Bruce Golden

Novels

His novels include the following:

Background

Golden was born in San Diego, California, United States, and graduated from San Diego State University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English/Creative Writing (where he was encouraged to write by the same professor who mentored science fiction author Greg Bear). He taught a course in magazine article writing at SDSU and was a volunteer youth baseball coach/administrator for 17 years. He has one son, Eric, and two grandchildren, Savannah and Troy, and still lives in San Diego.

Writing career

Golden began his professional writing career as a freelance journalist, publishing more than 200 magazine and newspaper articles ranging from in-depth profiles to feature stories to satirical commentary. His first sale as a writer was a story on Black's Beach, at the time the only legal nude beach in the country, which was published by The Progressive in 1977. He worked for 14 years as an editor, and was the founding editor/art director responsible for the creation of five different publications.

In 1985 he was chosen to be the head writer and associate producer of a comedy/variety show (San Diego's Passion) involving more than a hundred actors, writers, musicians, and dancers. In 1986 he wrote a teleplay that was optioned for Steven Spielberg’s Amazing Stories. However, the program was cancelled before the script could be produced, so Golden rewrote it as the short story “Common Time,” which was named as a semi-finalist in L. Ron Hubbard’s Writers of the Future contest. An augmented version of the story was published many years later in the U.S. magazine Brutarian, as well as publications in Romania, Greece, Canada, and England.

Golden turned to broadcasting in 1990. As a television news producer and radio reporter, he was awarded an Emmy, two Golden Mikes, and a number of honors from the Society of Professional Journalists, including recognition for his radio documentaries Sex in the ‘90s and Banned in the USA. For a change of pace, he called upon the comedy writing talents he’d honed nearly a decade earlier to create Radio Free Comedy, a program lampooning political correctness. Much later he wrote and produced a pair of public health educational documentaries for the state of California. In 2001, Golden walked away from his journalistic career to devote himself to his first love-- writing fiction. Golden's first novel, Mortals All (Shaman Press), was a futuristic examination of the civil rights of artificially-created humans. A review in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine described it as "Steeped in the ambience of classic 1950's Galaxy magazine ... social satire, irreverent anti-establishmentarianism, and pseudo-hardboiled narration ... Golden writes with zest and good pacing ... a certain flippancy of characterization and delivery ..."

Golden’s second novel, Better Than Chocolate (Zumaya Otherworlds), was a futuristic mystery written with undertones of satire and social commentary. It follows San Francisco Police Inspector Noah Dane, who, while hunting his partner's killer and investigating a pair of seemingly unrelated murders, stumbles onto a conspiracy that threatens all humanity. Much to his dismay, his new crime-fighting partner is a Marilyn Monroe celebudroid.

A review in Asimov’s Science Fiction says of the book, "If Mickey Spillane had collaborated with both Frederik Pohl and Philip K. Dick, he might have produced Bruce Golden’s Better Than Chocolate." In Golden’s third novel, Evergreen (Zumaya Otherworlds), he created his own planet—a beautiful world populated by majestic forests, ever-changing auroras (called by “sky sprites” by the natives), and the ursu, a primate-like species that may have once achieved sentience. A review in SFFWorld.com said of Evergreen, "Believably tormented characters, unique world-building, realistic dialogue, adventure, exploration, alien lifeforms . . ."

In addition to his novels, Golden has sold more than 100 short stories published across nine countries in such publications as Pedestal, Oceans of the Mind, Odyssey, Digital Science Fiction, Postscripts, Penumbra, and Nemonymous. His tales have been appeared in more than a dozen anthologies, and he won Speculative Fiction Reader’s “2003 Firebrand Fiction Award,” the 2006 "JJM Fiction Prize," and was a co-winner of the 2003 “Top International Horror” stories contest. He’s received several Honorable Mentions from the Speculative Literature Foundation and the Writer’s of the Future Contest.

In 2011, he published Dancing with the Velvet Lizard (Zumaya Otherworlds)--with 33 stories, one of the largest single author collections of speculative fiction in print.

Awards and accolades