Rob Swigart

His latest novel, Mixed Harvest, won a Nautilus Gold Award in 2019.

In April 2012, Subliminal Games launched a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign to recreate Portal as a modern third-person adventure game. The project was cancelled in June 2012 after falling short of the funding target.

Building upon an early interest in archaeology discovered while visiting sites around Central America, Swigart later wrote two archaeological novels published as textbooks, Xibalbá Gate (2005) and Stone Mirror (2007), while he was a visiting scholar at the Stanford Archaeology Center.

Following the release of Stone Mirror, he attended a series of seminars at Çatalhöyük, where he was a novelist in residence in 2005. The seminars, focusing on the connection between religion and the development of cities, inspired his collection of stories about the human past, Mixed Harvest (2019), which explores what happened before religion and sedentism.

Rob Swigart contributed to the Eastgate Quarterly Review of Hypertext, a digital literary periodical produced by Eastgate Systems and distributed via floppy disks in folios. His multimedia hypertext work, “Directions,” was published in issue 1:4 (Eastgate Quarterly Review of Hypertext, 1994). The work includes astronomical images, scientific graphs and maps, poetry, prose, black and white BITMAP images, and sound effects all arranged in a modified Periodic Table of Elements.

Rob Swigart later published a hardcover novel building upon the story, Portal: A Dataspace Retrieval (1988).

Portal is a text-driven adventure computer game published for the Amiga in 1986 by Activision. Ports to the Commodore 64, Apple II, and MS-DOS were released later, and versions for Macintosh and Atari ST were announced and developed but never released.

Though Swigart's satirical work has elements of science fiction, Swigart's first science fiction novel, The Book of Revelations, was published by E. P. Dutton Co. in 1981. It is an experimental New Wave science fiction novel about a futures researcher in California.

His second novel, A.K.A./A Cosmic Fable, was nominated for a BSFA Best Novel Award in 1979.

A.K.A./A Cosmic Fable was nominated for the BSFA Best Novel Award in 1979, alongside J. G. Ballard’s The Unlimited Dream Company, Tom Reamy’s Blind Voices, Thomas M. Disch’s On Wings of Song, and Arthur C. Clarke’s The Fountains of Paradise.

Rob Swigart began writing at a young age, first poetry and then short stories. He started writing seriously in graduate school, as he studied literature and taught fiction writing. The stories he wrote as a graduate student grew into his first novel, Little America (1977). He then went on to publish two more novels in a similar satirical style.

Rob Swigart published three satire novels in the late 1970s: Little America (1977), A.K.A./A Cosmic Fable (1978), and The Time Trip (1979). Swigart's satirical work has been called avant-garde and postmodern, as well as absurd and iconoclastic for its unconventional style and content.

Rob Swigart was born in Chicago to attorney Eugene Swigart Jr. and actress Ruth Robison Swigart. His family moved to Cincinnati, where Swigart grew up, in 1947. He currently lives in California.

Rob Swigart (born January 7, 1941) is an American novelist, poet, short story writer, futurist, and archaeology scholar best known for his satirical work, archaeology writing, science fiction, and interactive novel computer game, Portal (Activision, 1986). He is the author of sixteen books, including fourteen novels, one business book, and one translated prose poem.