Michael A. Stackpole

"I should have known the minute Mike Stackpole was invited into the Star Wars universe that there was going to be trouble."

―Timothy Zahn^[src]

Michael A. Stackpole (born November 27, 1957) is a science-fiction and fantasy author. He has written I, Jedi, the Dark Tide Duology and half of the X-Wing book series. He also wrote the short stories Missed Chance and Elusion Illusion. Stackpole co-wrote the short story Side Trip and comic Star Wars: Mara Jade – By the Emperor's Hand with another fan-favorite author, Timothy Zahn.

Stackpole created the popular characters of Soontir Fel and Corran Horn. He agreed to pose as the latter for the Star Wars Customizable Card Game, despite all other depictions of the character bearing no resemblance to him.

Biography[edit | edit source]

From 1977 on, he worked as a designer of role-playing games for various gaming companies, and wrote dozens of magazine articles for the industry. During this time, in response to the accusations of Patricia Pulling and a few others who felt that the "occult" elements of Dungeons & Dragons were driving people to Satanism, murder and suicide, perhaps even as part of a vast Satanic ritual abuse conspiracy, Stackpole did a research study on all American legal cases where injury or death had been attributed to gaming, and found that not only were the links to gaming very weak, but that even if all of the reports had been valid, they showed that gamers were violent or suicidal far less often than the general public (see External links below).

In the 1980s, Stackpole began designing computer games for Coleco and then Interplay Productions. The best known was Bard's Tale III.

In 1986 Stackpole wrote his first novel, the fantasy story Talion: Revenant. However, the manuscript would not be published until 1997 by Bantam Books. His editors believed that a 175,000 word book was too long for an unknown author and that the story wasn't particularly engaging. The story remained unpublished for the next 11 years until reworked by Stackpole's editor, Anne Lesley Groell. Stackpole clarifies these issues himself in the afterword of the published version of Talion.

In 1987 he began writing novels set in the BattleTech universe for FASA, and became one of the most popular authors in that genre. Some of his Battletech books were used as the source for a televised animated series.

Based on his popularity in fan fiction, he was selected to write several novels in the Star Wars universe for Bantam Books.

In addition, he has written several novels and short stories with original settings. One of his recent series is the DragonCrown War Cycle. These books attempt to break fantasy conventions, including the introduction of firearms in a fantasy setting which is not universally considered a positive advancement.

On March 21, 2008, the main-belt asteroid 165612 was named Stackpole in his honor.^[1]