Sheila Finch (born 29 October 1935) is an author of science fiction and fantasy.[1] She is best known for her sequence of stories about the Guild of Xenolinguists.
Sheila Finch was born on 29 October 1935 in London, England. She attended Bishop Otter College (now Chichester University) from 1954 to 1956, then taught for a year (1956–1957) in a primary school in Hackney, London. Following her marriage to Clare Grill Rayner in 1957 (divorced 1980), she emigrated to the US and completed her BA in English Literature at Indiana University Bloomington in 1959, followed by an MA in linguistics and medieval history in 1962. She has three daughters. From 1963 to 1967, when the family lived in San Luis Obispo, California, she taught part-time at Cuesta College and began publishing poetry. The family moved to Long Beach in 1967. Sheila taught creative writing and science fiction at El Camino College from 1970 to 2005. The family relocated for two years to Munich, Germany in the 1970s, where Sheila studied German and taught English as a second language.
She is a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association, serving as Vice-President for two years, then Chair of the Grievance Committee for five years. As Western Regional Director, during the 1980s and 1990s she organized activities for the organization aboard the Queen Mary in Long Beach Harbor. She is also a charter member of the Asilomar Writers Consortium, founded by Jerry Hannah in Monterey, California in 1976.
Besides teaching and publishing, Sheila has been active in the community, serving first as a volunteer in a residential hospice, then for ten years as a volunteer for St Luke's Episcopal Church's program for the homeless. She also served for eight years on the City of Long Beach Mayor's Advisory Committee for Homelessness.
Sheila Finch currently lives in Long Beach, California.
In her 1986 book Triad, Finch used the term "xenolinguist" to describe the linguists who decode alien languages.[2][3] The word has gained widespread acceptance in the science fiction industry and was used to describe the character Uhura in the remake of Star Trek.[4][5]
Finch created a series of tales about communicating with aliens which eventually was consolidated in collection of short stories entitled The Guild of Xenolinguists (Golden Gryphon Press, 2007). The Guild was founded on Earth in the middle of the 22nd century after first contact with a race from somewhere in the Orion Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy. A few early linguists, neurolinguists, ethnographers and computer scientists established the Guild which then took over the responsibility for training xenolinguists to make first contact and to record alien languages in the field. Later, the Guild provided translation services for the expanding commerce and colonization of the following centuries.[6]