John Scalzi is an American science fiction writer, born in California in 1969, and one of the genre's most reliably entertaining and commercially successful figures.
A journalist and film critic by training, he was blogging at his site Whatever years before the word existed, and first serialised his debut novel there. That book, Old Man's War, in which Earth's elderly enlist in an interstellar army in exchange for new young bodies, was nominated for the Hugo Award and launched a six-book series that made his name.
His novel Redshirts, a metafictional comedy about doomed junior crew members aboard a suspiciously televisual starship, won the Hugo for Best Novel in 2013, and The Collapsing Empire opened a space-opera trilogy about an interstellar civilisation whose vital transport network is failing.
Recent years have seen him lean happily into high-concept comic novels, including The Kaiju Preservation Society, Starter Villain and When the Moon Hits Your Eye, in which the moon abruptly turns into cheese and humanity must cope.
A former president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, he is known for crisp dialogue, brisk plotting and an unusually cheerful public presence.
He lives in rural Ohio with his wife, and writes, famously, in the company of an ever-changing cast of cats.
