Jeff Carlson (author)
Jeff G. Carlson (born July 20, 1969) is an American science fiction and thriller writer.
Life and career
Son of a former division head at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Carlson was born in Sunnyvale, California and has since lived in several cities up and down the Californian coast. In the early 1990s, he also lived in Arizona, Colorado and Idaho before returning to his native California in 1997. He now lives with his wife Diana and their children near San Francisco.
Carlson left high school at age fifteen after passing the California High School Equivalency Examination and now holds a B.A. in English Literature. His past jobs include driver, pressman, salesman, waiter, phone representative, cashier and construction worker.
First known for his short stories, to date Carlson has written seven novels, the first three of which are known as the Plague Year trilogy. His 2007 debut, Plague Year, is a present-day thriller about a worldwide nanotechnology contagion that devours all warm-blooded organisms living below 10,000 feet in elevation. Plague War and Plague Zone are its two sequels.
After the release of Plague Year, Carlson was shortlisted for the 2007 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, an award voted on by the fandom of science fiction. In a minor controversy, Carlson was forced to decline the nomination due to a rule change by the award administrators, which retroactively made Carlson ineligible due to some of his earliest short fiction sales to Strange Horizons.
In 2008, Plague War was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award, a juried prize which goes annually to the best science fiction paperback original.
Among his short stories such as those for Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine and the Fast Forward 2 anthology, Carlson has also written an award-winning novelette called The Frozen Sky, a near-future adventure which deals with the surprise discovery of an intelligent amphibian species in the oceans beneath the frozen surface of Jupiter’s sixth moon, Europa.
In 2011, Carlson published a collection of his short fiction entitled Long Eyes.
In 2012, Carlson published an all-new, novel-length expansion of The Frozen Sky. Its success led to a major book deal with 47North, one of the new publishing imprints owned by Amazon Publishing.
In 2013, 47North released Carlson's epic novel called Interrupt.
In 2014 and 2016, Carlson published two sequels to The Frozen Sky entitled Betrayed and Blindsided. He is also rumored to be collaborating on a new sci fi series with New York Times bestselling author David Brin.
Awards and nominations
- Novelette “The Frozen Sky” (2007) - First-place winner in the international Writers of the Future contest.
- Plague War (2008) - Finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award for Best Novel.
Selected bibliography
- Plague Year (2007)
- Plague War (2008)
- Plague Zone (2009)
- Long Eyes (2011)
- The Frozen Sky (2012)
- Interrupt (2013)
- The Frozen Sky 2: Betrayed (2014)
- The Frozen Sky 3: Blindsided (2016)
External links
- Jeff Carlson's web site
- Author interview at Penguin USA - undated but prior to publication of Plague Year on July 31, 2007.
- Author interview with Grasping For The Wind on September 17, 2008.
- Author essay at John Scalzi's Whatever on November 24, 2009.
- Writers of the Future interview on October 15, 2012.