Introduction
Rob Swigart (born January 7, 1941) is an American science fiction writer.
Early life and education
Swigart was born on January 7, 1941, in Chicago, Illinois. He began writing poems when he was six, and stories in high school and college. He initially gave up on writing but returned to it during his graduate studies.
He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey. Later, he attended State University of New York at Buffalo, earning a Ph.D. degree in Comparative Literature.
Career
In his early career, Swigart worked as a technology journalist, technical writer, and even a computer game designer (Activision 1984-89). While working for Activision, he created a text-driven interactive novel titled Portal (produced by Brad Fregger.) It offers a complex Future History of the planet earth over the next century, a period marked by speculations about Genetic Engineering, and the coming to reflective awareness of a mainframe named Homer.
From September 1972 to May 2006, Swigart was an Associate Professor of English at San José State University, San Jose, California. In 2004-2012, he was a visiting scholar at Stanford University, Stanford, California.
In 1993-2006, he was a Research Affiliate at Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, California. During that period, in 1994, he co-authored with Robert Johansen Upsizing The Individual In The Downsized Corporation (published by Addison-Wesley, ISBN: 978-0201489408).
He published his first novel, Little America in 1977. In 1988, Swigart published a hardcover version of Portal, titled Portal: A Dataspace Retrieval (published by St. Martin's Press.) A softcover edition was released by Backinprint.com in 2001.[4]
In 2017, he co-authored Blue Murder: Police Procedural Page-Turners with Julie Smith, Shelley Singer, and Adrienne Barbeau.
Most recently, in 2019, he published Mixed Harvest: Stories from the Human Past
Selected books
- Little America (1977)
- Venom: A Thriller in Paradise (August 2013)
- The Time Trip (November 2015)
- Stone Mirror: A Novel of the Neolithic (September 2016)
- Blue Murder: Police Procedural Page-Turners (2017)
- Mixed Harvest: Stories from the Human Past (2019)
Trivia
Sigart is an aikido black belt.