Chris Roberson (author)

John Christian Roberson (born August 25, 1970), known professionally as Chris Roberson, is an American science fiction author and publisher who is best known for alternate history novels and short stories.

Early life

Roberson grew up near Dallas, Texas and attended the University of Texas at Austin. After graduating with a degree in English literature and a minor in history, he leaned towards becoming a literary, post-modernist writer and penned a couple of novels in that style, which went unpublished as Roberson realized that he "wasn't depressed enough for that line of work". In the 1990s, Roberson wrote a couple of mystery novels but the end results turned out to be a mix of mystery and science fiction genres, so the publishers specializing in either of those rejected them. Ultimately, Roberson settled on writing science fiction, citing his upbringing in the 1970s and 1980s as the major inspiration, since the genre was particularly commonplace in America at that time:

"Everything from Saturday-morning cartoons to comic books to late-night B-movies to pulp novel reprints to blockbuster summer movies--it was all science fiction, in one form or another."Tobias S. Buckell interview with Chris Roberson for ''The Eternal Night''
. Accessed on the 21st of January, 2008

During this period, Roberson had a variety of day jobs, such as a product support engineer for Dell computers, a position he held for seven years and quit in 2003 to concentrate on his work as a writer and publisher.

Career

Between 1998 and 2002, Roberson was part of the writer's collective Clockwork Storybook, alongside comic book creators Bill Willingham (of '' Elementals'' and, later, ''Fables'' fame), Matthew Sturges (who would go on to co-write ''Jack of Fables'' with Willingham and relaunch ''House of Mystery'' for Vertigo) and Mark Finn (also a Robert E. Howard scholar and playwright). Starting as a writing group, Clockwork Storybook developed into a monthly online anthology, then a publishing imprint of the same name. The collective attempted to capitalize on the growing trend of print on demand and launched with four print titles in early 2001. Roberson produced four novels for Clockwork Storybook, three of which were subsequently expanded and reprinted: '' Voices of Thunder'' (Feb. 2001) was revised to become '' Book of Secrets'' (Angry Robot, 2009), '' Set the Seas on Fire'' (Dec. 2001) was expanded for its 2007 release by Solaris, while ''Any Time at All'' (Sep. 2002) became ''Here, There and Everywhere'' ( Pyr, 2005).

After the dissolution of Clockwork Storybook, Roberson decided to focus on his career as a writer and soon after made his first professional sale with the short story for the '' Live without a Net'' anthology, edited by Lou Anders and published by Roc. The book was published in 2003 and paved the way for future sales to ''Asimov's Science Fiction'' and other anthologies such as ''Tales of the Shadowmen'', ''Postscripts