About me

I was a Hugo and Locus Award finalist for the group biography Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction (Dey Street / HarperCollins), which was named one of the best books of 2018 by The Economist. My biography Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller, which was released by Dey Street / HarperCollins in 2022, was selected as a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, an Economist best book of the year, and one of Esquire‘s fifty best biographies of all time. Collisions: A Physicist’s Journey From Hiroshima to the Death of the Dinosaurs, my biography of Luis W. Alvarez, will be published by W.W. Norton on June 10, 2025. My essays, reviews, and nonfiction have been featured in print and online in the New York Times, The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times, Slate, Salon, The Rumpus, Gizmodo, Fast Company, Public Books, Asterisk, and The Daily Beast.

On the fiction side, my novels include the thrillers The Icon Thief, City of Exiles, and Eternal Empire, all published by Penguin Books. I also rediscovered Frozen Hell, the original version of John W. Campbell’s novella “Who Goes There?” (aka The Thing), which has been under development as a film by Blumhouse Productions. My short stories have frequently appeared in the magazine Analog Science Fiction and Fact and have been reprinted in Lightspeed and two editions of The Year’s Best Science Fiction, as well as many other anthologies. Syndromes, an audio original collection of my short science fiction, is available from Recorded Books. I also edit a bimonthly puzzle feature, “Unknowns,” for Analog.

My father immigrated to the United States from Hong Kong, and my mother is Finnish-American. I was born in 1980 in Castro Valley, California, and I graduated from Harvard University with a degree in Classics. My favorite books are The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges, and The Whole Earth Catalog; my favorite movies are The Red Shoes, Blue Velvet, and Chungking Express. I live with my wife, the NPR host Wailin Wong, and our daughter in Oak Park, Illinois.