Early Life and Career
Roberson grew up near Dallas, Texas, and attended the University of Texas, Austin. Graduating with a degree in English literature and a minor in history, he held a variety of jobs - including seven years as a product support engineer for Dell computers - before quitting his job in 2003 to launch small press MonkeyBrain Books.
He cites his upbringing in the seventies and eighties, as his major inspiration, since science fiction was particular commonplace in America at that time, saying:
"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."
After college, he has suggested that he leaned towards becoming a more literary, post-modernist writer, even writing a couple of novels to that end, which he adamant will never see the light of day, after realising that he simply "wasn't depressed enough for that line of work". In his twenties, he wrote a couple of mystery novels, seeing them as a commercial venture, but found himself skirting around turning them into 'genre' titles, falling between the two camps of mystery and science fiction, and interesting publishers of neither. Ultimately he settled on writing science fiction, saying:
"My brain tends to work along the lines of science fiction tropes. Whenever I run into an odd little bit of trivia, some obscure historical fact or odd scientific principle, I can't help but start thinking of ways I could use it in a story."
His writings have received positive reviews from Locus Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov's Science Fiction, The New York Review of Science Fiction, Infinity Plus and RevolutionSF. He lives in Austin, Texas with his wife (Allison Baker) and their young daughter, Georgia.
Read more about this topic: Chris Roberson (author)
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