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.
His second novel, A.K.A./A Cosmic Fable, was nominated for a BSFA Best Novel Award in 1979.
His latest novel, Mixed Harvest, won a Nautilus Gold Award in 2019.
Swigart's poetry and fiction have appeared in a number of magazines, including Antaeus, Atlantic Monthly, Epoch, Fiction, Michigan Quarterly Review, New England Review, New York Quarterly, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, and South Carolina Review.
Life and career
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.
Swigart majored in English at Princeton University and received a PhD in comparative literature from the State University of New York at Buffalo.
Teaching
Rob Swigart was an Associate Professor at San Jose University for 35 years, after which he was Visiting Scholar at the Stanford University Archaeology Center. His research, teaching, and archaeological writing focus on ancient societies and the 6,000-8,000 years during which humans adopted agriculture, as well as the consequences of this switch from a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle to farming.
Writing
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.
In the 70s and into the 80s, Swigart's poetry was published in a number of literary magazines across the United States, including Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Reed, New York Quarterly, and Michigan Quarterly magazines.
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.
Swigart also published the Thriller in Paradise series, technothrillers set in Hawaii; and the ongoing Lisa Emmer series of historical thrillers.
Electronic Literature
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.
Following, Swigart was a founding member and Secretary of the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO). During his time at ELO, Swigart participated in the Preservation, Archiving, Dissemination Project, an initiative that considered how to move electronic literature from defunct platforms to current technologies. He also published interactive multimedia novella About Time and other hypertext fiction and poetry, including short story “Seeking."
Futurist
Swigart worked as a research affiliate for the Institute for the Future, US-based not-for-profit think tank established to help organizations understand trends and plan for the future.
As a futurist, Swigart developed scenarios and wrote stories around topics such as climate change.
Satire fiction
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.