Nye were working together on a novel, presumably The Death of Sleep (1990) in the Planet Pirates trilogy.

In the early 1990s they collaborated in three series based on McCaffrey stories from the 1960s and 1970s.

Meanwhile, McCaffrey completed five more Pern books, after which they revised The Dragonlover's Guide.

Late in the 1990s Nye began work with Robert Asprin to extend the Myth Adventures series he had started in 1978.

She wrote three Ship novels in collaboration with three different women that were published in 1992 and 1993.

Nye began collaborating with Robert Lynn Asprin on the MythAdventures series in 2003 with the publication of the collection Myth-told Tales and the novel Myth Alliances.

She has been an instructor of the Fantasy Writing Workshop at Columbia College Chicago (2007) and she teaches the annual Science Fiction Writing Workshop at DragonCon.

Meanwhile, three of Nye's book series were "adrift" since Meisha Merlin Publishing went out of business in 2007.

Since Asprin's death in 2008 she has continued that humorous fantasy series and she is now also writing sequels to his Dragons, or Griffen McCandles, contemporary fantasy series.

In 2008 she donated her archive to the department of Rare Books and Special Collections at Northern Illinois University Libraries.

After his 2008 death she continued to write books they had planned.

Asprin alone wrote two novels in the Griffen McCandles series, published 2008 and 2009.

Among other projects, Nye is continuing to write the Myth Adventures series and her military SF/humor series begun with View from the Imperium (2011).