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The Big Three
--- Isaac Asimov
--- Arthur C. Clarke
--- Robert A. Heinlein
Robert E. Vardeman
--- Introduction
--- Fantasy
--- The Accursed
--- Cenotaph Road
--- The Demon Crown Trilogy
--- The Jade Demons Quartet
--- The Keys to Paradise
--- Swords of Raemllyn
--- The War of Powers
--- Science Fiction
--- Biowarriors
--- Masters of Space
--- Star Frontier Trilogy
--- Tom Swift
--- The Weapons of Chaos
--- Thrillers and Mysteries
--- Nick Carter: Killmaster
--- Peter Thorne, Psychic
--- eXtraordinary Bureau
--- Other Works
--- Other Novels and Collections
--- Lady Death
--- Westerns
--- Short Fiction
Science Fiction and Fantasy Series
SF Universes and Fantasy Worlds
A Brief Biography of Robert E. Vardeman
Robert Edward Vardeman is an author, primarily of fantasy, science fiction and westerns, with more than 300 novels and several well-known series to his credit including The War of Powers (co-authored with Victor Milán), Swords of Raemlynn (co-authored with Geo. W. Proctor) and Cenotaph Road.
As well as publishing under his own name, Vardeman has also written under house names such as Jake Logan (Slocum), Nick Carter (Killmaster) and Victor Appleton (Tom Swift), and several pseudonyms including Karl Lassiter and Jackson Lowry in the western genre, and F.J. Hale (fantasy) and Edward S. Hudson (science fiction).
"Using Karl Lassiter keeps SF fans from being startled if they’d pick up, say Sword and Drum or First Cherokee Rifles. . . . My F/SF pen names were used for a different reason. When I was turning out a lot of SF, there would be times where I had two or three titles coming out in the same month from different publishers. I put the Star Frontier series under a pen name for this reason (ditto with the fantasy series After the Spell Wars). This difference in pen names soothed publishing feathers that I wouldn't be competing with myself. ("I'll buy one Vardeman book this month, but two? Never! I'll buy that Edward Hudson book instead. Maybe the F.J. Hale book, too.") I have no idea if this is reality, but the publishers liked the notion."
Robert E. Vardeman, from an interview with M-BRANE SF, 2009
Vardeman was born on 6 January 1947 "down the street from the Crazy Water Hotel" in Mineral Wells, a city in Palo Pinto County, Texas. He first encountered science fiction as an eight-year-old when he read the first three Tom Swift Jr. novels as part of a Cub Scout project and was soon hooked. "I read the Hardy Boys, of course, but SF was the drug of choice."
Robert Heinlein’s earlier books were a strong influence on Vardeman’s tastes – up to and including The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress – and he was also a fan of Arthur C. Clarke, Poul Anderson and Isaac Asimov. Later Robert Silverberg and John Brunner were the must-read SF authors along with fantasists such Fritz Leiber and Thomas Burnett Swann. Nowadays he reads mysteries for fun, as well as the older Tom Swift books and nonfiction on modern physics.
"I never wanted to write short stories. For that matter, I never wanted to be a writer. I am a product of the Cold War, growing up in the '50s amid bomb shelters and On the Beach and Khruschev pounding on a desk at the UN promising to bury us. I can remember exactly the moment of Kennedy's assassination (high school chemistry class), I can also remember the precise instant I learned of Sputnik (standing in the cafeteria line at Jonathan Wainwright Elementary School, 5th grade). This decided me to be a nuclear physicist."
Robert E. Vardeman, from the introduction to Stories from Desert Bob's Reptile Ranch, 2008
Vardeman relocated to Albuquerque in 1963 and it was there that he met book and magazine collector Roy Tackett when they both tried to buy a copy of a September 1956 issue of Astounding in a secondhand bookstore. They became friends and soon after held the inaugural meeting of the Albuquerque Science Fiction Society. The club flourished and in 1969 held its first SF convention called "NewMexiCon" – later christened "Bubonicon" by Vardeman who had noted that Egypt had banned people from New Mexico from travelling there because of the bubonic plague cases that sometimes occurred in the state.
As well as becoming involved in the social aspects of fandom, Vardeman also made a name for himself as a fan writer, contributing letters and articles to a number of fanzines of the time in addition to starting SLANapa, a monthly amateur press association, and Sandworm, his own bi-monthly fanzine. His writing earned him a nomination for the 1972 Hugo award for Best Fan Writer.
"My very first short story appearance was in a Spanish language magazine, Nueva Dimension. I never got paid, not one thin peseta. But I was published."
