Author's imagination reaches outer limits
Pelland in running for writers award
Jennifer Pelland has prevented genetics from going haywire, built bubble cities to deter solar mutations in the human race, and created future societies for those who have been affected by global warming.
The 38-year-old science-fiction writer also has been nominated for this year's Nebula Award, presented by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, for her short story "Captive Girl."
Over the past eight years Pelland has published around 30 stories and written two novels. A collection of her short stories, "Unwelcome Bodies," was released by Apex last month.
"In some stories I invent everything," said Pelland, who lives in Waltham. "Others require research."
Pelland belongs to a science-fiction and fantasy writers group that meets monthly to discuss the classics and their personal projects. "It could be anything from the high fantasy of 'Lord of the Rings' to the work of Neil Gaiman," Pelland said.
Pelland grew up in Springfield on a diet of "Creature Feature" films and science-fiction novels that she would fish out of her father's collection.
"Star Wars" was the first full-price feature film that she attended with her family. The movie, she said, "blew the walls out of my mind," and she mentally wrote herself into the script.
An academic whiz in elementary school, Pelland skipped half of second grade and was pushed ahead. In retrospect, she said, it wasn't the best move for her social life.
"I lost track of how to interact with human beings until high school," said Pelland.
By then she fell in with the drama club but never gave up watching "Dr. Who," a British science-fiction series that began airing on television in 1963.
Pelland attended Wellesley College and a month after arriving connected with members of the Society for Creative Anachronism, an international organization dedicated to researching and re-creating the arts, skills, and traditions of pre-17th-century Europe. Pelland met her husband in 1987 at a medieval dance at MIT.
After graduating from Wellesley, she landed a job with an organization that promoted international educational exchange between Latin America and the United States.
During that period, Pelland spent a fair amount of time online with fan-fiction communities, focusing on expanding stories and characters created by favorite authors.
She was an editor for a "Star Trek" newsletter and traveled to conventions. "It was fun, but it was always someone else's creativity," said Pelland.
By the age of 30, Pelland was working on college textbooks for the publishing house Addison-Wesley, and questioning why she was spending so much of her free time on other people's science-fiction stories. So she set out to make a few life changes.
Pelland began writing original pieces.
As she became more successful, she decided to share what she learned about science-fiction writing and launched jenniferpelland.com, which offers advice to aspiring and frustrated writers. The site also contains a blog that tracks her writing career.
Pelland's day job now is as a senior translations project manager at Integrity Interactive, a Waltham company that produces online corporate ethics training in 40 languages.
She said the training has covered material as granular as European chemical company regulations and as broad as antitrust and money-laundering laws.
But her real love remains science fiction.
