Stephen Euin Cobb

Science fiction writer

biography

Stephen Euin Cobb has earned his keep in an unusually wide variety of professions. He’s been a bank teller, construction worker, security guard, radiation worker in a nuclear facility, computer programmer and a long-haul truck driver. (Two of his novels were written on a notebook computer while in the sleeper of his eighteen-wheeled “big-rig.” These two novels have the distinction of having been written in every state in the union except Hawaii, Alaska, North Dakota and Vermont.)

Born in Orangeburg South Carolina in 1955, when he was only one year old his family moved to the western suburbs of Chicago. It was there that he spent his formative years.

As a child he showed a special talent in art. Drawing during the wrong classes got him in trouble a few times, but when he was a teenager he won a scholarship to study at the world famous Art Institute of Chicago. . . Not once but twice. He felt honored—and a little overwhelmed—to be taking art classes in the same building that housed paintings by Rembrandt, van Gogh and Renoir.

Despite the attention it brought him, however, art was not his true passion, that was science. Even when very young, long before he learned to read, he had his mother read books to him—books about dinosaurs. A decade before he even learned the word, he dreamed of being a paleontologist.

Then—thanks to after-school reruns of Star Trek and NASA’s widely televised lunar landings and a few dozen second-hand science fiction books—he developed a lifelong fascination with astronomy. He considers himself to have become an amateur astronomer at the age of thirteen; when, on a cold fall night in 1968 he propped his father’s little thirty-power spotting telescope on the hood of the family Buick and found his first planet. It was the ringed planet: Saturn. “It looked cold and pale and very small,” he says, “but it was clearly another world—an alien world.”

During the ensuing years he has enjoyed many other interests—chemistry, psychology, theoretical physics, computer programming, the internet, the list seems endless—but he has always returned to astronomy like an old friend. He sees it as foundational to all other sciences since they all exist within its huge bounds.

about his middle name

Stephen’s somewhat unusual middle name—Euin—is pronounced like a contraction of the two words You in, with the emphasis placed on You. This was his father’s middle name, as well as that of his father’s father. He believes it to be a Gaelic word which means young.

Stephen’s Novel: Plague at Redhook