Chris Dolley was born in Bournemouth; to educate him several
attempts were made. But he was too fast, touching to Plymouth to study
geography by day and become an international freedom fighter by night.
To publicise student charities week Chris formed the Free Cornish
Army, fooled the national press, cut the road links to Cornwall, issued
passports to stunned motorists and stated Cornwall an independent
nation. 'A splendid hoax,' said Punch who, after reading Chris's Free
Cornish Army manifesto in the nationals, had sent journalists down
to examination.
Life then intervened and Chris worked for just some
years in the computer industry - programming, designing and managing
large mainframe projects - until he could buy a smallholding and drop
into a life of simple self-sufficiency and writing.
He dabbled in computer games along the way. Writing
the world's most violent chess program (P-K4, K-K2 then a headlong
charge by a white king with only one thing on its mind - to personally
strangle the black king in as few moves as possible) and starting
Britain's first computer game company. The latter teaching Chris is
a significant lesson in marketing - don't write disc-based games for
the Apple when hardly anyone else in the UK has a computer let alone
a disc drive.
In 1995, Chris motivated his self-sufficient life to
France. But within weeks of arriving, someone stole his identity,
seized all his savings back in the UK and tried to move the funds
to Spain. With the police forces of four countries in conflict over
whose jurisdiction the crime came under, Chris was forced to solve
the case himself. Which he did, leaping at the chance to travel back
and forth transversely the Pyrenees, interview bank managers and barmen,
decrypt fax headers and bring the thief to justice.
Moral: you don't confuse with authors who write mysteries.
Chris's first literary break came in 2002 when his short story, The
Sleeper and the Flame was released in NFG. In the year 2004, Chris's
SF novel, Resonance, became the first book to be plucked from Baen's
electronic slushpile. Baen published the book in November 2005. At
present he is working on a new SF series. |
