Brian Stableford has written 75 books, including 50 novels. In 1999 he was the recipient of the Science Fiction Research Association's Pilgrim Award for his contributions to sf scholarship, completing his set of the four major awards available in that field - the others being the SFRA's Pioneer Award (1996), the Distinguished Scholarship Award of the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts (1987) and the J. Lloyd Eaton Award (1987). His recent non-fiction includes Yesterday's Bestsellers and Glorious Perversity: The Decline and Fall of Literary Decadence, both published by Borgo Press in 1998. He also works in the field of the popularization of science, in which he is currently producing a series of "LabNotes" pamphlets on recent developments in medical biotechnology for the Education Division of the Wellcome Trust. He occasionally translates obscure 19th century fantasies from the French, his most recent endeavour in that vein being Paul Feval's 1869 account of Vampire City, issued by Sarob Press, 1999.

The Hooded Swan series was written while he was a postgraduate student at the University of York, initially in the Biology department and later in Sociology. He taught Sociology for 12 years at the University of Reading before becoming a full-time writer in 1988.