Robert E. Vardeman on the publication of Automatización: 1984
in Nueva Dimensión #18, December 1970
Vardeman graduated from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque with a bachelor’s degree in Physics and went on to work for Sandia National Laboratories in the Solid-State Physics Research Department where he spent five years working on technology relating to nuclear weapons and a radioisotope thermoelectric generator to power spacecraft such as the Viking Lander, as well as earning a master’s degree in Materials Engineering.
"It is all Geo. W. Proctor's fault. He was a reporter for a Dallas newspaper at the time and had published several short stories. "It's easy," he said. "It's fun." I was unconvinced. "We can make a few bucks." We co-authored a story and voila! it sold. Payment on publication. The magazine folded before it was printed. The story sold again. And again and again, all payment on publication, all dying before we saw print or long green. The story title? A Killing in the Market."
Robert E. Vardeman, from his FAQ on CenotaphRoad.com
Proctor and Vardeman had already worked together on an erotic SF novel for Carlyle Communications (Pleasure Planet, 1974). Vardeman also co-authored The Jackals Below, a short story with Richard J. Patten (The Second Void, November 1975, ed. Paul Collins) and The Biological Revolution with Jeff Slaten (2076: The American Tricentennial, Pyramid Books, 1977).
Vardeman had been accepted into Berkley to work on a PhD in ceramic engineering but after deferring his studies for six months opted instead for a career as a full-time writer when he sold a fantasy novel to Dell Publishing on the basis of a synopsis and sample chapters. Later, an editor change at Dell led to it being dropped and condemned to publishing oblivion. A similar fate awaited Quicktime Death, an action-adventure spy book in the Baroness series that was accepted for publication by Pocket Books, but did not make it into print before the series was cancelled. After these false starts, Vardeman's science fiction novel The Sandcats of Rhyl eventually appeared in bookstores in 1978.
1978 also brought the publication of The Mating Web in Andrew J. Offutt's anthology Swords Against Darkness III. This short story was the first appearance of Krek, the arachnid hero of the Cenotaph Road series. Krek made another short story appearance in The Opal Egg in 1982 (Sorcerer's Apprentice #15, ed. Liz Danforth) before Cenotaph Road itself was publushed in 1983.
Vardeman's output increased markedly in the 1980s when he began to write multiple series of novels across a range of genres. Working with Victor Milán, a fellow resident of Albuquerque, he co-wrote The War of Powers fantasy series (Playboy Paperbacks, 1980-82) as well as his Cenotaph Road series published by Ace Books between 1983 and 84. Writing as Nick Carter, he also contributed eight novels to the Killmaster spy adventure series (Ace Charter Books, 1980-84) and his first Tom Swift volume under the Victor Appleton house name (Wanderer Books, 1983).
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"When Simon & Schuster got the [Star Trek] franchise, David Hartwell looked around for writers. I loved TOS [The Original Series], proposed two novels, he bought one -- the first one bought for the series, by the way. Roddenberry’s novelization of the first movie and Vonda McIntyre’s novel killing off Kirk were both published before mine for obvious reasons. A year or two later, Hartwell told me he wanted the second proposal I’d done. This was a real surprise, but I jumped at the chance. Over the last 25-plus years, these two books -- The Klingon Gambit [1981] and Mutiny on the Enterprise [1983] -- have sold steadily and well and both are still available as e-books. . . . I changed agents between the first and second book and my career moved in a different direction. In 1984 I began writing westerns and let the chance to do more Star Trek books slip away." Robert E. Vardeman, from an interview with M-BRANE SF, 2009 |
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Beginning in 1984, Vardeman wrote for the western-themed Slocum series published by Berkley Paperbacks under the house name of Jake Logan. By the time that the series ended in 2014, he had authored 114 books featuring the hero, John Slocum.
As the decade progressed, Vardeman continued to be prolific in the fantasy realm with The Jade Demons Quartet (Avon, 1985-86), The Keys to Paradise (Tor, 1986-87) and The Demon Crown Trilogy (Tor, 1989-90), along with three science fiction series: The Weapons of Chaos (Berkley/Ace Books, 1986-88), The Masters of Space (Avon Books, 1987) and Biowarriors (Ace Books, 1989-90).
New English Library published an omnibus edition of the first three volumes of The War of Powers series in 1984. I found this and the second omnibus on the shelves of Hudson's Books in Birmingham in 1985 or 86. The excellent cover artwork by Chris Achilleos first drew me in, but the adventures of Fost Longstrider and Moriana and their nemeses Prince Rann and Synalon only whetted my appetite for more. New English Library duly obliged by reprinting much of Vardeman's back catalogue including The Keys to Paradise (1986), The Jade Demons Quartet (1987) and Weapons of Chaos (1989). The cover art by Paul Bryn Davies on the later books was never quite up to the level of Chris Achilleos, but NEL and REV already had me hooked.
