John T. Cullen has lived in San Diego for over 33 years. He has been a professional writer most of his life. He is the author of more than 20 books, including the acclaimed A Walk in Ancient Rome (Nonfiction/Ancient History). He has been a newspaper reporter, and held writing jobs as a soldier in the U. S. Army in West Germany during the 1970s. He worked for many years as a technical writer/editor/trainer/product demonstrator in the aerospace and computer systems development industries.

Karen Wiesner, historian of internet publishing, confirmed that John T. Cullen was the sixth online publisher in world history (Clocktower Books, with Brian Callahan, 1996). He was the second person in history to publish serial chapters weekly online (1996-7: This Shoal of Space, at that time titled Heartbreaker; and Neon Blue). He and Callahan were the publishers of the world's first professional online magazine of SF/F/H without print precedents (0uts1de: Speculative & Dark Fiction, renamed Deep Outside SFFH, eventually finishing a memorable ten-year run in January 2007 under the name Far Sector SFFH). The magazine was the first online SF/F/H publication listed (1999) in Writer's Market as a paying venue alongside the large pulps. He founded and maintained a widely acclaimed writer's resource (Sharpwriter.com) from 1998 to its recent retirement (though it may reappear as a more specialized venue in time).

Born in Europe (Army brat), he lived in several countries and is conversant in several languages. He worked as a summer intern reporter in New Haven, Connecticut during the 1960s. He earned a B.A. in English from the University of Connecticut, Storrs, with Relateds in History and German. During the 1970s, he served two hitches in West Germany with the U.S. Army, where he invariably fell into writing jobs at a major HQ. He earned his M.S. in Business Administration from Boston University, in the Overseas Division of Metropolitan College. Upon his return to civilian life in 1980, he worked in industry while earning a B.B.A. in Computer Information Systems from National University. He is married and has a son.

He has arrived at a place in life where he can concentrate on his lifelong passion for writing. He loves the thrill of fiction, as well as the unending curiosity and satisfaction of history. He continues to enjoy traveling, but has resolved to make San Diego his home base for the duration.

After being online 11 years as of this update (August 5, 2007), he has plenty of relics and trophies of the WWW to display on this site. These include a link to Event Horizon, an ambitious but short-lived online effort by a well-known SF/F editor during the 1990s, and images from past John T. Cullen ventures like Nitework.net and InfoNana.com. It's been said that one of the strengths of web-based publishing is that you never need to go out of print (kind of like the old catch-phrase from Love Story, about never needing to say you're sorry—whatever that means, and one suspects it doesn't really anything). In that spirit, one does stay connected to the birth moment when one's mean first web page went live. For John T. Cullen, that was sometime back in April 1996, with one mysterious looking black page (resurrected here in a later, fancier format: Neon Blue Fiction) with white text on it, and a primitive gif image of its logo. It's been fun ever since.

VR Note: Virtual Reality Written in 1990, This Shoal of Space (originally titled Heartbreaker) is an early VR novel (Virtual Reality). The premise was stimulated by various original influences in the author's imagination, particularly from his experience as a computer programmer in the 1980s, where v-r was a technical concept for 'virtual paging' to swap memory during processing on the tiny-RAM mainframes of the time. It's an example of the title being more intriguing than the object itself, although programmers at the time were thrilled at the extra leverage. Perhaps the earliest story in the VR genre or trope is Ray Bradbury's The Veldt (The Illustrated Man, 1951). See: Wikipedia for more notes. Stanislaw Lem wrote a short story in this genre in 1960. Daniel F. Galouye published Simulacron-3 in 1973. The movie TRON appeared in 1982. After 1990, a number of novels and movies were made, including The Matrix and The Thirteenth Floor. The concept of VR is used in a unique and original manner in This Shoal of Space, where the term itself is never used, but computers (both human and alien-built) are at the 'core' (q.v.) of the story. It is a story that has been difficult on some literal-minded readers, but many readers have thrilled to the mind-bending concepts that transcend V-R, amid an aura of compelling characters and engrossing complications. More at Synopsis.