John scalzi biography

Entry updated 16 December 2024. Tagged: Author.

(1969-    ) US author and journalist. Born in California, he studied at the University of Chicago (briefly under Saul Bellow) before taking on a career in journalism. He began publishing work of genre interest with "Alien Animal Encounters" in Strange Horizons for 15 October 2001, and soon published his first novel, the Military SFOld Man's War (2005), which had initially been noticed in its 2002 online iteration by Tor Books editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden.

Old Man's War, the first volume in what would become the Old Man's War or Green Soldier Universe sequence, is very consciously an updating of some of the most distinctive traits of Robert A Heinlein's work, most obviously Starship Troopers (October-November 1959 F&SF as "Starship Soldier"; 1959). The premise of Scalzi's novel is again a recruitment drive for soldiers in an interplanetary Future War; but in Scalzi, the old are enabled by a Tec