SOURCE: "The Restless Urge to Write," in Women of Vision, edited by Denise Dupont, St. Martin's Press, 1988, 109-27.

In the following essay, Vinge discusses the origins of and the influences on her fiction, the creative process, and the role of women writers in the science fiction genre.

There used to be an ad for the Famous Writers School that ran on matchbook covers. It read, Do You Have the Restless Urge to Write? Whenever I think about my career as a writer, it always comes back into my mind, because it seems to sum up creativity better than anything I've seen. I never expected to become a science-fiction writer; probably no one was more surprised about it than I was. And yet I've had a restless urge to create something—not always in the form of writing—and share it, ever since childhood.

My mother discovered that when...