Payne Harrison Collection - Fully Processed | Cushing Library

Payne Harrison, Jr., is a writer of several noted technothrillers. He was born in 1949, the son of Payne Harrison, Sr., who graduated from Texas A&M in 1924 at the age of 19 and as the youngest graduate in the history of the university. Harrison, Jr. attended Texas A&M from 1967-1971, during which time he served as a member of the Corps of Cadets. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in journalism and subsequently served for two years in the U.S. Army as a public relations officer.

After completing his Army service, Harrison returned to A&M, where he obtained a master's degree in political science. He also earned an M.B.A. from Southern Methodist University, and worked as a reporter and a financial consultant before beginning his literary career.

Harrison's first technothriller was Storming Intrepid, released in 1989. The book tells the story of a attempt by Soviet agents to hijack the (fictional) American space shuttle Intrepid. A sequel, Thunder of Erebus, set in Antarctica, followed in 1991. Harrison wrote two additional novels, Black Cipher (1994) and Forbidden Summit (1997), before taking a hiatus from writing. He returned to the technothriller genre in 2010 with Eurostorm.