Bruce Balfour, the acclaimed author of The Forge of Mars, brings us to a future age in which virtual versions of the dead control the desires of those they've left behind-with terrifying results.
Bruce Balfour was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1958. In response, the American government created the space program.
Balfour moved to Orange County, California when he was ten. An avid science fiction reader, he started writing short fiction when he was fourteen. Hundreds of short stories later, his first professional sales occurred in 1982, when he was finally able to beat the editor of Twilight Zone into submission with a flurry of manuscripts.
After living around Los Angeles for ten years, Balfour felt obligated to study film production(and business)at UCLA. When he realized that there were only about eight people in California who were actually employed in film production, he made the natural switch and became a computer science major at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Desperate for people with artificial intelligence training, NASA hired Balfour at Ames Research Center. When they needed someone to push computer buttons on the Kuiper Airborne Observatory, a high‑altitude research aircraft, NASA put Balfour on a team to capture infrared images of the Space Shuttle on reentry.
He enjoyed pushing buttons, and there were a few occupations he hadn't worked at yet, so Balfour became a computer game designer/producer/director. Involved in early and successful efforts to bring extensive stories and deeper characters into computer adventure games, several of Balfour's original and adapted PC games -- such as Neuromancer, Wasteland, Outpost, and The Dagger of Amon Ra -- became award‑winning bestsellers.
While managing the development of his computer games, Balfour's first novel, Star Crusader, was published in 1995. A non-fiction book that explained the science behind his Outpost space simulation game - sometimes characterized as "Sim City in space" - was published in 1994. Adopted as a teaching tool by many high school science classes, the Outpost game and book remained in print until 2000.
Fearing that he might miss something during the dot-com boom, Balfour moved from the mountains near Yosemite and returned to the San Francisco Bay Area. As the director of product development for a large educational software company, he was a highly-paid cog in the machine of a multinational corporation, spending way too much time with high-tech executives, cultish software developers, and the possibilities of advanced Internet technologies, causing the darker themes of his next novels to ferment in his head. As you might expect, his natural response was to then get a degree in science journalism from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Returning to the world of Big Science and Big Shiny Objects, from x-ray synchrotrons to supercomputers, Balfour took a job with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California. Infected with an apparent desire to work for every national lab in the country, Balfour then took a job with Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, California, where he works in Business Development and pretends to understand some of what's going on around him at the lab (which is much stranger than science fiction.
supporting young companies engaged in advanced transportation and renewable energy technology development (see www.igateihub.org for more information).
Balfour's recent novels, which explore such diverse subjects as artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, international politics, the future of the Internet, and the future of marketing, have been well-received. The Forge of Mars, published by Berkley/Ace in September of 2002, was a national bestseller. The 2003 sequel, The Digital Dead, examined realistic near-future technologies that simulate immortality and how they might be used by unscrupulous marketers and politicians. As they say, some people would die to live forever. Prometheus Road was published by Berkley/Ace in October of 2004.
His most recent novel is Burning Season, a modern-day techno-thriller, published in January 2012. He is now working on a historical novel set in ancient Egypt during the reign of Pharaoh Ramesses III, as well as another modern-day thriller.
If you can stand it, read more about these books and their backgrounds, see photo galleries, and get the full experience at www.brucebalfour.com
