I’ve always thought that the Venn diagram of Space Opera and Military Science Fiction should not be a circle. I thought there should be stories about people living in interstellar civilizations that didn’t involve massive wars across unimaginable distances, resulting in untold misery and suffering. Each of these books shows mostly normal people trying to get by in a galaxy far, far away.

I’m kind of obsessed with Antarctica. Sometimes, in a good way–I love ice and cold!–and sometimes in a more troubled way (melting Antarctic ice will have a global impact). As a science writer and academic, my work engages deeply with Antarctica, climate change, and sea level rise, and after my three trips to the ice, I wrote my own Antarctic story.

All these books are different, deeply imbued with the personality of the author and their different experiences on the frozen continent. And all of them engage with the vulnerability of this astonishing part of the world and the remarkable people working to uncover its secrets. 

Since I was a little boy, I’ve been passionate about technology and its potential to help people. After 25 years working in high tech, digital transformation, and artificial intelligence with a career spanning Intel, Google DeepMind, and a few successful startups I co-founded, I’ve pivoted to helping people, particularly leaders, understand how AI will transform business, education, and society, and how they can use AI to create new value and solve problems for people.

AI is about to change everything about everything, and these books will help readers understand what’s coming and prepare themselves for humanity’s journey into an age of abundant intelligence.

I remember carrying home tall stacks of library books in the summertime and spending entire days immersed in my heroes’ latest adventures as a kid. This continued as I grew up, as I learned that I ought to be a hero, too, by confronting evil both within and without.

I’ve always wanted my work to have meaning beyond the paycheck, and for some reason, my mind automatically seems to drift toward the bigger picture. During my career, I have watched environmental issues change from being distant concerns to a flat-out crisis that we may well have ignored until it is too late.

I’m the tenth kid in my family. I can’t think of a single part of my personality that wasn’t defined by my interactions with my siblings, then later their partners, and then later their children. The thing about family is that, yes, it’s a source of stress and even trauma, but I’ve also found it the truest path to not just meaning in life but something like salvation. I love stories that put us at that tipping point, in part because I think most of us live there, whether we realize it or not.

I spent twenty-five years on active duty, with nineteen months in Vietnam as a helicopter pilot. I served as a tactics instructor at the US Army Infantry Center; two years teaching the operational level of war at the US Army Command and General Staff College; two years teaching at the German Army Tactics Center.

Photography has always been more than just images for me. I love capturing the moments that define a movement. I started out photographing punk bands, drawn to their raw creativity. Later, I shot Hollywood legends, but at the core, it was always about the same thing: artists fighting to make something that lasts. These stories feel like snapshots of a life I know well, and they bring me back to the packed punk club where everything started.

As a child, I was lonely and misunderstood. As soon as I could read, I devoured books as though I’d been given water after a long thirst, and I felt closer to the characters in books than I did to my family. In my twenties, I discovered in an acting class that playing characters took me even closer to my lifelong urgency to understand myself and the world around me. I accepted storytelling as my rescue and my spiritual path.

I have researched and observed attempts to map, enhance, and control biological human bodies since I was a teenager. I was always interested in how people described and related to themselves as biological creatures. As part of that, I was fascinated by attempts to talk about the human body with words other than the strict biological, both by poets and artists and by entrepreneurs and scientists.

As a researcher in cultural studies, I concentrate on different ways to understand ourselves as biological creatures and on imaginaries about (bio)technology and how these dreams about what technology can do affect our self-understanding.