Robert Chen is a Taiwanese-Canadian writer and software designer whose work moves between speculative fiction, technology, and narrative nonfiction. Born in 1985 in Vancouver and raised between Taipei and Calgary, he studied physics and media arts at McGill University before building data visualization and simulation tools for climate and aerospace labs. His short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and his essays on technology, memory, and material culture have run in Nautilus and Logic. A 2016 Clarion West graduate and a finalist for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, Chen also teaches narrative design at the University of Washington.
In addition to exploring time, systems, and human choice in fiction, Robert Chen writes nonfiction that examines the infrastructures and everyday tools that shape public memory—archives, field kits, workshops, and the hands that use them. He has reported from TVA salvage sites in the Tennessee Valley, brickworks in Taipei's Wanhua District, and community archaeology projects along the Salish Sea, often bringing a designer's eye for process to histories grounded in place. He lives in Seattle, where he co-runs a neighborhood zine press and tends a small citrus greenhouse with his partner and an elderly shiba inu.
