| Barry B. Longyear | |
| Birth Name: | Barry Brookes Longyear |
| Birth Date: | 12 May 1942 |
| Birth Place: | Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, U.S. |
| Period: | 1990–present |
| Genre: | Science fiction |
| Awards: | Hugo Award, Prometheus Award, Nebula, John W. Campbell Award, Analog |
Barry Brookes Longyear (born May 12, 1942[1]) is an American author who resides in New Sharon, Maine.[2]
Born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania,[1] Longyear is known best for the Hugo- and Nebula Award–winning novella Enemy Mine (1979, Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine), which was subsequently made into an identically titled movie (1985) and a novelization in collaboration with David Gerrold. The story is of an encounter between a human and an alien soldier, whose races are at war. They are marooned together in space and have to come to overcome their mutual distrust in order to cooperate and survive. A greatly expanded version of the original novella as well as two novels completing the trilogy, The Tomorrow Testament and The Last Enemy, are gathered with additional materials into The Enemy Papers.
The novella helped Longyear to win the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1980. He was the only writer to win the Hugo, Nebula, and Campbell awards during the same year until this was matched by Rebecca Roanhorse in 2018.
He also wrote the series Circus World and Infinity Hold, several stand-alone novels, numerous short stories, and two books for the Alien Nation novelization series. His trilogy "Infinity Hold", "Kill All the Lawyers", and "Keep the Law", was released during 2002 in a single paperback volume titled Infinity Hold 3 by the Author's Guild in a Backinprint.com edition. His recent Jaggers & Shad mystery stories, featuring two detectives in the Artificial Beings Crimes Division (Devon Office), are set mostly in Exeter and the surrounding Devon countryside and villages. The first of the tales, The Good Kill won the Analog AnLab award for Best Novella in 2006 and Murder in Parliament Street won the same award for 2007. The Hook won the 2021 Prometheus Award.
The series Circus World chronicles the adventures of a space-going circus troupe whose spaceship crashes, marooning them on a deserted planet without contact with the outside world.
The series Infinity Hold concerns a society developing from a group of violent convicts dumped on a new planet without police or government.
Saint Mary Blue is a novel about the course of treatment of a man who has substance abuse and mental health problems, while resident in a treatment facility.
The God Box is a stand-alone fantasy novel with a protagonist who finds himself the keeper of a small wooden box that provides cryptic guidance from the gods. He must stay ahead of a deadly manhunt and play his role in an ancient prophecy. The box, if asked, takes what he does not need, and gives him what he does need—but what he needs and what he thinks he needs are usually very different. This lends itself to humorous and unexpected situations.
Longyear has also written a mystery series, the The Hangman's Son trilogy (2011) and Rope Paper Scissors (2013), all featuring Joe Torio.