Steve Perry (author)

• 1. Introduction

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  Steve Perry was born on the 31st of August, 1947, and before he ever wrote a single novel, he had already lived several lives. He taught swimming, guarded pools, assembled toys, clerked in a hotel gift shop, sold aluminum, taught martial arts, worked as a private detective, and served as a nurse. That list is not embellishment. It is just the biography.

  Somewhere in the middle of all that, Perry found his way to the page. What followed was more than fifty novels, animated television scripts, movie novelizations, and a series of books that landed on the New York Times Bestseller list. He built fictional martial arts. He wrote inside some of the most recognizable universes in popular culture. One of his scripts for Batman: The Animated Series earned an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Writing.

  This is a story about a writer who came from the Deep South and never seemed to run out of material.

• 2. Before the Words

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  Louisiana is where Perry's story begins. Born in the Deep South, he eventually passed through California, Washington, and Oregon before settling into the life of a freelance writer. The road there was anything but direct.

  The jobs he held before writing full-time read like a casting call for a genre novel. A private detective and a nurse share the list with an aluminum salesman and a toy assembler. Each of those roles put Perry in contact with people under pressure, people in need, and people who did not always tell the truth. That kind of observation tends to find its way into fiction.

  His wife, Dianne Waller, became a Port of Portland executive. They have two children and five grandsons. One of those children, S. D. Perry, went on to become a science fiction author in her own right.

• 3. Silat and the Fictional Arts

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  Perry practices Silat, a martial art from Southeast Asia. That practice did not stay on the training floor. It moved directly into his fiction, where it became the foundation for two invented combat systems: Sumito and Teräs Käsi.

  Both are essentially fictionalized versions of Silat. Sumito, also called "The 97 Steps," sits at the center of Perry's most sustained literary project, the Matador series. Teräs Käsi crossed over into the Star Wars universe, carried by the same impulse to root fantastical combat in something that actually works.

  The Matador series spans over a dozen books, beginning with The Man Who Never Missed in 1985. The series follows the arc of a rebellion against a corrupt and declining interstellar government, from its birth through its aftermath. The 97 Steps are not window dressing in that world. They are what the rebellion runs on.

• 4. The Franchise Universes

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  Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire, published in 1996, became a bestseller. So did the Men in Black novelization two years later. Perry wrote inside the Star Wars, Alien, and Conan universes, producing work that readers found in the same stores as the films and television series those properties came from.

  For Conan, Perry wrote five novels across the late 1980s and into 1990, beginning with Conan the Fearless in 1986. The Aliens novels came in the early 1990s, including Earth Hive, Nightmare Asylum, and The Female War, the last co-written with Stephani Perry. Indiana Jones and the Army of the Dead arrived in 2009.

  Co-writing with Michael Reaves, Perry extended his Star Wars work into the MedStar duology and then the Death Star novel in 2007. The collaborations with Reaves stretch back to 1984, when the two worked together on Sword of the Samurai for the Time Machine series.

• 5. Net Force and the Bestseller List

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  Tom Clancy's Net Force was created by Tom Clancy and Steve Pieczenik. Perry served as collaborator on all of the books in that series, seven of which reached the New York Times Bestseller list.

  Perry's contributions to Net Force span from Breaking Point in 2000 through The Archimedes Effect in 2006, with several titles co-written alongside Larry Segriff. The series sits in a techno-thriller register quite different from the interstellar rebellion of the Matador books or the sword-and-sorcery of the Conan novels.

  The range across those franchises points to something about Perry's working method. He brought the same professional discipline to a Net Force thriller that he brought to a Star Wars adventure, and the bestseller list registered the results seven times over.

• 6. Television and the Emmy Nomination

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  Batman: The Animated Series ran from 1992 to 1995, and Perry wrote for it across that entire run. One of his scripts earned an Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Writing.

  The list of animated shows Perry contributed to is long: The Real Ghostbusters, Gargoyles, Godzilla: The Series, Spider-Man Unlimited, and others. He also wrote for Street Fighter and Extreme Ghostbusters during the mid-to-late 1990s. The Centurions, from 1986, appears near the start of that television career.

  Membership in The Animation Guild and the Writers Guild of America, West, runs alongside his membership in the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Perry built a career that crossed the boundary between prose and screen without treating either side as secondary. The Matador series is still growing. Churl, published in 2023, is the most recent entry, and The Void series began releasing new titles in 2024.