Alec Nevala-Lee

Nevala-Lee was born in Castro Valley, California on May 31, 1980[6][7] and graduated from Harvard College with a bachelor's degree in Classics.[8] He currently lives in Oak Park, Illinois.[9] His novels include The Icon Thief, City of Exiles, and Eternal Empire, all published by Penguin Books,[10] and his short fiction has appeared in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Lightspeed Magazine,[11] and two editions of The Year’s Best Science Fiction.[12] He has written for such publications as the New York Times,[13][14] the Los Angeles Times, Salon, The Daily Beast, Longreads, The Rumpus, Public Books, and the San Francisco Bay Guardian. [15] His nonfiction book Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction was released by Dey Street Books, an imprint of HarperCollins, on October 23, 2018.[16]

In the course of researching Astounding, Nevala-Lee discovered a previously unknown draft of John W. Campbell's novella "Who Goes There?", the basis for the movie The Thing.[17] The manuscript, Frozen Hell, is currently being developed as a feature film by Blumhouse Productions.[18] Frozen Hell was published in 2019 by Wildside Press with introductory material by Nevala-Lee and Robert Silverberg.[19][20] Nevala-Lee also uncovered an unpublished manuscript, "A Criticism of Dianetics," co-authored by L. Ron Hubbard in 1949, which the noted Scientology critic Tony Ortega has described as "a stunning document."[21] Astounding also served as a resource for the Washington Post podcast series Moonrise, which was produced by the reporter Lillian Cunningham.[22]

Analog editor Trevor Quachri partially credited the critical picture of Campbell in Nevala-Lee's book with the decision to rename the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, which became the Astounding Award in August 2019.[23] In her acceptance speech for the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Related Work, writer Jeannette Ng, whose speech criticizing Campbell the previous year was widely seen as catalyzing the name change, thanked Nevala-Lee, "who wrote the book and brought the receipts."[24] Nevala-Lee's work has been cited by multiple publications, including The Atlantic,[25] for its treatment of the author Isaac Asimov's conduct toward women and its impact on the science fiction community.[26] Syndromes, an audio original collection of thirteen of Nevala-Lee's stories from Analog read by Jonathan Todd Ross and Catherine Ho, was released in 2020 by Recorded Books.[27]

Nevala-Lee’s debut novel, The Icon Thief, a conspiracy thriller inspired by the work of artist Marcel Duchamp,[28] received a starred review from Publishers Weekly.[29] A sequel, City of Exiles, is partially based on the Dyatlov Pass incident,[30] while the concluding novel in the trilogy, Eternal Empire, incorporates elements from the myth of Shambhala.[31] On the science fiction side, Locus critic Rich Horton has called Nevala-Lee “one of [Analog editor Stanley Schmidt’s] best recent discoveries...One of Nevala-Lee’s idea engines is to present a situation which suggests a fantastical or science-fictional premise, and then to turn the idea on its head, not so much by debunking the central premise, or explaining it away in mundane terms, but by giving it a different, perhaps more scientifically rigorous, science-fictional explanation.”[32] Analog has referred to him as "a master of…tale[s] set in an atypical location, with science fiction that arrives from an unexpected direction,”[33] while Locus reviews editor Jonathan Strahan has said that Nevala-Lee's fiction "has been some of the best stuff in Analog in the last ten years."[34] The Wall Street Journal has called Nevala-Lee "a talented science fiction writer,"[35] and Jim Killen of Tor has written that he has earned "a reputation as one of the smartest young SFF writers out there."[36]

Nevala-Lee's book Astounding—a group biography of the editor John W. Campbell and the science fiction writers Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and L. Ron Hubbard[6]—is a 2019 Hugo Award finalist for Best Related Work[37] and Locus Award finalist for Non-Fiction.[38] The Economist named it one of the best books of 2018, calling it "an indispensable book for anyone trying to understand the birth and meaning of modern science fiction in America from the 1930s to the 1950s—a genre that reshaped how people think about the future, for good and ill."[3] The author George R.R. Martin praised it as "an amazing and engrossing history...Insightful, entertaining, and compulsively readable."[39] In a starred review, Publishers Weekly described it as "a major work of popular culture scholarship,"[40] while Kirkus Reviews referred to it as "first-rate...a welcome contribution to the study of popular literature."[41] Writing in The Wall Street Journal, the scholar Michael Saler called it an "engrossing, well-researched history,"[35] while James Sallis of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction described it as a "wonderfully researched, expansive biography."[42] Gary K. Wolfe wrote in Locus: "As literary and cultural history, Astounding may well stand as the definitive account of this important era in the growth of modern SF."[43] The editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden praised it as "one of the greatest works of science fiction history ever,"[44] while Michael Dirda of The Washington Post called it "enthralling" and concluded: "In the end, Nevala-Lee’s Astounding isn’t just Arrakisian spice for science-fiction fans—it’s also a clarion call to enlarge American literary history."[45]

• Official website
• Alec Nevala-Lee at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Alec Nevala-Lee at the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
• Alec Nevala-Lee Interview at Writers Digest
• Alec Nevala-Lee Interview at Lightspeed Magazine
• Alec Nevala-Lee Interview at the Christian Science Monitor
• Alec Nevala-Lee Interview at Syfy Wire
• Alec Nevala-Lee Interview at Space.com
• Alec Nevala-Lee on BookTV on C-SPAN2