Steve Davidson's Biography

Born in 1958, my earliest memories are of science fiction bedtime stories told to me by my Mother, and of listening to the Shadow on the radio. (Not to mention being scared out of my wits by The Mummy on an old B&W TV - with dials and vacuum tubes no less).

Childhood, which has lasted far longer than the norm, and which included witnessing man land on the moon, eventually led to college (English Lit & Religious Education - but I haven't done anything with the latter in well over 30 years) and tyro experience attending and working on SF conventions. I had the honor of managing the Hugo Banquet at SunCon in 1977 and working security at Iguanacon in '78 (memorable experiences with both Harlan Ellison and Gahan Wilson at that one).

I also received a grant from my university to subsidize the production of a semi-prozine I edited with a friend (Joseph Zitt) and which received contributions from other friends (Fred Kiesche, Steve Hart, Ginjer Buchanan, Laurence Janifer, Bob Walters) and learned my first major life's lesson: always read the fine print. The first issue was to debut at Iguanacon and American Airlines lost it while shipping. They ended up only being responsible for the shipping costs...

I moved on to gaming, publishing the now infamous (and collectible) Christians and Lions, The Irreverent Strategy Game and garnering various development jobs for the big boys - SJG, FASA, Chaosium - and utlimately landed a job at AT&T, working for a specialty division that was developing something new - videodiscs and interactive training technologies. I managed the QA/QC shop and had my hand in numerous other jobs - scripting, video editing, design. Corporate politics being what they are, the division was closed. I briefly moved on to managing a small development group that continued to use off-the-shelf hardware and homegrown software - military training systems, tourist kiosks. This culminated in an edutainment game that made it into AT&T's museum in NYC and into EPCOT, where it was very popular for a number of years.

During this time the new game of paintball was brought to my attention, I started playing and quickly became something of a founding father of the industry; I stopped writing fiction in favor of the burgeoning paintball non-fiction market, ultimately penning numerous regular columns, feature articles and four books, two of which have seen publication. I'm credited with establishing the first (and still on-going) professional competition league (NPPL) but, alas, I was not able to capitalize on these accomplishments to the degree that I should have. Reluctantly, I chose to leave the industry behind.

Lots of other cool and nifty things have ocurred during these years, not the least of which is having (finally) gotten married to THE most wonderful person on the face of the planet. Yes, its obligatory to say such, but in this case its the truth.

I'm now off on other ventures, most involving writing and/or publication. This site is one such project. I've also returned to fiction writing (having recently started AND completed a novella - the first of many more to come) and am again writing reviews of SF literature. Links to the same are provided elsewhere.