Their first collaboration, The Glass Inferno, about fire in a high-rise, helped inspire The Towering Inferno, a film which grossed over $100 million. A follow-up thriller on a nuclear plant disaster, The Prometheus Crisis, has shipped 800,000 paperback copies. Now their newest, The Nightmare Factor—gene mutation research gone haywire—will likely become another best-seller.
Behind their success is an unusual collaboration. Although Robinson, 51, has a B.S. in physics and served as a Navy electronics technician during World War II and Korea, he turned to journalism and for 20 years was an editor for magazines like Rogue, Cavalier and a staff writer at Playboy. Scortia, also 51, published some 50 short stories, mostly sci-fi, but his principal occupation for two decades was science. After graduate study in biochemistry, he was an Army chemical weapons expert during Korea, and spent nine years supervising high-energy propellant research for a California aircraft company.
Solid technical grounding gives Scortia & Robinson plots a frightening aura of plausibility. Robinson admits to "a little authorial license" in staging Prometheus' atomic plant disaster, but contends that Glass Inferno "is within the realm of possibility. In 1972 a high-rise in São Paulo, Brazil went up like a Christmas tree." Of Nightmare Factor's mysterious epidemic, which closely resembles Legionnaire's Disease, Robinson cautions, "The facts are for real. Nickel carbonyl, the heavy metal compound which is a suspected culprit in our story, was thought to be the cause of the Legionnaire's flu. It turned out not to be responsible, but it's interesting that Tom came up with it before anyone else." Co-author Scortia insists of their three books, "They're all based on things you see in the papers every day. They are real without actually having happened."
The two men met in the mid-'50s and became closer friends when Robinson edited Scortia's stories in the '60s. When Scortia lost his aeronautics job during the 1970 NASA cutbacks, he decided to write full-time and persuaded his pal to quit Playboy and join him. They now work out of bachelor Robinson's handsomely renovated house in San Francisco. Scortia, who is divorced, commutes from nearby because his collaborator refuses to learn to drive. The two men switch writing and rewriting chores chapter by chapter. Sometimes, Scortia says, "We honestly don't know who wrote what." Adds Robinson, "Both of us have our egos under control." With an estimated $2 million-plus from various hardcover, paperback and film rights so far, so are their finances.
As a matter of fact, Robinson's only complaint is the "perishable" nature of their work—and the critic who huffed, "Books like these are more manufactured than written." Robinson consoles himself with the hope that the novels convey a warning. "We live in a technological world that ordinary people know nothing about," he believes. "To the extent that we can inform them through chills and thrills, that's fine."
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