Michael Blumlein, M.D. was an American fiction writer and a physician. Blumlein attended medical school at the University of California, San Francisco and worked as a practicing doctor and member of the faculty at University of California, San Francisco for decades. Most of his writing is in or near the genres of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. His novels include The Healer, The Movement of Mountains, and X, Y. He was nominated for the World Fantasy Award and the Bram Stoker Award. His short stories have been collected in anthologies and published in Interzone and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, among others.