hard deadlines

John is a science fiction writer born in Brooklyn, NY the year NASA was created. As a child, his surrogate parents were Robert Heinlein and Andre Norton (as he grew up, they morphed into James Tiptree, Jr. and Thomas Pynchon.)

He attended the Clarion science fiction workshop in 1993, and sold his first short story, the Sturgeon Award-winning "Jigoko no mokushiroku" to Asimov's in 1995.

Recent publications include the Nebula®-shortlisted "Keyboard Practice..." in the January 2005 Fantasy & Science Fiction, and "The Ashbazu Effect" in the 2004 anthology ReVisions, edited by Julie Czerneda and Isaac Szpindel, which was a finalist for the 2005 Sidewise alternate history award.

A theorist and practitioner in the field of hypertext narrative, he wrote one of the first hypertext novels, Uncle Buddy's Phantom Funhouse, a New Media Invision Award finalist, in 1993. It was reviewed in the New York Times, where Robert Coover gave a nod to its "sheer pleasure of play." Learn more at Eastgate Systems.

TINAC: John, Nancy Kaplan, Stuart Moulthrop, Michael Joyce. (photo by Adam Chinitz)

As a member of the TINAC collective, he has written on digital narrative and spoken at dozens of colleges and conferences.

He attended Syracuse University, got his degree and did graduate work at the New School University, and is a doctoral candidate in Media Ecology at NYU.

Though born in Brooklyn, he is as close to a native Rhode Islander as you can get ("Take a left just past where Nadeau's drugstore used to be...") and relishes belonging to the third generation of his family to live in their house. He and Karen and their son, Jack, serve as scritchers and objects of nuzzlement to TRFH (Their Royal Feline Highnesses), Curi and Eclipse.

In the mundane world, he is a webmaster at an international management consulting firm.