Chris Lawson was born in Melbourne, Australia, a city Howard Waldrop once described as a hellhole in the Antipodes and which Ava Gardner said was a fitting pace to film the end of the world. For some of his childhood, the Lawsons lived in New Guinea, where Chris's father worked as a biologist on a crocodile farm (and has the scars to prove it) and his mother studied the psychology of personal identity in the local community. Then the family moved back to the setting of On the Beach.

Chris knew he wanted to be a writer at age eight. His first story was horror, involving tentacled alien invaders and an incoherent motorcycle chase action scene. Chris had the good fortune to be at exactly the right age to experience early Asimov and Tom Baker as Doctor Who, and then Star Wars, and then to be exactly old enough to love Blade Runner when it first came out. His most formative dramatic experience came in 1985 and it was Troy Kennedy Martin's Edge of Darkness.

While he was studying medicine, Chris worked as a service station attendant and a computer programmer back when it was possible for one person to know everything about the field -- ahh, the Golden Age of Computing. Since then, Chris has worked his way through internship, residency, obstetrics, paediatrics, neuro-rehab, general practice, an undefinable job with a multinational pharmaceutical company, a short time working in fringe medicine, and back to general practice in which field he continues to work today.

During this period he continued to write, slowly developing basic skills but never showing any definite edge. It finally clicked when he read Greg Egan's "The Cutie" and realised that all his interests -- science fiction, biological science, philosophy and ethics -- could be brought to bear on a single point, like a lens focussing the sun.

His first publications appeared in the renowned Australian journal Eidolon, and his first professional sale, "Unborn Again" went into the World Fantasy Award-winning anthology Dreaming Down-Under. "Unborn Again" was reprinted in Event Horizon and the Dozois Year's Best Science Fiction anthology, was listed in the Year's Best Fantasy and Horror reading list, and has been optioned for feature film development. His next sale was "Written in Blood," which first appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction and was reprinted in both the Dozois and the Hartwell Year's Best collectons. Both stories were translated into French for GALAXIES magazine, and "Written in Blood" was translated into Czech for IKARIE.

Since then, Chris has stretched himself into non-biological SF ("Chinese Rooms" in Eidolon), SF dressed as a police mystery ("Lacey's Fingerprints" in the Borderlands Convention book and reprinted in AGOG! TerrificTales), and SF about elite athletes ("Faster, Higher, Stronger" in Spectrum SF). His greatest departure from the hard biological core is an historical horror story set in the trenches of World War One ("No Man's Land" in Gathering the Bones) which he co-wrote with Simon Brown.

Chris is currently working on his first novel, a terrifying look at bioterrorism called Proof of Concept. Well, he's terrified by it, anyway. He has future designs on a daikaiju story, a time travel dinosaur novel set in Antarctica, a novelistic tour of relativity special and general, a story about sex and death and manipulating human pheromones, and a non-science fiction thriller about a medical trial going badly wrong on a small Caribbean island.

He is married with two children and continues to live in Melbourne.

MirrorDanse

Chris Lawson