John Michael Scalzi II (photo ©Gage Skidmore) was born on May 10, 1969 in Fairfield, California, U.S.A.

John Scalzi started reading science fiction and mystery when he was a kid. He earned a bachelor in philosophy at the University of Chicago in 1991 and when he was still a student he started working as a journalist. After graduating, he worked for some years as a corporate consultant and movie critic.

In 1995 John Scalzi married Kristine Ann Blause and in 1998 the two of them had their only daughter, Athena.

In 1997 John Scalzi wrote his first novel, “Agent to the Stars”, which he made freely available on his website asking for a donation of $1 to anyone who appreciated it. Over the course of five years he received about $4,000 in donations.

In 1998 John Scalzi decided to become a full-time writer and also opened a blog because he wanted to practice writing in the format typical of a newspaper or a column. In an interview he stated that he wanted to write novels of a genre he knew so his choice was between science fiction and mystery and he decided by flipping a coin.

In 2002, John Scalzi started publishing his novel “Old Man’s War” on his blog, serialized. The novel was published as a book in 2005 and became the first of a series that in the following years saw the publication of various novels but also some short fiction and the two final books are actually fix-up of short fiction published separately as autonomous works though with by a common thread.

John Scalzi chose military science fiction as marketable and because he could draw inspiration from Robert A. Heinlein but it didn’t monopolize his work. In 2006 he published “The Android’s Dream“, in which you can see in a particular way the humor that characterizes his works. In 2011 he published “Fuzzy Nation“, a reboot of “Little Fuzzy” by H. Beam Piper. In 2012 he published “Redshirts“, winner of the Hugo Award for best novel of the year.

In 2014 the novella “Unlocked: An Oral History of Haden’s Syndrome” began a new series that was developed with the novel “Lock in” of the same year, in which John Scalzi also exploited his passion for mystery since it’s a science fiction mystery. In 2018 the author published the sequel “Head On”.

In 2017 John Scalzi started the Interdependence series with the novel “The Collapsing Empire“. Initially the project was to write two novels but in the end it was developed as a trilogy. In 2018 the second novel, “The Consuming Fire” was published.

Over the course of his career John Scalzi has explored very different themes, showing considerable versatility, so much so that he was also a consultant in the development of the TV show “Stargate Universe”. He’s now a well-established writer but he certainly still has much to offer to science fiction fans.