Steven Barnes

 Steven Barnes (born March 1, 1952) is an American science fiction, fantasy, and mystery writer. He has written novels, short fiction, screen plays for television, scripts for comic books, animation, newspaper copy, and magazine articles.

Barnes wrote several episodes of The Outer Limits and Baywatch. His "A Stitch In Time" episode of The Outer Limits won an Emmy Award. He also wrote the episode "Brief Candle" for Stargate SG-1 and the Andromeda episode "The Sum of Its Parts". Barnes's first published piece of fiction, the 1979 novelette "The Locusts", was written with Larry Niven, and was a Hugo Award nominee. Barnes subsequently collaborated with Niven on several other books, including three books with both Niven and Jerry Pournelle. Barnes said he clashed politically with the two conservative writers but enjoyed working with them, calling it "a tremendous learning opportunity".

Barnes's alternate history novel Lion's Blood won the 2003 Endeavour Award. His 2004 Star Wars tie-in novel The Cestus Deception was a New York Times bestseller.

Together with his wife, Tananarive Due, and actor Blair Underwood, Barnes won the 2009 NAACP Image Award for outstanding Literary Work - Fiction for In the Night of the Heat: A Tennyson Hardwick Novel.