George Zebrowski's nearly forty books include novels, short fiction collections, anthologies, and a book of essays.

Zebrowski has published more than seventy works of short fiction and more than a hundred and forty articles and essays, and has written about science for Omni Magazine. His short fiction and essays have appeared in Amazing Stories, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Science Fiction Age, Nature, the Bertrand Russell Society News, and many other publications.

His best known novel is Macrolife (Harper & Row, 1979), about which Arthur C. Clarke said, "It's been years since I was so impressed. One of the few books I intend to read again." Library Journal chose Macrolife as one of the one hundred best science fiction novels, and The Easton Press included it in its Masterpieces of Science Fiction series. Zebrowski's short fiction has been nominated for the Nebula Award and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. Stranger Suns (Bantam, 1991) was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.

The Killing Star (William Morrow, 1995), written with scientist/author Charles Pellegrino, received unanimous praise in national newspapers and magazines. Brute Orbits (HarperCollins, 1998), an uncompromising novel about the future of the penal system, was praised by reviewers for its characters, originality, and thought.

Cave of Stars, a novel that is part of his Macrolife mosaic, was published by HarperCollins in 1999. Skylife, an anthology edited by George Zebrowski with physicist and writer Gregory Benford, was published by Harcourt Brace in 2000. Swift Thoughts, a hardcover collection of his stories, with an introduction by Gregory Benford, came out in 2002. A second hardcover collection, In the Distance, and Ahead In Time, was also published in the same year. Synergy SF: New Science Fiction, the next volume of his legendary Synergy series of original anthologies, was published in 2004.

George Zebrowski was one of the principal speakers at Philcon 2004, and he kindly agreed to an interview in between signing books for his fans.

biographical information from Philcon.org

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How did you and your partner, Pamela Sargent, get involved in writing the Star Trek novels that you collaborated on?

We watched the original episodes in the 1960s. And we had thoughts over the years, long before we became writers, about certain episodes. And when the chance arose to go back to those episodes, and revisit certain things, revise that, that's what we did. So there's a kind of love here.

At one point, the publishers there said, "Hey, let's get some really good authors to write Star Trek books, instead of the usual." So they asked us, and they made us a nice offer, you know, and that's what we did. But it seems not to have helped or hurt us, as far as our own writing goes.

What keeps you writing? Where do your ideas come from?

From everywhere, but principally from my reading just about anything: philosophy of science. My background is in philosophy of science, but I read history. I read all contemporary and 19th Century literature. Everything interests me, and everything sets me off. So I come up with four or five story ideas a week. I open a file; I make some notes. There's more notes that go into that file, and eventually that story will be written. There are some story ideas that are just dying to be written, and I don't have time to do them because I'm working on longer things. Now if anything, I have too much material to do, and I have to start choosing what means most to me.

It's actually good, in a way, because given the hammer of commerce, I've been held back from my novels, unless I want to write them entirely on speculation. If I want a contract, they've been held back in that way. But things are going our way again: my way again, Pam's way again. We're going to have new offers. For example, the Pyr Prometheus books. And it's by Lou Anders, who's going to do a 25th anniversary reissue of Macrolife, the novel I'm best known for, although I think that Brute Orbits might be right there, too. And the forgotten novel here is Cave of Stars, which is a companion to Macrolife. And what Lou Anders may have me do is a third Macrolife novel.

And short stories usually I have a commission. Somebody asks, and it's spoken for almost immediately. Tomorrow [at Philcon] I'll be reading a short story called "A Piano Full of Dead Spiders," which is sort of a fantasy and not much science in it. But it's going to be published in Amazing Stories in March. It's a tough-minded, hard-edged story, which may get a little hysterical. But that's exactly what I intended.