John Scalzi

John Scalzi was born John Michael Scalzi II on May 10, 1969, in Fairfield, California. He grew up in the Los Angeles suburbs, raised by his mother with very little money. That childhood became the essay "Being Poor," one of the most widely read things he has published. He attended a boarding school in Claremont on scholarship and graduated in philosophy from the University of Chicago in 1991, where he was also editor-in-chief of the student paper.

Before the novels, he was a journalist. He wrote columns and film reviews for The Fresno Bee, and in 1996 AOL hired him as an in-house writer and editor. In 1998 he started the blog Whatever, which is still running.

The blog changed everything. In December 2002, Scalzi posted Old Man's War there, one chapter a day. Tor editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden read it and bought the book, which came out in January 2005. The premise is simple and strong: a 75-year-old retiree joins a space army and gets a young body to fight aliens. It was a Hugo finalist, and Scalzi won the Campbell Award for best new writer in 2006.

The series grew with The Ghost Brigades, The Last Colony, Zoe's Tale, The Human Division and The End of All Things, and returned in 2025 with The Shattering Peace. In 2026 the whole saga won the Hugo for Best Series.

Outside that universe, Scalzi leaned into light, funny science fiction. Redshirts (2012), a riff on the expendable crew members of space TV shows, won both the Hugo and the Locus for Best Novel in 2013. Then came Lock In, The Interdependency trilogy, The Kaiju Preservation Society and Starter Villain, the last three all Locus winners.

He has a behind-the-scenes résumé too. He served as president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America from 2010 to 2013. In 2015 he signed a $3.4 million deal with Tor for 13 books over ten years, and in 2024 he added ten more. He was a creative consultant on Stargate Universe, and Netflix's animated series Love, Death & Robots has adapted several of his stories, including "Three Robots." He lives in Bradford, Ohio, with his wife, Kristine.