Richard Jeffery Wagner

This is my personal author page. I also have an Amazon author page. I began writing my autobiography at the turn of the millennium and finished it in 2020. Having gotten the writing bug as a result, I began writing fiction and nonfiction.

My first four books were self-published. My fifth book (and third novel), Love Beyond Orbit, and the sequel novella, Planet of Love, were both published by Auctus Publishers, a traditional publishing company. Links to book information are listed below in the order in which the books were published.

Brief Biography

Award-winning author Richard Jeffery Wagner uses his full name to distinguish himself from a notorious anti-semite. He grew up in Salinas, California, graduated from Salinas High School, John Steinbeck's alma mater, in 1967, and briefly attended Hartnell College in Salinas. He was drafted in 1969, served as an electronics technician in the United States Air Force, and was honorably discharged in Hawaiʻi at the rank of staff sergeant in 1978.

Dr. Wagner remained in Hawaiʻi and continued to attend the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa (UH), obtaining his Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering in 1979. While at UH he met his future wife, UH alumna Andrea Johnson. He was hired by the Northrop Grumman Corporation in Redondo Beach, California, as a spacecraft test engineer, where he was noted for several innovative approaches to his craft. He and Andrea were married in 1981. He was granted a Master's Fellowship to the University of Southern California (USC) and he obtained a Master of Science degree in Computer Science. He was invited to join the robotics research team of Prof. Ken Goldberg at USC and the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science was conferred on him with emphasis in robotics and artificial intelligence in 1997.

Dr. Wagner began writing professionally at Northrop Grumman Corporation to produce test procedures, reports, and spacecraft business proposals. He managed the winning spacecraft integration and test proposal for the James Webb Space Telescope in 2002. He also managed the integration and test portion of the winning Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter (JIMO) proposal. JIMO was to be a nuclear fission reactor powered electric propulsion scientific spacefaft, but it was subsequently cancelled due to national policy changes.

Dr. Wagner invented the electrostatic sticky foot for space-walking robots and has published national and international peer-reviewed scientific papers. He is the inventor of an Order(n) sort and his Erdős number is four. He is a member of the SFWA, where he serves on the Emerging Technologies Committee, and of the Authors Guild.

All Dr. Wagner's books are accessible at his Amazon author page.

At Roy's restaurant in Hawaiʻi Kai in August, 2026. Photo by Andrea Wagner.

Email Richard dot J dot Wagner at gmail dot com

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