Identity area
Type of entity
Person
Authorized form of name
Snodgrass, Melinda
Parallel form(s) of name
Standardized form(s) of name according to other rules
Other form(s) of name
Identifiers for corporate bodies
Description area
Dates of existence
1951-
History
Melinda Marilyn Snodgrass was born in Los Angeles in 1951, and her family moved to New Mexico when she was five months old. Under her father's tutelage, she was given every possible opportunity - she learned to ride, shoot, swim and fly fish, she sat in on his business meetings and traveled with him from a young age. She inherited her father's musical ability and studied ballet, voice, and piano. She starred with the Civic Light Opera, and also performed the role of Gretel with the New Mexico Symphony Orchestra in a performance of Hansel and Gretel. Her love of music took her to Vienna, Austria where she studied voice at the Conservatorium der Stadt Wien.
However, rather than pursuing a musical career, she returned to America to finish her college degrees, majoring in History (Magna Cum Laude) and minoring in music at the University of New Mexico. After graduating, she entered the New Mexico School of Law where her foci were Constitutional law, jurisprudence, and legal history.
After graduation, she practiced law for three years working first for Sandia National Laboratories, and then with a corporate law firm, but discovered that while she loved the law she wasn't terribly fond of lawyers. At the urging of author Victor Milan, she tried writing and never looked back. In 1984 she published her first book, the Star Trek novel The Tears of the Singers. Since then, Snodgrass has published a number of novels and short stories, including the Circuit Trilogy (1986-1988) about a Federal Court judge riding circuit in the solar system, two fantasies from Avon, one co-written with Victor Milan, and then in 1984 she and friend/fellow author George R.R. Martin created the Wild Cards Series, a shared world "mosaic universe" anthology with a focus on the real impact of superheroes in our world. The series continues today, and is scheduled to debut as a Hulu television series. Snodgrass herself, in addition to writing stories for the series and being one of its co-editors, wrote the novel Double Solitaire as part of the series in 1992.
At Martin's urging, Snodgrass entered the world of Hollywood, where she served as story editor for the 2nd and 3rd seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation. While in this role, she also wrote several scripts for the show, including one of its most famous and well-received episodes, 'The Measure of a Man' . She worked on a number of other shows as well, including Reasonable Doubts and The Profiler, and wrote episodes for The Antagonists, Sliders, Strange Luck, and Odyssey 5, to name only a few. She also scripted an adaptation of Star Blazers for Disney. She has written six pilots - one of which, Star Command, aired on the UPN network.
In recent years, Snodgrass has completed the Edge trilogy (2008-2015), a series of contemporary fantasies that explore the tensions between science and rationality and religion and superstition. Her three-volume White Fang Law fantasy series, about a vampiric law firm, was originally written under the pen name Phillipa Bornikova and came out between 2012-2018. She is currently working on a military space opera series, The Imperials Saga, which debuted in 2016 with The High Ground and as of 2023 consists of four additional books.