Chris Roberson

Roberson was selected by DC Comics to finish the "Grounded" story arc in the Superman monthly title, which he worked on in addition to his current Vertigo titles, iZombie and Cinderella: Fables are Forever. 2015 wrote for Legendary Comics the thriller graphic novel Black Bag, which features arts from JB Bastos.

Roberson is also writing books for Black Library publishing; Dawn of War II, published March 2009, and Sons of Dorn, which came out in early 2010.

Roberson's miniseries is titled Cinderella: From Fabletown With Love, and described by the author as featuring "spies, sex, and shoes." Illustrated by Shawn McManus and released in late 2009 / early 2010, it "answer(s) the question of what happened to Cinderella's fairy godmother."

In July 2008, at the Comic-Con International in San Diego, it was announced that Roberson will be working on a comic book miniseries set in the universe of the DC/Vertigo series Fables, created by fellow-former-Clockwork Storybook author Bill Willingham.

His novel Paragaea was included in Waterstone's Top Ten SF list for 2006.

He is editor of the Adventure anthology series, first published by MonkeyBrain in November, 2005.

In November, 2005, Roberson edited the first volume in a projected annual series of Adventure anthologies, comprising "original fiction in the spirit of early twentieth-century pulp fiction magazines" across the genres, featuring contributions from (among others) Lou Anders, Paul Di Filippo, Mark Finn, Michael Moorcock and Kim Newman. (Many of which featured authors would become MonkeyBrain stalwarts.)

He has been a finalist for the World Fantasy Award for times - once each for writing (2004) and editing (2006) (For Adventure Vol. 1, left.) and twice for publishing (2006), (2008). On two occasions he has been a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. He won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History Long Form in 2009 for The Dragon's Nine Sons. He has also been nominated twice for the Sidewise Award for Alternate History Short Form, which he won in 2004 with his story "O One".

Roberson grew up near Dallas, Texas, and attended the University of Texas, Austin. Graduating with a degree in English literature and a minor in history, he held a variety of jobs - including seven years as a product support engineer for Dell computers - before quitting his job in 2003 to launch small press MonkeyBrain Books.

Focusing, after the demise of Clockwork Storybook, on his writing, Roberson sold a short story (his first professional sale) to Roc anthology Live Without a Net, under the editorship of Lou Anders. It was published in 2003, and paved the way for future sales to Asimov's Science Fiction and other anthologies. In 2004, Anders, (by now considered by Roberson "something of a personal patron") by now an editorial director at Prometheus Books' new SF imprint Pyr, bought an expanded version of one of Roberson's CWSB books Any Time At All, which was published in 2005 as Here, There & Everywhere.

In 2003, having "discovered.. in the few years of helping run the CWSB imprint, that [he] really enjoyed being a publisher," Roberson started up his own imprint. Partly this move was inspired by the dissolution of CWSB, and Roberson having discovered a few projects by writers that he had wanted to bring out under that banner. He decided, however, that MonkeyBrain Books would deal exclusively in "traditional offset trade-paperbacks and hardcovers," distributed internationally, rather than printed on demand.

Since 2003, he is the publisher (along with his business partner and spouse Allison Baker) of MonkeyBrain Books, an independent publishing house naturally based in Austin, Texas, which specialises in genre fiction and nonfiction genre studies.

Starting as a writing group, CWSB became an online monthly anthology, and then a publishing imprint of the same name. Roberson produced four novels under CWSB, as the collective attempted to capitalise on the Print On Demand revolution. This ultimately fell through, and the four went their separate ways. Two (to date) of Roberson's CWSB books have been subsequently expanded and reprinted. Any Time At All (Sep, 2002) became Here, There & Everywhere (Pyr, 2005), and Set The Seas On Fire (Dec, 2001) was expanded for its April, 2007 release by Solaris. Voices of Thunder (Feb, 2001) has been revised to become Book Of Secrets for upcoming publication by Angry Robot in August, 2009.

From 1998 to 2002, Roberson was part of writer's collective Clockwork Storybook, alongside noted comics author Bill Willingham (Fables), Matthew Sturges (co-writing with Willingham of Jack of Fables) and Mark Finn (Robert E. Howard scholar and playwright).

Chris Roberson (born August 25, 1970) is an American science fiction author, trombonist, and publisher based in Portland, Oregon, best known for alternate history novels and short stories.

He cites his upbringing in the 1970s and 1980s, as his major inspiration, since science fiction was particular commonplace in America at that time, saying: