Robert J. Szmidt is a novelist, translator, and a former editor in chief of the following monthly magazines: Video Business, PlayStation Plus, Science Fiction and Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror--all of which appeared between 1992-2012.
He made his literary debut in the 1980s, then his career path veered into other areas and yet he has never forgotten his roots. At the turn of the century he went back to writing and founded his by now cult Science Fiction magazine, thus initiating a revival of interest in Polish SF.
He has published twenty novels, a few novellas and twenty five short stories. He’s also made an appearance in a number of anthologies.
A wiz at post-apocalyptic fiction, he is--not without grounds--called The Destroyer of Worlds.
In The Apocalypse According to Sir John, first published in 2003 and in response to its significant popularity reprinted multiple times since, Robert J. Szmidt foretold the Ukraine crisis and its likely consequences.
His other post-apocalyptic fiction works include a novel titled Solitariness of the Angel of Doom, which was written well before McCarthy's The Road, but in the same vein; its action takes place in America and tells the story of the last man on Earth.
In 2015 Robert J. Szmidt revisited the topic of a zombie apocalypse in his The Rats of Wroclaw: Chaos. This book is in the vein of Max Brooks' World War Z, however Robert J. Szmidt has created totally new zombies, different from George A. Romero's and Danny Boyle's. Book 2 of this series--The Rats of Wroclaw: Prison Bars--was published on January 30, 2019, and The Rats of Wrocław: Hospital on July 31, 2019.
His flagship series is a five-part space opera, a huge bestseller in Poland: The Fields of Long-Forgotten Battles, which comprises the following books – Easy to Be a God, Escape from Paradise, Edge of Extinction, Victory or Death and Asgard’s Last Mission.
Also, Robert J. Szmidt has written a trilogy for the METRO2033 UNIVERSE project set up by Dmitry Glukhovsky: The Abyss, The Tower and Riese (the first of them was translated into Russian and published in Russia; the second one will be released soon).
Robert J. Szmidt has travelled widely, crossed three oceans and visited five continents. He is a prolific translator with a dozen video games, as well as over eighty books under his belt.
He created two science fiction awards and founded a website (www.fantastykapolska.pl) offering free access to the library counting over 500 Polish SF novels, novellas and short stories, not unlike Baen.com.
Robert J. Szmidt has Austrian and French roots. His paternal great-grandfather was the director of the Warsaw-Vienna Railway at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. His maternal great-grandparents lived near Albi, a well-known town in the south of France.
Robert J. Szmidt is married and lives with his wife in the bucolic region of Poland called the Polish Jurassic Highland, at 1,600 ft above the sea level, where he can admire elegant ammonites in his back yard. He says, “When you commune with the past on a regular basis, you must have your mind on the future--for anyway, a hundred fifty million years is no more than the blink of an eye”.
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