Lewis Shiner

"My parents moved once a year, whether they needed to or not. My father was in the National Park Service, which meant regular transfers; if we were in one town more than a year, my parents would move to a better house, inevitably in a different neighborhood, far from my existing friends.

"I won a Dallas-wide high-school fiction contest my senior year, which got me publication and 25 dollars. The next year I won a freshman writing award at Vanderbilt which entailed no publication and 30 dollars worth of books at the university bookstore. That was about it for the next eight years.

"I date my serious writing career from the summer of 1974." --Lewis Shiner (quoted in the Introduction to Nine Hard Questions About the Nature of the Universe , 1990).

"Mr Shiner describes himself as a compulsive researcher. He has travelled widely throughout the USA and Mexico, and has worked as house painter, rock musician, computer programmer, draftsman, clerk, and construction worker." [publisher's bumpf, Frontera , US pbk, 1984]

"I played drums for fifteen years and once recorded some demo tracks..." --Lewis Shiner (quoted in the anthology In Dreams , 1992).

"Lewis Shiner has been a cyberpunk rhetorician since the Movement's beginning. His voice has been a primary and highly articulate force in cyberpunk's bullheaded and successful battle for public acceptance without compromise. Yet, like most (or all but Gibson) cyberpunks , his own fiction is unlike the others -- excepting, of course, an uncompromising devotion to quality." --Stephen P.Brown (in Science Fiction Eye , Volume 1, Number 5, July 1989).

"Lewis Shiner is one of the original cyberpunks, a reputation he's been trying to live down ever since cyberpunk became just another subgenre within the SF corpus (he even wrote an obituary piece in the New York Times ). A graduate of Austin's notorious Turkey City writers' workshop, he has published short fiction in just about every magazine in the SF field." --Paul J.McAuley, Kim Newman (in the anthology In Dreams , 1992).

"Lewis Shiner is one of the leading young writers on the cutting edge of speculative fiction. His short stories have appeared in several magazines, including Omni , as well as the highly acclaimed anthologies In the Field of Fire , Semiotext(e) , Mirrorshades , Razorded Saddles , and Alien Sex . His first novel, Frontera , was a finalist for the Nebula Award. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife [Edith] and a house full of books." [publisher's bumpf, Deserted Cities of the Heart , 1988]

"Since his first publication in 1977, Lewis Shiner has written a widely ranging spectrum of short stories: mysteries, fantasies, and horror as well as SF. But the 1984 appearance of his first novel, Frontera , demonstrated his important role in Movement fiction. Frontera combined classic hard-SF structure with a harrowing portrait of postindustrial society in the early twenty-first century. The book's gritty realism and deflating treatment of SF icons aroused much comment.

"Shiner's work is marked by thorough research and cooly meticulous construction. His lean, vigorous prose shows his allegiance to hard-boiled mystery fiction as well as to such quasi-mainstream authors as Elmore Leonard and Robert Stone.

"The son of an anthropologist, Shiner has a fondness for odd belief structures, such as Zen, quantum physics, and mythic archetypes. Though he is capable of bizarre flights of fancy, his work of late has tended toward direct, unsentimental realism and an increasing interest in global politics." --Bruce Sterling (in Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology , 1986).

"His first novel, Frontera , was nominated for the Nebula Award; his second, Deserted Cities of the Heart , gave Jimi Hendrix a walk-on part; his third, Slam , is a utopian comedy involving skateboarding and thrash rock. And...Glimpses , a novel concerning someone who has the gift of being able to transfer the great never-recorded mythical songs of rock'n'roll on to tape." --Paul J.McAuley, Kim Newman (in the anthology In Dreams , 1992).

"Shiner once edited a zine called Modern Stories . He has also written a graphic novel (The Hacker Files , published as a comics series by DC, 1992-1993), and contributed sections to the Wild Cards series." --Henry W.Targowski (in Mark/Space , 1995).