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"I was doing the Cenotaph Road series for Ace when the first three Swords of Raemllyn books with Geo. Proctor were sold there. Geo and I talked over where we wanted to go, I did the synopsis, we rewrote it, I did the first draft since I wrote faster, Geo did a rewrite and then I did a final rewrite with him doing the page proofs. The process went quite well and we were able to talk endlessly about it. Geo lived in Texas, I was in NM. . . . The first three Raemllyn books did so well, we sold three more. Ace balked at a final three, but those sold to New English Library and never saw American dead tree publication. . . . Working with Geo was trying, especially when our ideas diverged, but the books came out a great fusion of his characters and my plots. And somehow we remained best friends throughout and after." Robert E. Vardeman on the publication of Swords of Raemllyn (Ace Books and NEL, 1985-95) |
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Back in the States, Vardeman was writing much less fantasy and science fiction during the 1990s and 2000s -- most notably Biowarriors (Ace Books 1989-90), The Accursed (NEL, 1994) and a selection of standalone novels and media tie-ins -- but he tried his hand at murder mysteries with the Peter Thorne, Psychic Investigator series (Avon Books, 1990-92). He also continued to be a very active author of westerns, not only writing as Jake Logan in the Slocum series, but also on his own behalf, under the pen names of Karl Lassiter and Jackson Lowry, and under various house names including Jon Sharpe and Ford Fargo.
Vardeman was an early convert to e-publishing. In the mid-1990s some of his short stories were published on WayfarerOnline and while in 2004 others appeared in anthologies edited by Jean Rabe and published on CD-ROM. However, it was not until 2008, when he began to sell his work via his own online bookstore as well as at itunes and Amazon, that he would pursue a new way to reach his readers.
"Vertically Integrated Publishing (VIPub) is a term I concocted to describe what authors need to do to survive the rigors of e‑publishing. We need to create the work, edit it, find ways of publishing it and then even more ways of advertising and selling it. That we would have control of the entire process is both a benefit and a huge weight crushing us down. Most of us would prefer to sit in a room lit only by the glow from our monitors and . . . write. Nothing else."
Robert E. Vardeman on being an author in the brave new world of e‑publishing
Many of Robert E. Vardeman's novels and short stories are available in a variety of ebook formats at the Cenotaph Road Store.
An illustrated bibliography of novels by Robert E. Vardeman is available here.
References
- Robert E. Vardeman - Stories from Desert Bob's Reptile Ranch
- Robert E. Vardeman - Cenotaph Road Store
- Robert E. Vardeman - Facebook
- Robert E. Vardeman - Twitter
- Robert E. Vardeman - Wordpress
- Robert E. Vardeman - Robert E. Vardeman - Science Fiction & Fantasy
- Robert E. Vardeman - Jackson Lowry - Westerns
- Robert E. Vardeman - FAQ - retrieved 27 November 2016
- Amazon - Robert E. Vardeman - retrieved 27 November 2016
- Wikipedia - Robert E. Vardeman - retrieved 27 November 2016
- Fantastic Fiction - Robert E. Vardeman - retrieved 27 November 2016
- The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction - Robert E. Vardeman - retrieved 27 November 2016
- The Internet Speculative Fiction Database - Robert E. Vardeman - Summary Bibliography - retrieved 27 November 2016
- Albuquerque Journal - Prolific Bubonicon Pioneer Weighs In on Science Fiction Writing - retrieved 28 February 2018
- Lachesis Publishing - Q&A with Robert E. Vardeman - retrieved 27 November 2016
- M-BRANE SF - Q&A with Robert E. Vardeman - retrieved 28 February 2018
- Tom Rizzo - Storyteller's 7: Robert Vardeman and Crossing Genres - retrieved 27 November 2016
- Western Fictioneers - Western Fictioneers Members - Vardeman, Robert - retrieved 28 February 2018
A list of the first publications of Robert E. Vardeman's science fiction, fantasy, thriller and mystery novels appears below.
Titles in black are novels, while those in blue are collections and omnibuses.
Listings of westerns and short fiction are in preparation.
| Fantasy | Science Fiction | Thrillers and Mysteries |
| The Accursed | Biowarriors | Nick Carter: Killmaster |
| After the Spell Wars | Masters of Space | Peter Thorne, Psychic Investigator |
| Cenotaph Road | Star Frontier Trilogy | eXtraordinary Bureau Casefiles |
| The Demon Crown Trilogy | Tom Swift | |
| The Jade Demons Quartet | The Weapons of Chaos | |
| The Keys to Paradise | ||
| Swords of Raemllyn | Other Works | Coming Soon |
| The War of Powers | Other Novels and Collections | Westerns |
| Lady Death | Short Fiction |