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.
Rob Swigart was born in Chicago to attorney Eugene Swigart Jr. and actress Ruth Robison Swigart.[3] His family moved to Cincinnati, where Swigart grew up, in 1947.[4] He currently lives in California.[5]
Swigart majored in English at Princeton University and received a PhD in comparative literature from the State University of New York at Buffalo.[5]
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.[6][7][8]
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).[9] 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.[8][10]
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.[8]
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.[11] 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.[11]
Following, Swigart was a founding member and Secretary of the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO).[12] 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.[13][14] He also published interactive multimedia novella About Time[15] and other hypertext fiction and poetry, including short story “Seeking."[16][17]
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.[18]
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[19] and postmodern,[20] as well as absurd and iconoclastic[21] for its unconventional style and content.
Though Swigart's satirical work has elements of science fiction, Swigart's first science fiction novel, The Book of Revelations, was published by E. P. Dutton Co. in 1981. It is an experimental New Wave science fiction novel about a futures researcher in California.[23]
Portal (1986)
Portal is a text-driven adventure computer game published for the Amiga in 1986 by Activision. Ports to the Commodore 64, Apple II, and MS-DOS were released later, and versions for Macintosh and Atari ST were announced and developed but never released.
The user plays as an unnamed astronaut who returns from a failed 100-year voyage, only to find that humans have disappeared from Earth. The astronaut discovers a barely functional computer connected to a storytelling mainframe called Homer. Homer tells stories of the past, but much of his memory is missing.[24] With the computer and Homer's help, the player attempts to piece together a narrative and discover what happened to the human race.
Rob Swigart later published a hardcover novel building upon the story, Portal: A Dataspace Retrieval (1988).
In April 2012, Subliminal Games launched a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign to recreate Portal as a modern third-person adventure game. The project was cancelled in June 2012 after falling short of the funding target.
An Outriders Anthology: Poetry in Buffalo 1969–1979 and After . Outriders Poetry Project, 2013. ISBN978-0984177288
“Billy The Kid Plays Squash with the President of General Motors”[54]
Reviews, articles, and essays
“Theocritus’ City Women” (1973, in the Bucknell Review #21)
“Computer Generations” (1984, in West Magazine)
“The Rhythm of Rock” (1984, in California Living)
“Classics Re-Examined: The Time of Death and the Death of Time: Genji Sex and the Victorian Sensorium Lady Murasaki.” (1984, in the San Francisco Jung Institute LibraryJournal #5.2 )[55]
“A Look at What’s Ahead” (1985, in MacWorld#2.4 )[56]
“They’re Playing Our Song” (1986, in MacWorld#3.2 )[57]
“Sexual Fantasy and the Literature of Despair” (1982, in Spirales, translated into French)
^Prendergast, Jane (September 21, 1989). "Ruth Robison Swigart, actress". The Cincinnati Enquirer. Archived from the original on August 30, 2020. Retrieved December 7, 2020.
^Swigart, Rob (1987). "Down Time". New England Review and Bread Loaf Quarterly. 10 (1): 49–54. JSTOR40241880. Archived from the original on April 9, 2022. Retrieved November 30, 2020.
^"Author Index". Fiction. Archived from the original on August 6, 2020. Retrieved November 30, 2020.
^Swigart, Rob (October 29, 2006). "Dispersion". Electronic Book Review. Archived from the original on March 7, 2021. Retrieved November 30, 2020.
^Swigart, Rob (August 1, 2008). "Seeking". Electronic Book Review. Archived from the original on February 24, 2021. Retrieved November 30, 2020.
^Swigart, Rob (August 22, 2019). "Water". Fictional Cafe. Archived from the original on August 5, 2020. Retrieved November 30, 2020.
^Swigart, Rob (Spring 2020). "Mine". Jet Fuel Review. 19: 100–103. Archived from the original on November 23, 2020. Retrieved November 30, 2020.
^Swigart, Rob (Spring 2020). "The Factory". The Deadly Writers Patrol. 17.
^Swigart, Rob (2020). "Sigrid". Sublunary Review. Archived from the original on April 9, 2022. Retrieved November 30, 2020.
^Swigart, Rob (January 2021). "Disappointment". Stonecoast Review. 14.
^Swigart, Rob (Spring 2021). "Floater". South Carolina Review. 53 (2).
^Swigart, Rob (Winter 1971–72). "God = 3rd Law of Thermodynamics"(PDF). Poetry Northwest. 12 (4): 15. Archived(PDF) from the original on January 19, 2021. Retrieved November 30, 2020.
^Swigart, Rob (Winter 1972–73). "The Wind Tunnel"(PDF). Poetry Northwest. 13 (4): 39–41. Archived(PDF) from the original on January 19, 2021. Retrieved November 30, 2020.
^Swigart, Rob (1973). "The Execution". New York Quarterly. 15.
^Swigart, Rob (1975). "The Gardener". Michigan Quarterly Review. 14 (1): 70–71. Archived from the original on May 5, 2017. Retrieved November 30, 2020.
^Swigart, Rob (Spring 1977). "Bone Poem"(PDF). Poetry Northwest. 18 (1): 15. Archived(PDF) from the original on January 19, 2021. Retrieved November 30, 2020.
^Swigart, Rob (1944). "Directions". Eastgate Quarterly Review of Hypertext. 1 (4).
^Swigart, Rob (May 1985). "A Look at What's Ahead"(PDF). MacWorld. 2 (4): 78. Archived(PDF) from the original on February 17, 2022. Retrieved November 30, 2020.
^Swigart, Rob (February 1986). "They're Playing Our Song"(PDF). MacWorld. 3 (2): 108–112. Archived(PDF) from the original on May 6, 2020. Retrieved November 30, 2020.
^Swigart, Rob (October 22, 2004). "Satisfying Ambiguity". Electronic Book Review. Archived from the original on February 26, 2021. Retrieved November 30, 2020.
^Swigart, Rob (November 8, 2004). "Past Futures, Future's Past". Electronic Book Review. Archived from the original on February 24, 2021. Retrieved November 30, 2020.
^Swigart, Rob (November 7, 2006). "Not Just A River". Electronic Book Review. Archived from the original on February 28, 2021. Retrieved November 30, 2020.
^Swigart, Rob (January 23, 2017). "The Rarest Tuscan Cheese". Life in Italy. Archived from the original on November 30, 2020. Retrieved November 30, 2020.
^Swigart, Rob (October 30, 2011). "Anomalies". Electronic Book Review. Archived from the original on March 1, 2021. Retrieved November 30, 2020.
^"Irish Film & TV Index". Irish Film & TV Research Online – Trinity College Dublin. Archived from the original on November 13, 2019. Retrieved December 7, 2020.