Name Jeff Carlson Role Fiction writer | Nominations Philip K. Dick Award | |
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Books Plague Year, Plague War, Plague Zone, Adobe Photoshop Elements, The Apple TV Pocket Guide | ||
Jeff G. Carlson (July 20, 1969 - July 17, 2017 ) was an American science fiction and thriller writer.
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Life and career
Son of a former division head at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Carlson was born in Sunnyvale, California and had 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.
Carlson left high school at age fifteen after passing the California High School Equivalency Examination and eventually obtained 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, 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 was also rumored to be collaborating on a new sci-fi series with New York Times bestselling author David Brin.
He died of lung cancer three days before his 48th birthday.