Chris Roberson (author)
American writer
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he leaned towards becoming a literary, post-modernist writer and penned a couple of novels in that style, which went unpublished as Roberson realized that he "wasn't depressed enough for that line of work".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."
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), Lilah 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.
“Chris Roberson (author)” enters the record as american writer. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Chris, Roberson and author can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5107884. VIAF identifies the subject as 36581267. The Library of Congress control number is no2002028357. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1970, 2003, 1998 and 2002.
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This entry incorporates text from “Chris Roberson (author)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.