I’m a biographer, novelist, and critic based in Oak Park, Illinois. My books include the Hugo Award finalist Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction; Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller, a New York Times editors’ choice and one of Esquire’s fifty best biographies of all time; and Collisions, the first biography of the physicist Luis W. Alvarez, which was an Economist best book of the year. I’m currently working on Whiz Kids: The Oracles of RAND and the World They Made, which is scheduled to be published by Norton in 2028.