"Each book will have a lot of cliffhangers, because I like that." -- Kevin J. Anderson
Kevin J. Anderson (born March 27, 1962) is an American science fiction author. He has written spin-off novels for Star Wars, StarCraft, Titan A.E., and The X-Files, and is the co-author of the Dune prequels. His original works include the Saga of Seven Suns series and the Nebula Award-nominated Assemblers of Infinity. He has also written several comic books including the Dark Horse Star Wars collection Tales of the Jedi written in collaboration with Tom Veitch, Predator titles (also for Dark Horse), and X-Files titles for Topps. Some of Anderson's superhero novels include Enemies and Allies, about the first meeting of Batman and Superman and The Last Days of Krypton, telling the story of how Krypton came to be destroyed and the choice two parents had to make for their son.
Anderson serves as a judge in the Writers of the Future contest.
His wife is author Rebecca Moesta. They currently reside near Monument, Colorado.
"Do you want Columbus to go across the ocean, or do you want to put a message in a bottle and hope that it lands somewhere? I'd rather have actual people be there. Whether they look like Americans or like the inhabitants of some other country, depends on who has the most drive.""Dune is the bestselling science fiction book of all time. It's something you really need to read in your lifetime. If you're going to read The Lord of the Rings, which everyone should, then you have to read Dune, too.""Every spare second I would write, somehow. On my lunch hour, too.""I always had this non-stop drive. I had to keep sending stories out and every once in awhile I'd get something accepted or get the little trickle of positive feedback.""I always turn in my books on time, so you can always count on a book coming out when it's supposed to.""I did several interesting jobs, working in restaurants, I worked at a lab rat farm, feeding and watering all these rats. Then I got a full-time job as a technical writer for a large scientific research laboratory.""I don't think the author should make the reader do that much work to remember who somebody is.""I got to spend all of my time every day at work reading and editing papers about cutting-edge technical research and getting paid for it. Then I'd go home at night and turn what I learned into science fiction stories.""I had a minor in Russian history, and this was at the time when the big Cold War was going on.""I mean, I wasn't stupid. I knew we'd make money and sell a lot of Dune books.""I sold my very first novel when I was 24 or 25 years old.""I think now I'm up to something like 85 different titles that I've published.""I think that somebody with the resources and innovation and the idea is going to come out of nowhere and come up with a successful space travel program.""I want to make it so that so many things happen... that you didn't expect would happen in this series, that you realize that you have to read every one of them.""I wanted the feel in these books to be like an epic fantasy, with kings, queens, dukes and court politics, but of course like what I was explaining before, about making the science make sense, you have to make the politics make sense, too.""I'm talking to you and it's basically a direct communication, whereas if I'm writing a letter to you and you read the letter, there are like 12 extra deconstruction and reconstruction steps in the communication.""I've had the same, full-time assistant and typist for eight or nine years now. She's read everything I've written, she types everything and does a good job, translates it and makes comments.""If I could go back in time and tell my younger self that eventually that I'd become very successful writing Dune books after Frank Herbert's death, I would have laughed myself silly, I think, at how strange that prospect would be.""If you had an alien race that looked like insects, then they would build robots to look like themselves, not to look like people.""If you look at the British royal family and take away the scandals and the goofy stuff that's going on, people love to have this king to look up to - the royals are like celebrities.""In a certain sense, this guy - who is one of the most evil people in the book - he's not really that bad at running the show, because he knows what he's doing, he's smart and he's got the big picture in mind. He's like the Godfather.""It was like there was a pile of kindling that was in the back of my imagination just waiting there. Once I lit it, it just flared up and I kept getting ideas and ideas.""My dad is a bank president and my mom was an accountant and they didn't think that seeking the life of a freelance writer was very practical, you see. Of course, I was just as determined to do it.""My total year's income from working as hard as I possibly could from writing went from like $30 one year to about $70 the next year. And it made me realize that maybe you couldn't really pay the rent that way.""Of course you don't make any noise in space, because there's no air.""One of the things that was kind of shocking for humans... was to come to terms with was the fact that, hey, we may not be the center of the universe.""Over the years, I've trained myself to speak using the same language I would use if I were typing: meaning using full sentences in the way that paragraphs and scenes are arranged.""Sure, President Bush can say that the U.S. government won't fund stem cell research, but believe me, Japan is applauding. Because they will just do it first and get all the patents.""Telling your story out loud is the way human beings communicate. We don't normally think up words, translate how to spell them and then move our fingers up and down over this randomly arranged set of keys to make the same letters appear on a screen.""The great secret behind classified projects is that most of them are so utterly boring and uninteresting that James Bond wouldn't even take a second look at them.""The people who make policy decisions should damned well know what they are talking about before they make the decisions. There is nobody who is an expert on cloning who would be afraid after seeing Attack of the Clones.""There is grand romance in The Lord of the Rings. It's an important part of epic literature.""We sat around on a hotel balcony with a bottle of wine and tried to figure out how you would go about blowing up a planet. That's the kind of conversations science fiction writers have when they get together. We don't talk about football or anything like that.""We wanted to write the first prequels as a story that anyone could pick up.""Wouldn't you like to have an augmented memory chip that you could plug into your head so you don't have to look everything up and remember everything?"
