The Rising Flame: Defender of the Flame (ePub)

Sylvia Engdahl is the author of ten science fiction novels. She is best known for her traditionally-published Young Adult novels that are also enjoyed by adults. One of them, Enchantress from the Stars, was a Newbery Honor book, winner of the 2000 Phoenix Award of the Children's Literature Association, and a finalist for the 2002 Book Sense Book of the Year in the Rediscovery category. Her Children of the Star trilogy, originally written for teens, was republished as adult SF.

Recently she has been writing independently-published novels for adults, the Hidden Flame dulogy and the RIsing Flame duology. Although all her novels take place in the distant future on hypothetical worlds and thus are categorized as science fiction, they are character-driven and are directed more to mainstream readers than to avid science fiction fans.

Engdahl is a strong advocate of space colonization and has maintained a widely-read space section of her website for many years. She has also recently issued an updated edition of her 1974 nonfiction book The Planet-Girded Suns: The History of Human Thought About Extrasolar Worlds, which is focused on original research in primary sources of the 17th through early 20th centuries.

She lives in Eugene, Oregon.