Robert E Waters

Robert E. Waters

Robert Ernest Waters is a science fiction and fantasy writer who authorted the Star Citizen short stories The Cup as well as Hunter & Swan for Cloud Imperium Games. He's a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

Other Works

Cover of The Cup story by Robert Waters

The Last Hurrah book, by Robert E. Waters

After university in 1991, he found a gig as a tech writer at AutoZone, working in their communications department, where he realized that that kind of environment, doing that kind of writing, was not what I ultimately wanted to do. So about a year later, he went back to Memphis State in pursuit of a Master’s Degree.

Gaming was quickly becoming his dominant preoccupation, and he wrote very little fiction during this time. Weekends were spent playing PC games, board games, role-playing games. One day he decided to go to the local game shop to see if they had anything new and discovered Road Kill by Avalon Hill. He got home, tried to read the rules, and realized that they were quite difficult to figure out, so he decided to revise them and send them back to Avalon Hill with an offer to write their rules for them. He did not get any writing assignments, but became a play testers and two years later in 1994 he was hired as the Managing Editor of Avalon Hill quarterly magazine, The General. He helped to develop a number of boardgames during his time with The Avalon Hill Game Company.

In 1996 he went to work for Stanley Associates, a government contractor which had a lot of military software contracts. Robert worked for the Military Sealift Command division, and after a year he went on to work in their games division, where he worked on Wooden Ships and Iron men for Avalon Hill and on Semper Fi made for Computer Magic.

At the same time he was doing contract work on the side, working among others on the manuals for Harpoon 98.

It was during his time at Stanley that he began writing fiction again in a serious way. One year later, he sold his first story to Charlie Ryan at Aboriginal SF, which never saw the light of day, because the magazine went out of print.

He kept writing, and, in 1998, got the opportunity to be an assistant editor at Weird Tales, the Magazine of Fantasy and Horror, where he stayed for eight years.

In 1998 as well, he quit Stanley Associates and went to TalonSoft, a publisher of several award-winning computer wargames, where he stayed as producer and tech writer.

In 2000 he when he went to work for BreakAway Games, where he worked among others on Sid Meier's Antietam/South Mountain expansion, Waterloo and Austerlitz, both based in Sid's Antietam engine, Sid Meier's Civilization 3: Conquests, and even Electronic Art's Battle for Middle Earth: Rise of the Witch King, where he was assigned the task of scripting the first draft of the campaign. Breakaway Games has since expanded and Robert worked as writer, editor, designer, producer, and voice-actor of commercial and so-called serious games for government and medical use to train people, such as Vital Signs: Emergency Department.

His first official fiction publication was in 2003, with The Assassin’s Retirement Party, Weird Tales, Issue #332. The next came in 2004 with Sister Sonata in Nth Degree #11. The next came in 2007 with Ill Met in Mordheim, Black Library Publishing, Games Workshop. Since then, He published several stories in Nth Zine and the anthologies Bad-Ass Faeries 3,Dragon’s Lure, Barbarians at the Jumpgate, Hellfire Lounge 2, The Grantville Gazette, and many others.

Early Life

He was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1968. His grandfather used to tell him stories he made up on the fly. Aged five, he tried writing his first story. He spent his middle- and high-school years discovering the joys of reading. First, it was a series of semi-biographical fiction about important people in American history. In fourth grade, he tried reading The Hobbit, got about ten pages into it and put it down, but a couple years later, he returned to Middle-Earth and gave it another go.

In the sixth grade, he played baritone in the junior high band and decided to make a career in music, either as a performer, a composer, or a music teacher. He stuck with that idea through high-school and into college, but all the while he was reading and writing stories. In seventh grade, he discovered horror fiction. During his freshman year in high-school he picked up a collection of science fiction stories by Robert Sheckley and he played his first Dungeons & Dragons game. Sheckley introduced him to the sheer fun of writing short fiction; role-playing games introduced him to what would later become his career: working in the computer and board game industry. He also served as the first editor of Flights Magazine, his high-school’s literary journal. He put out the first three issues, it was his first experience with reading other people’s poetry and fiction, and deciding whether it would be accepted or not.

In 1986, he attended Memphis State University. While music had played an important role in his youth, writing and playing games became the focus. He tried journalism, but the curriculum there was not very good, and he didn’t like that kind of writing so he decided to try for a degree in English, and found that the university English department had a pretty good technical writing program. He graduated from MSU with a Bachelor’s Degree in English in 1991, and spent that summer looking for work.

External Links

• Official website

Trivia

• He loves smooth jazz.