Margaret Ball

Margaret Ball is an American science-fiction and fantasy author who co-created the Acorna series with Anne McCaffrey, launching the 1997 debut novel that introduces a trio of asteroid miners who find an abandoned escape pod carrying an infant who is unmistakably, impossibly, part unicorn — a silver-maned, horned girl whose horn can purify poison and heal wounds, and who grows at an accelerated rate into a young woman determined to find out where her people came from and why they were destroyed. Ball co-wrote the earliest Acorna novels with McCaffrey before departing the series, which McCaffrey then continued for eight further books with a different co-author, Elizabeth Ann Scarborough. Ball's contribution helped establish the series' central premise and its blend of space-opera worldbuilding with a distinctly fairy-tale-inflected central character, a combination that gave Acorna its particular niche within McCaffrey's broader body of collaborative science fiction. Beyond her work on Acorna, Ball has published science fiction and fantasy under her own name across multiple decades, and holds a background in linguistics that has informed some of her worldbuilding and naming conventions in her genre fiction.