Crawford Kilian

Crawford Kilian is a Canadian science fiction novelist, journalist, and writing teacher who has been teaching and writing online since the 1980s. Born in New York City in 1941, he grew up in Los Angeles and Mexico City, took his BA from Columbia and his MA from Simon Fraser University, and built his career at Capilano University in North Vancouver, where he developed the school's first online writing course and taught how to write for multimedia and the web.

His fiction runs to more than ten novels across science fiction and fantasy, including the Chronoplane Wars trilogy (The Empire of Time, The Fall of the Republic, and Rogue Emperor), the Icequake books, the Greenmagic and Redmagic sequence, and standalones such as Eyas, Brother Jonathan, Lifter, and Gryphon. His earliest novel, Wonders, Inc., was published in 1968. The Chronoplane Wars books, which deal with time-travel intervention in alternate histories of the Roman world, have remained in print across multiple editions.

For writers, his books from Self-Counsel Press have been steady recommendations for decades. Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy (1998, second edition 2007) covers genre conventions, world-building, and the practical decisions a speculative writer faces. Writing for the Web (1999, republished multiple times) was one of the earliest serious craft books on online writing and remains a useful primer on the format. Sell Your Nonfiction Book (2009) and the Indie Filmmaker's Business Writing Handbook (2008, with Rob McGann) round out his craft library. He co-wrote A Writer's Guide to Speculative Fiction in 2019 with Silvia Moreno-Garcia.

Kilian was the public education columnist for the Vancouver Province newspaper for many years and is a contributing editor of The Tyee, the independent Canadian online publication. He has written extensively on Canadian education and on the history of Black pioneers in British Columbia, the subject of his nonfiction book Go Do Some Great Thing.