>>  Biography

Those who wish to get my attention call me Bob.

The function of this bio is not to stroke my own ego, under the assumption that your life will not be complete without knowing the intimate details of mine. No. The purpose is that by seeing a bit of the person, you might better enjoy my work. No more, no less. Any lessons learned, insights gained, or epiphanies revealed, will be generated solely from your side of the screen.

If you glanced at any of the other pages on this site, you will have already realized that I wear several hats. I'm an engineer of the electrical variety (not to be confused with a physicist), a writer of science fiction, and a reporter of technology. In reality I wear only one hat - these three areas have so merged that there is no separating them.

The Facts
I was born in Los Angeles, where I spent twenty years in school. No, I was not repeatedly held back in grammar school. After high school, I stayed right in LA and attended UCLA. First a physics major (because a good friend of mine attending Cal Tech was a physics major), I realized by my junior year that it was not my desire to understand the universe, but to figure out just enough about it so I could construct some widget to manipulate the universe. I had the temperament of an engineer. BS in '80, MS in '80 and PhD in '83. For my doctoral work I'd figured out how various atoms jump around on a semiconductor surface, and spent nearly 4 years building the machine to make those atoms jump where I wanted them to. And I do mean building. I was the guy in the machine shop who once caught a speeding three pound V-chuck in the face, nearly punching out my left eye, and while wiring up a 15,000 V piece of electronics vaporized most of a screwdriver and almost dislocated my shoulder. The business of controlling the placement of desired atoms on a semiconductor surface is called molecular beam epitaxy. It was cutting edge back in the early '80s. Today it is a standard manufacturing tool used in the fabrication the chips that go in your cell phone. What did I learn in all those years of school?

Eureka moments are few and far between. Everything takes twice as long as it should. Idiots, like beer bubbles, float to the top. Everyone will tell you why something won't work.

After UCLA I planned to take a half-year off to travel. Three days after leaving UCLA the lack of a machine to build, or of a lab to muck around in, had driven me into deep despair. I went down the road to Malibu and took a job at the Hughes Research Labs. I spent five years running an integrated circuits lab (wall to wall machines always breaking down) and five more back in the world of molecular beam epitaxy pushing around atoms. I'd authored or co-authored (one authors a technical paper) nearly 100 papers and received 10 patents. But along the way I had also started doing something else - writing SF.

The story here is so standard, as to have become a cliché. I'd been reading SF since I was 10. Wrote my first book at 13 (a post-apocolyptic saga that spent much of its time at Disneyland - where the lines were incredibly short due to the greatly reduced population). By high school I was submitting stories to the magazines and getting those nice little form letter rejections. And then I went to UCLA. I allowed myself to read a single SF novel every Friday night (that tells you more about me than I'm sure you wanted to know), and that was all the SF I had time for. I did not resume writing until several years after joining the research labs.

I experienced a little epiphany while reading some quickly forgettable story. I realized that the plot of the story could be thought of as an equation, and the characters as the variable in the equation. In the same way that one experiences a Eureka moment when all the data falls into place, when the equations make sense, and you have understood something never before understood, the same thing happened when reading a story, when all the pieces linked together, when all the clues made sense, when the square-jawed hero revealed himself to by the mild mannered but oh-so-eccentric scientist. It was a literary Eureka moment. And if reading such a story could induce this high, then I wondered just what it would feel like to write such a story just like the pros did.

I wrote stories like the pros. I gathered rejection after rejection. The stories were flat, the characters not even two-dimensional, and the eventual revelation as exciting as a bowl of cold oatmeal. This went on for several years. Then one manic evening I wrote a story that I had no intention of submitting to anyone - a piece about a crazy man who had the ability to make tuna fish appear from thin air. I was not trying to write like a writer. I was writing like myself - bizarre, but with the physics all worked out. I did submit that story and it did sell. I'd found my voice. That was back in 1987.

Sold a fair number of stories then and started working on the book. After you get some stories published, then you have to work on the book. Because with those published stories in hand, you can get an agent to take a look at your book. I had Quad World written by 1990, and my agent, Richard Curtis, sold it to ROC. Everyone seemed to like it. They contracted for a sequel, which I wrote, and then started through the editing process. And then IT happened.

The sales numbers for Quad World were horrible. Hardly anyone had bought it. One must remember that this was 1991, and the only outlet for selling books were in the brick and mortar bookstores (no Amazon), and it turned out that because the publisher had increased the number of titles they produced in the month my book came out, that they had trouble getting sufficient shelf space for all their titles in the big chain bookstores. I was the new guy (i.e. cannon fodder). Quad World never appeared on the shelves of any of the big chain stores. This in turn led to poor sales numbers (big surprise). As a result they decided not to publish the sequel, and I was informed that because of my "bad numbers" in the computer, that they did not want to publish anything from me. Good-bye.

Ouch.

I stopped writing entirely for a while, and then slowly got back into it through science columns I did for Aboriginal SF and for the Science Fiction Writer's of America Bulletin. A move took me across the country to Georgia, where I did some lab work at Georgia Tech, started doing science writing, and helped start a trade magazine called Compound Semiconductor that dealt with electronic and optical devices used in telecomm and datacomm business. Then by the late 90's, the wound healed sufficiently from the Quad World fiasco (the scar of course remains), that I started on a second book.

Picoverse

Took three years to write and Richard Curtis sold it to ACE. My editor tells me that this one will be put on the shelves. And that is about it. I cannot imagine that there could be anything more that any rational being would want to know about me.

Oh yes, my favorite painter is Juan Gris.

© robert a. metzger. All rights reserved.