Science & Tech Quote by Elizabeth Moon

There’s a sly humility in the clunky phrasing: “One of my degrees was a science degree in biology.” It reads like someone refusing to posture, even while quietly establishing authority. Elizabeth Moon isn’t tossing around “STEM background” as a brand; she’s doing the writerly equivalent of showing a credential and immediately putting it back in her pocket. The redundancy (“degree” twice, “science” plus “biology”) signals an offhand, conversational register, the kind you get in interviews or convention panels where the speaker is trying to be useful, not impressive.

The intent feels practical: don’t treat my imagination as untethered. Moon’s work often lives where genre loves to get sloppy - militaries, bodies, ecosystems, cause-and-effect. Dropping biology into the sentence is a way of asserting that her fictional worlds have to metabolize reality. Biology implies systems, constraints, unintended consequences: the opposite of magic fixes. It’s also a quiet rebuttal to the old split between “serious” scientific knowledge and “mere” storytelling. She’s not asking permission to write; she’s reminding you she’s trained to observe.

Subtextually, the line nudges at gendered expectations, too. Women writers in science fiction have long been treated as guests in someone else’s clubhouse. Saying “one of my degrees” expands her identity beyond a single lane: not just “the writer,” not just “the scientist,” but someone who’s moved through multiple institutions and still gets to choose how to speak. The understatement is the point; confidence doesn’t need fireworks when it has receipts.