S.M. Stirling - Stephen Michael Stirling - is a Canadian-American author of science fiction and, above all, alternate history, one of the most prolific and inventive practitioners of the form.
Born on a Royal Canadian Air Force base in France in 1953 to an English mother and a Canadian father, and a former lawyer and keen amateur historian, he has lived in many countries and now writes from the American Southwest. History - how it might have turned, and how people rebuild when it breaks - is his abiding subject.
His best-known work, the Emberverse or 'Change' series, begins with Dies the Fire, in which every modern technology abruptly and permanently stops working and the survivors must remake civilisation with muscle, blade and bow. In the Nantucket books, opening with Island in the Sea of Time, the island is hurled back to the Bronze Age, while his earlier Draka novels imagine, unsparingly, an alternate history dominated by a ruthless militaristic state. His debut, Snowbrother, launched the Fifth Millennium sequence and its warrior heroine Shkai'ra.
Across dozens of novels he is known for strong protagonists, dense world-building and a historian's delight in cause and consequence.
