Julian May grew up in Elmwood Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, the oldest of four children. Her parents were Matthew M. May and Julia Feilen May; as a child she was known as Judy May. She became involved in science fiction fandom in her late teens, publishing the fanzineInterim Newsletter for a time. She sold her first professional fiction, a short story called "Dune Roller", in 1950 to John W. Campbell's Astounding Science Fiction; it appeared in 1951, under the name "J. C. May", accompanied by her original illustrations. She met her future husband, Ted Dikty, later that year at a convention in Ohio. May chaired the Tenth World Science Fiction Convention in Chicago in 1952, becoming the first woman to chair a worldcon, and married Dikty in January, 1953. After selling one more short story, "Star of Wonder", she dropped out of the science fiction field for several years.
Period outside science fiction
May and Dikty had three children, the last of whom was born in 1958. Starting in 1954, May wrote thousands of science encyclopedia articles for Consolidated Book Publishers; after finishing that project, she wrote similar articles for two other encyclopedia publishers. In 1957 she and her husband founded a production and editorial service for small publishers, Publication Associates; the most notable projects May wrote and edited during this period include two episodes of the Buck Rogerscomic strip and a new Catholic catechism for Franciscan Herald Press, a publisher associated with the Order of Friars Minor. Between 1956 and 1981 she wrote more than 250 books for children and young adults, most non-fiction, under her own name and a variety of pseudonyms; the subjects included science, history, and short biographies of modern-day celebrities such as athletes and musical groups. "Dune Roller" was filmed in 1972 as The Cremators, in which she was credited as "Judy Dikty".
Return to science fiction
Having moved to Oregon in the early 1970s, May began to get reacquainted with the world of fandom; in 1976, she attended Westercon 29 in Los Angeles, her first science-fiction convention in many years. She made an elaborate diamond-encrusted "space suit" for the convention's costume party, which started her thinking about what sort of character would wear such a suit. She soon began accumulating a folder of ideas for what would become the Galactic Milieu Series, and in 1978 she began writing what would become the Saga of Pliocene Exile. The first book in that series, The Many-Colored Land, was published in 1981 by Houghton Mifflin. In 1987, she continued the series with Intervention, finally followed in 1992 by the Galactic Milieu Series: Jack the Bodiless, Diamond Mask and Magnificat. In August 2015, she was inducted into the First Fandom Hall of Fame in a ceremony at the 73rd World Science Fiction Convention.
