Jennifer Foehner Wells Books in Order

If you want her main first-contact storyline: Fluency → Remanence → Valence
If you want the Darcy-centered side of Confluence: Inheritance / The Druid Gene → Vengeance
If you want a short, strange science fiction sample: The Grove → Symbiont Seeking Symbiont
If you want anthology appearances first: The Galaxy Chronicles → The Z Chronicles

Jennifer Foehner Wells grew up in rural Illinois, where books, open land, and a busy imagination seem to have worked together early. She has said that a family friend's collection of science fiction, especially Ray Bradbury, helped hook her when she was young, and that early reading shaped the kind of stories she would later tell.

She studied biology at Monmouth College in Illinois. After college, she worked in an animal disease diagnostic lab and later as an assistant store manager at a greenhouse, which helps explain why so much of her fiction feels interested in living systems, strange ecologies, and the physical realities of survival.

She came to fiction the long way around.

Before publishing her own novels, Wells wrote an online Stargate Atlantis fan novel called Futura Memoratia. That kind of project is a real apprenticeship in public. It teaches pacing, stamina, and how to keep readers following a long story one chapter at a time.

She also took a very hands-on path into publishing. In one interview, she talked plainly about using family savings to give Fluency the professional editing and production it needed, which says a lot about the practical, self-directed way she built her career.

Her breakout novel, Fluency, arrived in 2014 and starts with a great science fiction hook: NASA finally sends a team to investigate a silent alien ship that has been drifting in the asteroid belt for decades. At the center is linguist Jane Holloway, a woman recruited not because she can shoot or command, but because she can understand. Readers who click with Wells usually like that mix of first contact, language, danger, and genuinely odd alien life.

Remanence opens the story outward, pushing Jane into a much larger galactic crisis. Then Inheritance, which was previously titled The Druid Gene, shifts the focus to Darcy Eberhardt, a medical student whose own DNA turns out to be part of a much older and stranger story. By the time you get to Valence and Vengeance, Wells is juggling multiple fronts, different species, and very human questions about loyalty, grief, and responsibility.

She likes science fiction that gets weird, but keeps its people recognizable.

That also shows up in her shorter work. The Grove follows a sentient plant being who wants more from life than the collective mind of her world will allow. Symbiont Seeking Symbiont is much smaller and funnier, but it has the same interest in biology, bodies, and the uncomfortable surprises that come from contact with alien life.

Across her books, certain patterns keep returning: women pushed into impossible jobs, alien cultures treated as truly different, and the question of who gets recognized as fully sentient. Her background in biology gives the stories texture without turning them into homework. Even when the scale gets huge, the tension usually comes back to bodies, ecosystems, communication, and the hard work of staying alive.