Alec Nevala-Lee
Alec Nevala-Lee is an American novelist, biographer, and science fiction writer. He was a Hugo and Locus Award finalist for the group biography "Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction." His next book will be "Inventor of the Future", a biography of the architectural designer and futurist Buckminster Fuller. Biography. Nevala-Lee was born in Castro Valley, California on May 31, 1980 and graduated from Harvard College with a bachelor's degree in Classics. He is half Chinese, half Finnish and partly Estonian. He  currently lives in Oak Park, Illinois. His novels include "The Icon Thief", "City of Exiles", and "Eternal Empire", all published by Penguin Books, and his short fiction has appeared in "Analog Science Fiction and Fact", "Lightspeed Magazine", and two editions of "". He has written for such publications as the "New York Times", the "Los Angeles Times", "Salon", "The Daily Beast", "Longreads", "The Rumpus", "Public Books", and the "San Francisco Bay Guardian". 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. 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." The manuscript, "Frozen Hell", is currently being developed as a feature film by Blumhouse Productions. "Frozen Hell" was published in 2019 by Wildside Press with introductory material by Nevala-Lee and Robert Silverberg. "Astounding" also served as a resource for the "Washington Post" podcast series "Moonrise", which was produced by the reporter Lillian Cunningham. "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. Influence. "Analog" editor Trevor Quachri partially credited the critical picture of John W. 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. “Reading an early draft of Alec’s book is when I realized that the name change would need to happen eventually,” Quachri told "The New York Times", and Nevala-Lee stated that he supported the change: “It was clearly the  right call. At this point, the contrast between Campbell’s racism and the diversity of the writers who have recently received the award was really just too glaring to ignore.” 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." Nevala-Lee's work has been cited by multiple publications, including "The Atlantic", for its treatment of the author Isaac Asimov's conduct toward women and its impact  on the science fiction community. While researching "Astounding", 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." Work. Nevala-Lee's debut novel, "The Icon Thief", a conspiracy thriller inspired by the work of artist Marcel Duchamp, received a starred review from "Publishers Weekly". A sequel, "City of Exiles", is partially based on the Dyatlov Pass incident, while the concluding novel in the trilogy, "Eternal Empire", incorporates elements from the myth of Shambhala. On the science fiction  side, "Locus" critic Rich Horton has identified a tendency in Nevala-Lee's work "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.” "Analog" has characterized him as an author of "tale[s] set in an atypical location, with science fiction that arrives from an unexpected direction,” 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." "The Wall Street Journal" has called Nevala-Lee "a talented science fiction writer," and Jim Killen of "Tor" has written that he has earned "a reputation as one of the smartest young SFF writers out there." 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—was a 2019 Hugo Award finalist for Best Related Work and Locus Award finalist for Non-Fiction. "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." The science fiction writer Barry N. Malzberg described it as "the most important historical and critical work my field has ever seen," while the editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden praised it as "one of the greatest works of science fiction history ever," and the author George R.R. Martin called it "an amazing and engrossing history." In a  starred review, "Publishers Weekly" described it as "a major work of popular culture scholarship," and it received positive notices from Michael Saler of "The Wall Street Journal", James Sallis of "The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction", and Michael Dirda of "The Washington Post". In "SFRA Review", the critic Andy Duncan praised its writing and research, but questioned the continuing relevance of the book's four subjects: "As I enjoy and admire it, I can’t help but wonder whether it hasn’t been published a generation too late."