Kevin J. Anderson (aka Kevin James Anderson) was born March 27, 1962 in Racine, Wisconsin. The War of the Worlds greatly influenced him. He wrote his first story at eight years old entitled Injection. At ten, he bought a typewriter and has written ever since.
In his freshman year in high school, he submitted his first short story to a magazine, but it took two more years before one of his manuscripts was accepted. When it was accepted, they paid him in copies of the magazine. In his senior year, he sold his first story for money for $12.50. In 1988 his first novel, Resurrection, Inc. was published.
Anderson worked at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for twelve years. There, he met Rebecca Moesta (his wife) and Doug Beason, with whom he frequently writes.
After several of his early novels were published and met with critical acclaim, Lucasfilm offered him a chance at writing Star Wars novels.
Since 1993, 47 of Anderson's novels have been in bestseller lists. He has more than 20 million books in print worldwide. His books have been translated into Chinese, Croatian, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish.
The Essential Chronology (with Daniel Wallace, 2000)
The New Essential Chronology (original text only)
Dune books
(all with Brian Herbert)
House Atreides (1999)
House Harkonnen (2000)
House Corrino (2001)
The Butlerian Jihad (2002)
The Machine Crusade (2003)
The Battle of Corrin (2004)
The Road to Dune (2005)
Hunters of Dune (2006)
Sandworms of Dune (2007)
Paul of Dune (2008)
The Winds of Dune (2009)
The Sisterhood of Dune (2012)
The Throne of Dune (tbd)
Short stories:
"A Whisper of Caladan Seas"
"Hunting Harkonnens"
"Whipping Mek"
"The Faces of a Martyr"
"Sea Child"
Hellhole Series
with Brian Herbert
Hellhole (2010)
Hellhole Inferno (2012)
Hellhole Impact (2014?)
with Doug Beason
Lifeline (1990)
The Trinity Paradox (1991)
Nanospace (1992)
Assemblers of Infinity (1993) ISBN 0-553-29921-2
Ill Wind (1995)
Virtual Destruction (1996)
Fallout (1997)
Ignition (1997)
Lethal Exposure (1998)
using materials by L. Ron Hubbard
Ai! Pedrito! (1998)
using materials by A. E. van Vogt
Slan Hunter (2007)
with Dean Koontz
Dean Koontz's Frankenstein, Book One: Prodigal Son (January 25, 2005). Future editions of this book removed Anderson's name from the cover.
Crystal Doors series
with Rebecca Moesta
Island Realm (2006)
Ocean Realm (2007)
Sky Realm (2008)
X-Files books
Ground Zero (1995) ISBN 978-0002254489
Ruins (1996) ISBN 978-0006482536
Antibodies (1997) ISBN 978-0002246385
StarCraft books
Shadow of the Xel'Naga (2001) (as Gabriel Mesta)
Fantastic Voyage books
Fantastic Voyage: Microcosm (2001)
as K. J. Anderson
The Fantastic History of a Dark Genius (2002) (a fictional life of Jules Verne's Captain Nemo)
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen - novelization of the 2003 movie
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow - novelization of the 2004 movie
Original
Resurrection, Inc. (1988)
Climbing Olympus (1994)
Blindfold (1995)
Hopscotch (2002)
The Martian War (2005) (as Gabriel Mesta)
Gamearth Trilogy
Gamearth (March 1989)
Game Play (October 1989)
Game's End (September 1990)
Saga of Seven Suns series
Prequel: Veiled Alliances (Graphic Novel) (2004)
Hidden Empire (2002)
A Forest of Stars (2003)
Horizon Storms (2004)
Scattered Suns (18 July 2005)
Of Fire and Night (2006)
Metal Swarm (July 2007 UK/Australia, December 2007 US)
The Ashes of Worlds (June 2008)
Terra Incognita series
The Edge of the World (June 2009)
The Map of All Things (June 2010)
The Key to Creation (Forthcoming, 2011)
Anderson and musician and music producer Erik Norlander created a crossover project called Roswell Six and released the album "Beyond The Horizon" . It combines progressive rock/metal with science fiction lyrics by Anderson and his wife.
HarperEntertainment
The Last Days of Krypton (2007)
Enemies & Allies (2009)
Short story collections
Dogged Persistence (2001)
18 stories, including: Canals in the Sand, Dogged Persistence, A Whisper of Caladan Seas, Final Performance, Fondest of Memories, The Ghost of Christmas Always, Human, Martian One, Two, Three, Prisoner of War, Reflections in a Magnetic Mirror, Scientific Romance
