Spider Robinson

Since he began writing professionally in 1972, Spider Robinson has won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, three Hugo Awards, a Nebula Award, and countless other international and regional awards. Most of his 36 books are still in print, in 10 languages. His short work has appeared in magazines around the planet, from Omni and Analog to Xhurnai Lzobretatel i Rationalizator (Moscow), and in numerous anthologies. The Usenet newsgroup alt.callahans and its many internet offshoots, ispired by his Callahan's Place series, for many years constituted one of the largest non-porn networks in cyberspace. In 2006 Robinson became the only writer ever to collaborate on a novel with First Grand Master of Science Fiction Robert A. Heinlein, posthumously completing Variable Star. That same year, the Library of Congress invited him to Washington D.C. to be a guest of the First Lady at the White House for the National Book Festival. In 2008 he won the Robert A. Heinlein Award for Lifetime Excellence in Literature. Spider was born in New York City in 1948, and holds a Bachelors degree in English from the State University of New York. He was a regular book reviewer for Galaxy, Analog, and New Destinies magazine for nearly a decade, and contributes occasional book reviews to The Globe and Mail, Canada's national newspaper, for which he wrote a regular Op-Ed column from 1996-2004. As an audiobook reader of his own and others' work, he has won the Earphones Award and been a finalist for the Audie, and his podcast Spider on the Web has appeared online weekly since September 2007. In 2001 he released Belaboring the Obvious, a CD featuring original music accompanied by guitar legend Amos Garrett. He has written songs in collaboration with David Crosby and with Todd Butler. Robinson was married for 35 years to Jeanne Robinson, a Boston-born writer, choreographer, former dancer and teacher. She was founder/artistic director of Halifax's Nova Dance Theatre during its 8-year history. The Robinsons collaborated on the Hugo-, Nebula-, and Locus-winning Stardance Trilogy featuring the plot concept of zero-gravity dance. Jeanne died in 2010 of biliary cancer, and their daughter, Terri Luanna da Silva, died in 2014 of breast cancer. Robinson was a Vietnam War Conscientious Objector, and he emigrated to the woods of Nova Scotia, Canada, in the early 1970's, where he met Jeanne. He became a Canadian citizen in 2002, and has been living for more than two decades in British Columbia, Canada.