He became known for his work The Callahan Chronicles: Who is Spider Robinson?

Spider Robinson was born in 1948 in the Bronx, New York. He was an avid science fiction reader. He grew up reading Robert Heinlein's children's novels. He attended a Catholic high school and spent his teenage years in seminaries.

He attended a Catholic college for two years and five years at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He completed his undergraduate studies in English at the same university. While at Stony Brook, he played guitar in campus cafes and meetings and sang songs with his girlfriend. During these years, he adopted the pseudonym "Spider" due to his admiration for the blues musician "Spider" John Koerner.

Spider Robinson (born November 24, 1948) is an American-born Canadian science fiction author. He has won a number of awards for his hard science fiction and humorous stories, including the Hugo Award 1977 and 1983, and another Hugo with his co-author and wife Jeanne Robinson in 1978.

In 1971, he worked as a sewer guard in New York and began writing science fiction. He sold his first short story to Analog Science Fiction magazine in 1972. The story “The Guy with the Eyes” (Analog, February 1973) appeared in a collection of bar stories called Callahan's Place. The author continued to write Callahan's Place stories into the 21st century. These stories were later collected in a series of books.

He moved to Nova Scotia in 1973 and began writing full-time. In 1974 he won the John Campbell Award in the Best New Writer category. His short stories have been featured in Analog, Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine, and several other magazines. In 1975, he married choreographer, dancer, and Sōtō Zen priest Jeanne Robinson, with whom he later wrote the “Stardance” trilogy. He worked as a book reviewer for Galaxy Magazine in the mid-to-late 1970s. In 1978-79, he wrote book reviews for Jim Baen's original anthology series "Destinies." For several years thereafter, he wrote reviews for Analog, including Heinlein's latest works.

Robinson's first published novel, Telempath (1976), was a sequel to his Hugo Award-winning novel "By Any Other Name." For the next three decades, he published a book approximately every year, including short story collections. His short stories in the long-running Callahan series were published in 1997 under the title Callahan's Crosstime Saloon. These stories and later novels made frequent references to the works of mystery writer John D. MacDonald. The Sally McGee in his stories echoed Travis McGee, the central character in MacDonald's mystery novels. In 1992, he appeared as a master writer for the Hugo Awards at the World Science Fiction Congress (WorldCon) in Orlando, Florida. From 1996 to 2005, he was a columnist in the technology section of the Globe and Mail.

In 2006, Robinson published the novel "Variable Star", which he wrote based on a seven-page novel draft that Robert A Heinlein started writing and abandoned in 1955. He often expressed his admiration for Heinlein in various articles and books. Especially in the epilogue of "Variable Star", he talked about how Heinlein's works "Rocket Ship Galileo" and "Heinlein Juvenile" shaped his life.

After living in Vancouver for ten years, he moved to Bowen Island in 1999. He became a Canadian citizen in 2002. His wife Jeanne passed away on May 30, 2010, while continuing her treatment for bile cancer. His daughter Terri also died of breast cancer on December 5, 2014. He had a heart attack on August 31, 2013. Due to the health problems faced by his family, he preferred to stay away from literature after 2008. In 2013, he announced that he was working on his next "Orphan Stars" novel, which was progressing, albeit slowly. He simultaneously announced that he had started working on his autobiography. In 2018, he was announced as the Guest of Honor at the 76th World Science Fiction Congress.

He became best known in the international literary community with his work The Callahan Diaries. Robinson has resided in Canada for nearly forty years, primarily in the provinces of Nova Scotia and British Columbia.