ABOUT ELISSON

Elisson was born in New York in 1952 and spent his formative years in Massapequa, an unincorporated village on the south shore of Long Island (also the home of Jerry Seinfeld, the Baldwin brothers, and, yes, Joey Buttafuoco.) A child of intelligent and athletic parents, the young Elisson managed to avoid inheriting a shred of their racquetball, golf, or tennis capabilities. He did, however, manage to letter in high school JV Bowling. Woo Hoo.

While an undergraduate, Elisson chaired the Tiger, Princeton University’s celebrated humor magazine. The Tiger is still recovering. Meanwhile, our hero was graduated in 1974 with a bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering. Most people who know him say that he’s not a typical engineer, whatever that means. Most engineers are happy to hear it.

After getting out of school, Elisson moved to Houston in order to “see the world.” He ended up seeing a lot of hot, swampy, flat land festooned with monstrous flying cockroaches. In the process of establishing his big-corporation career, he discovered that Texas had its good aspects by meeting and falling in love with Dee, an honest-to-goodness Texan... from Fort Worth, no less. They were married in 1977, then embarked on a series of household relocations that began with a move to New Jersey in 1979, where their first child, Elder Daughter, was born later that same year.

The family migrated to Atlanta in 1981 where they were blessed with another daughter, the Mistress of Sarcasm, the following year. Then, after five years in the Heart of the Deep South, they moved to Glastonbury, CT... and two years later, to Trumbull, CT. In early 1991, they moved yet again, this time back to Houston. In July 1998 they left Houston to return to Atlanta, where they remain unto this day. If a rolling stone gathers no moss, then the Elisson clan is definitely “moss-less.”

In early 2009, Elisson retired from his gig at the Great Corporate Salt Mine - one of those little mom-and-pop operations with an annual revenue the size of half the European Union - after thirty-two years of sweaty intellectual labor. Meanwhile, Dee teaches kids with learning differences (e.g., dyslexia). Dealing with children who have essentially no attention span has helped her mightily in her relationship with her easily distractible spouse, who is likely to get “lost in the cheese aisle” at the slightest provocation.

Elder Daughter was graduated cum laude in 2001 from Boston University’s College of Communications and currently resides in Philadelphia. The Mistress of Sarcasm, having been graduated magna cum laude from Savannah College of Art and Design in 2005, now lives in upstate New York. With both offspring out of the house and in their respective urban and rural surroundings, this means that Elisson and Dee are technically “empty nesters.” This does not mean, however, that they have broken their daughters’ plates and sawn off their corners of the dinner table.

A voracious reader, Elisson learned to appreciate science fiction at his mother’s knee. Today, he favors Orson Scott Card, Harry Turtledove, Octavia Butler, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick, David Brin, Gregory Benford, Greg Bear, Cyril Kornbluth, Fred Pohl, Larry Niven, Harlan Ellison, just to name a few. Oh yeah, and mainstreamers like Tom Clancy, John Irving... Shakespeare, Huxley, the list goes on forever. He credits his father (Eli, of course!) for instilling in him a strange yet highly developed sense of humor and a love for comic verse: Ogden Nash, Franklin Adams, Hilaire Bellocq, Morris Bishop, don marquis, lots more.

Elisson has been an Online Journalist (doesn’t that sound so much more self-important than “blogger”?) since 2004; his first site was recognized by Carnegie Mellon University - in a study that permanently tarnished the reputation of that institution - as one of the 100 most informative blogs in the world. He has also has translated the “Mr. Ed” theme song into four different languages.

Be afraid... be very afraid.

(Hey, don’t you have anything better to do than to read this crap?)