Born 2 October 1953, Houston, Texas, United States.
Has written under the pseudonym of D.B.Drumm (the 'Traveler' series).
Spent most of his youth in Oregon state.
"About 1974 or so I left Oregon for San Francisco, and lived there, more or less on the streets, with accommodating hookers and queens and with less accommodating people who attacked me, and at one point in a cardboard refrigerator box for two days. I didn't have a fucking clue how to survive, at first. I had first-hand impression of growing violence at the street level." --John Shirley (in The Exploded Heart , US pbk, 1996).
"Among the so-called Cyberpunks, John Shirley is perhaps the only genuine Punk. Far be it from us to gossip, but when Shirley writes about rock'n'roll, weird hairstyles, controlled substances, sick violence and tacky sex, one gets the impression of a writer (like Jack London or B.Traven) who draws on his own adventures and has earned the right to a revolutionary stance by serving his season in the Lower Depths.
"The political comparisons are deliberate; Shirley has adopted a libertarian-socialist position, most fully worked out in his...trilogy, A Song Called Youth , but already present in earlier and delightful works such as City Come A'Walkin' and Three-Ring Psychus ." --Peter Lamborn Wilson (in Semiotext(e) SF 14 , US pbk, 1989).
"His career as a punk started in high school in Salem, Oregon, where he was expelled for keeping a teacher locked in a closet while he lectured the class on what a nuclear war would be like. He's been raising Cain ever since." --R.U.Sirius (in 21C Scanning the Future , #23, 1997)
"He is the author of numerous works in a variety of genres; his story collection Heatseeker was chosen by the Locus Reader's poll as one of the best short story collections of 1989." [jacket bumpf, New Noir , US pbk, 1993]
Was lead singer in the rock bands Terror Wrist, Obsession.
"I started the first Portland [Oregon] punk club, The Revenge, where various early West Coast punk bands played. I booked the Dead Kennedys and others." --John Shirley (in The Exploded Heart , US pbk, 1996).
"John Shirley has been called 'the Lou Reed of Cyberpunk'; in addition to publishing numerous polemical essays and seminal works of cyberpunk, he has also played in punk-rock bands such as Sado-Nation and is the lead singer [and lyricist] of The Panther Moderns -- a San Francisco-based rock band. He is currently working on a novel of surrealist urban nightmare called Wetbones ." [publisher's bumpf in Storming the Reality Studio , US pbk, 1991]
"The Panther Moderns are a band which appear in William Gibson's Neuromancer. Is Lucas Yonderboy modelled on someone we know?"
Shirley also writes lyrics for Blue Oyster Cult.
"...Leaving New York for a working sojourn in Paris, Shirley created the Traveler series for Dell, writing Traveler novels #1 through #5 as D.B.Drumm, and recorded his Obsession album. ('Seams', a spoken-word cut on Obsession , is one of my favorite Shirley stories.) [*note: 'Seams' has now been published in the collection The Exploded Heart --ed.]. He also absorbed crucial European background for the Eclipse trilogy, A Song Called Youth , which couples his surreal intensity with a new realism, a global extrapolation of neo-fascist rule in the near future." --William Gibson (in the introduction to Heatseeker , 1989).
"When I recorded with my band [Obsession], we never had quite enough money to do it right... Vocals were never a high priority with these guys -- maybe it had something to do with them being my vocals. The vocals only got worse with multiple takes -- or so my guitar player assured me. So I ended up doing my vocal tracks last thing, maybe four A.M. when we've got about ten minutes left in the studio and the engineer, who's been recording various bands for days and has run out of his crystal meth, is looking at his watch every ten seconds and has an expression on his face like a guy being electrocuted for a crime he didn't commit, and is in no mood to run overtime. I had one take. So they weren't as good as they could have been, and when I recorded 'Seams' I fucked up the singing part pretty bad, I can tell you." --John Shirley (in The Exploded Heart , US pbk, 1996).
"John Shirley has often been first to tread frontiers that later became well-trampled cyberpunk turf. As a rock performer, he was heavily involved in the first virulent outbreak of punk on the West Coast. A prolific writer whose work includes such novels as City Come A-Walkin', The Brigade , and the horror extravaganza Cellars , Shirley is well known for his soaring, surreal imagery and bursts of extreme visionary intensity." --Bruce Sterling (in Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology , US pbk, 1986).
Mickery Films has produced his script Black Glass , a movie about performance artists and government conspiracy in a nightclub in 1999.
Shirley was the co-screenwriter for Brandon Lee's last film, The Crow (there are several websites devoted to this film... check The Crow Home Page). He also wrote the screenplays for Primal Scream and The Specialist .
"He no longer has green hair." --Lewis Shiner (in When the Music's Over , US pbk, 1991).
"He used to do lots of bad things he doesn't do anymore.... usually". -- (in Axcess , 1994).
Shirley switched from books to screenplays for a time. But a new novel, Silicon Embrace , has been published by Mark V.Ziesing. And Eyeball Books have republished City Come A-Walkin' and published the collection The Exploded Heart in August 1996.
Story editor (and executive producer of at least one episode) of the TV series VR5, 1997.
"John Shirley was cyberpunk's Patient Zero, first locus of the virus, certifiably virulent." --William Gibson (in the Foreword to the revised edition of City Come A-Walkin' ).
John Shirley writes an opinion column, "Any Damn Thing I Please", for Wetbones magazine (1997-19??).
"John Shirley is one truly strange character. And his books are unusually unusual. A combination I happen to like." --Henry W.Targowski (in Mark/Space , 20 November 1996).
Married to: Kathy Shirley.
Children: Julian Shirley.
Married to: Michelina Shirley [aka Micky, aka St. Dominique Stigmata].
Lived in San Francisco, California [1974].
Lived in Los Angeles, California [1986].
Lived in Thousand Oaks, California, [1988].
Lived in Portland, Oregon, United States [1994].
Lives in Los Angeles, California [1996].
