Christopher Rowley is an American writer of both science fiction and fantasy. Rowley was born in 1948 in Lynn, Massachusetts to an American mother and an English father. Educated for the most part at Brentwood School, Essex, England, he became a London-based journalist in the 1970s. In 1977 he moved to New York City, and he currently lives in upstate New York's Hudson Valley. Rowley's first science fiction novel was The War for Eternity. It was published in 1983 and won the Compton Crook Award for best first novel. The War for Eternity led to three further novels set in the same future: The Black Ship, The Founder and To a Highland Nation. His novel Starhammer has been cited by computer programmer Jason Jones as an important literary influence in the creation of the Halo video game by Bungie Studios. Starhammer was followed by The Vang: The Military Form and The Vang: The Battlemaster to form a loosely connected trilogy spanning several thousand years and involving different sets of characters in each book. In the 1990s, Rowley switched to the fantasy genre with the success of his first novel for Roc Books, Bazil Broketail.