Spider Robinson

Spider Robinson
Spider Robinson with wife Jeanne Robinson at the 2004 Necronomicon.
Born	(1948-11-24) November 24, 1948 (age 68) The Bronx, New York City, New York, US
Occupation	Author
Genre	Science fiction

Spider Robinson (born November 24, 1948) is an American-born Canadian Hugo Award- and Nebula Award-winning science fiction author.

Robinson was born in the Bronx, New York City, New York. He attended a Catholic high school, spending his junior year in a seminary, followed by two years in a Catholic college, and five years at the State University of New York at Stony Brook in the 1960s, earning a Bachelor of Arts in English. While at Stony Brook, Spider earned a reputation as a great entertainer at campus coffeehouses and gatherings, strumming his guitar and singing in harmony with his female partner.

In his 20s, he "spent several years in the woods, deliberately trying to live without technology." In 1971, just out of college, he got a night job guarding sewers in New York City. He wrote his first published science fiction story, "The Guy with The Eyes", to get out of that job. In 1975 he married Jeanne Robinson, a choreographer, dancer, and Sōtō Zen monk, who co-wrote his Stardance Trilogy. They had a daughter, Terri Luanna da Silva, who once worked for Martha Stewart.

Robinson made his first short-story sale in 1972 to Analog Science Fiction magazine. The story, "The Guy with the Eyes" (Analog February 1973), was set in a bar called Callahan's Place; Robinson would, off-and-on, continue to write stories about the denizens of Callahan's into the 21st century. Robinson made several short-story sales to Analog, Galaxy Science Fiction magazine and others, and worked as a book reviewer for Galaxy magazine during the mid-to-late 1970s. In 1978–79 he contributed book reviews to the original anthology series Destinies.

Robinson's first published novel, Telempath (1976), was an expansion of his Hugo award-winning novella "By Any Other Name". Over the following three decades, Robinson on average released a book a year, including short story anthologies. In 1996–2005, he served as a columnist in the Op-Ed section (and briefly in the technology section) of the Globe and Mail.