Robinson was born in Waukegan, Illinois, but moved to Orange County, California, when he was two. As a child he loved to play in the orange groves stretching out for miles around his home, so when suburban sprawl began to encroach and the groves were torn out and paved over, the rapid change of modern life hit close to home. It was not until college in 1971 that he would stumble upon new wave science fiction and find in it an expression of that very sense of rapid change that had made such an impression upon him growing up, at which point he knew almost immediately that he would be committed to science fiction from then on. He enrolled at the University of California-San Diego (UCSD) in 1970 and received his B.A. in Literature in 1974.