Bradley C. Denton was born in Wichita,
Kansas in June 1958 to Charles W. Denton and Virginia (Koci)
Denton. He would be the eldest of three boys. His
brother Scott was born in 1959, and his brother Russ was born in
1963. They both have their good points.
Brad learned
to read sometime in the misty years before kindergarten. But he was
also a member of the first generation of Americans for whom
television was omnipresent. His favorite early-childhood TV
programs were Superman (with George Reeves) and Major
Astro (a local Wichita kids' program featuring a man in a
spacesuit who showed cartoons).
He attended grade
school in Valley Center, Kansas, and began reading books such as the
Happy Hollisters and Hardy
Boys mystery series and
the Mike Mars, Astronaut (by Donald A. Wollheim)
science-fiction series. Then he moved on
to Revolt on Alpha C by Robert Silverberg,
Tunnel Through Time by Lester del Rey, and Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn by Mark
Twain. He also read every science book and magazine he could
get his hands on, especially if the science happened to be
astronomy.
As an eighth- and
ninth-grader in Towanda, Kansas, Brad read Robert A. Heinlein's "juveniles" (such as The
Star Beast and Podkayne of Mars) as well as Twenty
Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Around the World in
Eighty Days by
Jules Verne. He also read Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's
Sherlock Holmes stories, Isaac Asimov's Robot stories, and several
of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan novels (including the mind-blowing
Tarzan/Pellucidar crossover, Tarzan at the Earth's
Core).
During this same period,
Brad discovered The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
while visiting his Koci relatives near Topeka,
Kansas. He soon began buying his own copies of
F&SF from the Rexall drugstore in
Augusta, Kansas -- and although he also bought and subscribed to
other science-fiction magazines such as Galaxy,
Amazing, Worlds of If, and
(later) Asimov's, F&SF was
his favorite. It still is.
Brad graduated
from Circle High
School in Towanda in 1976, and he began studies at
the University of Kansas in Lawrence that fall. His initial
plan was to earn a Bachelor of Science degree in astronomy, then
pursue higher degrees in that field while writing science fiction on
the side. By the end of his sophomore year, however, he had
realized that a love of the night sky didn't necessarily
result in a love of the higher mathematics required to do
real science. Meanwhile, he had discovered that his love of literature and writing
had increased. So during his junior year at KU, he began
to pursue a double major. Two years later, he would graduate with a Bachelor
of Arts degree in Astronomy and English.
In June 1979,
Brad met nineteen-year-old Barbara Eggleston in Lawrence.
Although he was a liberal-arts major and she was
in the Business school, they found that
they had important cultural points in common: Both had rural-Kansas farming roots, and
both had Czech forebears (Barb on her father's side; Brad on
his mother's).
But this was what sealed
the deal: When they first met, Brad told Barb that he
was double-majoring in English and astronomy . . . which prompted Barb to
ask, "What will you do with that -- write science fiction?" And when Brad said,
"Well, yeah," Barb seemed to think it was a great idea.
Eight weeks later, they were engaged.
They married in August 1980.
Over the next few years, Barb
would earn a Bachelor of Science in Business, and Brad would earn
a Master of Arts in English. During his graduate semesters, Brad
took every opportunity to study both the craft of fiction writing
and the history of science fiction under KU English Professor
James E. Gunn -- one of the most accomplished authors and
distinguished scholars in the field.
Brad's first professional
fiction sale was a novelette, "The Music of the Spheres," accepted
by The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in July 1983 and published in the March
1984 issue. The story was one of several
that Brad had written for a creative Master's thesis under Professor Gunn, and
the sale came while he was studying at Professor Gunn's
Intensive English Institute on the Teaching of Science Fiction.
It was the culmination of Brad's academic career and the beginning of
his professional one.
By the spring of 1988, Barb
and Brad were living in a rented farmhouse outside Lawrence.
Brad had sold several more stories as well as his first novel,
Wrack &
Roll. And after a few
years as an employee of the KU Science Library, Barb
had decided to pursue a Master's degree in Library and
Information Science at the University of Texas. So they took their Irish
setter/Labrador retriever, Watson (named after Sherlock Holmes's, Francis
Crick's, and Alexander Graham Bell's sidekicks), and their cats,
Rufus and Clarence, and moved to Austin, Texas.
Seventeen years later,
they're still in Austin
-- or rather, in their home on the outskirts of the
city. Their beloved dog Watson passed away in 1999 at the age of
fifteen, and Rufus the cat passed away in 2001 (also at the age
of fifteen). Clarence passed away in October 2006 at
the age of twenty. The current pets in the family are Tillie
the Terrier (who came to visit in 2003-04 and wound up staying in
2005) and Lab/Ridgeback siblings Lucy and Linus (who were adopted as
puppies in 2001).
Barb earned her graduate degree from the University of Texas
in 1990, and after various adventures in diverse branches
of information science, she is now employed as Web Services and
KM Manager for Tokyo Electron America. She travels to
Japan several times a year.
Brad
writes full-time. As of Fall 2006, he has published five
novels and numerous short stories. (See Books and Stories.
) His novel Buddy Holly Is
Alive and Well on Ganymede won the John W. Campbell
Memorial Award in 1992, and his two-volume story collection
The Calvin Coolidge Home for Dead Comedians / A Conflagration Artist
won the
World
Fantasy Award in 1995. More recently, in July 2005, his
F&SF
novella "Sergeant Chip" won the Theodore
Sturgeon Memorial Award.
Brad's most recent novel,
Laughin' Boy, was published in a limited hardcover edition by Subterranean
Press in August 2005. [Here are some Laughin' Boy
excerpts. ] He's now at work on several new pieces
of short fiction and a new novel.
Barb and Brad
Denton celebrated twenty-five years of marriage with a trip
to the Czech Republic in October 2005. [You can read
about it here. ] It was
terrific.
And
there's more to come.
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