Happy Birthday, Timothy Zahn

September 1, 2011 at 12:01 am | Posted in Birthday | Leave a comment
Tags: timothy zahn

Today Roqoo Depot wishes a very special happy birthday to author Timothy Zahn. Mr. Zahn kicked off the phenomena that become the Star Wars Expanded Universe with Heir to the Empire twenty years ago. Since then he has written numerous novels which have focused on his characters Thrawn and Mara Jade. Those Star Wars novels include: Heir to the Empire, Dark Force Rising, The Last Command, Specter of the Past, Vision of the Future, Survivor’s Quest, Outbound Flight, Allegiance, and Choices of One. Next Tuesday the 20th Anniversary Edition of Heir to the Empire will be released featuring annotations by Mr. Zahn and a new novella entitled “Crisis of Faith”. He has also written dozens of short stories for Star Wars. Aside from that, he has written several original science fiction series including Blackcollar, Cobra, and the Conqueror’s Trilogy.

Tim was born in Chicago, IL and later on got a BS degree in physics at Michigan State University, and a M.S. degree in physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He started writing science fiction as a hobby in 1975…

I was working on a mathematical project that really wasn’t going anywhere. It was something we hoped would be useful in plasma physics. It wasn’t really working. My advisor was too stubborn to give up. And he was out of town a lot, so it gave me a fair amount of time while I was stuck waiting for him to get back into town with not much to do, so I started writing as kind of a hobby. I sold my first story in December 1978: it was a story called “Ernie”, it came out in the September ’79 Analog. In July of that year, before the story came out, my advisor died suddenly of a heart attack. No one else would pick up the project because it wasn’t working and probably would never work. So I spent a semester working on the preliminaries for a new project, decided that I was having more fun writing, and decided in January of 1980 to kind of “take the plunge”, quit grad school and start writing full-time. So this last month was my twentieth anniversary of being a full-time writer.-Timothy Zahn, TFN interview, 2000.

If you’d like to learn more about Timothy Zahn or would like the chance to speak with him, then feel free to check out his Facebook page.

Posted By: Skuldren for Roqoo Depot.