After Élisabeth Vonarburg and Esther Rochon, Francine Pelletier is one of the most active and best-known woman writers in Quebec science fiction. Though she is often forced by a limited market to publish for an adolescent audience, her trilogy for adults, Le Sable et l'acier (Sand and Steel, 1997-1998), marks a turning point in her career. While classical American science fiction inspired her antecedents in Quebec, Pelletier represents the first generation of science-fiction writers in her province to claim a primarily local influence on her work. Although she has read (in translation) anglophone authors ranging from Isaac Asimov to Ursula K. Le Guin, Pelletier's first exposure to the genre came from the pages of the Quebec review Solaris, and its contributors--such as Vonarburg, Jean-Pierre April, and Daniel Sernine--were the main influences that prompted her to write science fiction.

Francine Pelletier was born on 25 April 1959 in Laval, Quebec...