Meredith was born on October 21, 1937, in Alderson, West Virginia in the United States, the first son of Joseph and LaVon Meredith. During World War II the family moved to St. Albans, West Virginia, where his father was employed as a technician in an industrial laboratory which worked synthetic gum, used at that time to replace natural one, whose sources were monopolized by the Japanese.
During these years, while attending high school and then first year at university, Meredith approached science fiction literature for the first time, and started reading novels by Robert A. Heinlein. In 1950 he bought his first copy of Astounding, of which he collected all issues until death of the editor John W. Campbell, in 1971. In this period he also wrote his first short stories, but his intention was to become an astronomer.
In 1956, owing to an illness suffered by his younger sister Sandra, the family moved to Florida, where, not finding a job, Meredith joined the Army, and had the chance to attend courses and achieve specific technical skills. He became a microwave-systems technician and also was a theory-of-communication and air-navigation trainer. Back in civilian life, he reached his family in Pensacola and got back to University. This was the time he wrote his first action short stories, which were published in magazines for men only. His first daughter, Kira Chimene, was born in 1965, from his second marriage with Joy Gates.In 1969, when he was father of three more sons (two twins, Jefferson Conan and Derek Carlton, and another boy, Rand Calvin), Ballantine Books bought and published his first two novels, The Sky is Filled with Ships and We All Died at Breakaway Station.
In 1970, to maintain his numerous family, Meredith started working also as a graphic designer at a weekly magazine in Florida, the Press Gazette, where he was in charge of the comic-strip page. It was in the same year at DeepSouthCon 8, known as "Agacon '70" in Atlanta, Georgia that he was awarded the very first Phoenix Award for professional contributions to southern science fiction fandom.
In 1973 his first paperback novel At the Narrow Passage was published by Playboy Press. He was also a mainstream writer, and author of erotic poems; he collaborated with other magazines and TV channels and was an oil painter as well.
In 1975 Meredith had to face the tragedy of the death of his son Jeff, who drowned in the bathtub at age 9. He was only 41 when he died from brain hemorrhage in 1979.
Meredith's works take up with considerable originality many familiar SF themes: A human Galactic empire and its struggle with a non-human rival ("We All Died at Breakaway Station") or with independence-seeking human subjects ("The Sky Is Filled with Ships"); a theocratic dictatorship, nuclear and biological warfare, and the effort to change history by time travel ("Run, Come See Jerusalem!"); or the "sidewise" travel into a alternate histories and the savage struggle for control over a multitude of divergent timelines (The "Timeliner" trilogy).
Whatever the specific situation, Meredith's protagonists tend to be highly motivated and devoted people, wholeheartedly taking up Earth- or Universe-shaking Causes to which they give their all - and often eventually discovering that they had been duped into serving an evil cause, or that an action taken with the best of intentions actually makes a bad situation even worse. A reader opening a Meredith book can by no means count on a happy ending - indeed, some of the books can be classed as dystopias. At best, Meredith's protagonists need to rest content with a partial or conditional victory, the merely temporary aversion of disaster.
