Alec Nevala-Lee
Alec Nevala-Lee (born May 31, 1980) is an American biographer, novelist, and science fiction writer. He was a Hugo and Locus Award finalist[1][2] for the group biography Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction. His most recent book is Inventor of the Future, a biography of the architectural designer and futurist Buckminster Fuller,[3] which was selected by Esquire as one of the fifty best biographies of all time.[4] He is currently at work on a biography of the physicist Luis W. Alvarez.[5]
Alec Nevala-Lee
Biography[edit]
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 is half Chinese, half Finnish and partly Estonian,[9] and he identifies as bisexual.[10] He and his wife Wailin Wong, a reporter and co-host for The Indicator on NPR,[11] live in Oak Park, Illinois with their daughter.[12][13]
His novels include The Icon Thief, City of Exiles, and Eternal Empire, all published by Penguin Books,[14] and his short fiction has appeared in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Lightspeed Magazine,[15] and two editions of The Year’s Best Science Fiction.[16] He has written for such publications as the New York Times,[17][18] Slate,[19] The Atlantic online,[20] the Los Angeles Times, Salon, The Daily Beast, Longreads, The Rumpus, Public Books, and the San Francisco Bay Guardian.[21]
He serves as a consultant to the Buckminster Fuller Institute[22] and on the editorial advisory board of the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts.[23] Nevala-Lee was also a member of the five-person jury that selected the finalists for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Biography.[24]
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.[25] 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.[26] The manuscript, titled Frozen Hell, was published in 2019 by Wildside Press with introductory material by Nevala-Lee and Robert Silverberg.[27][28] As of January 2020, Frozen Hell is being developed as a feature film by Blumhouse Productions.[29] Astounding also served as a resource for the Washington Post podcast series Moonrise, produced by reporter Lillian Cunningham.[30]
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.[31] His biography of Buckminster Fuller, titled Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller, was published by Dey Street Books / HarperCollins on August 2, 2022.[32] In 2023, to support the writing of his biography of physicist Luis W. Alvarez, Nevala-Lee received a $40,000 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.[33]
Influence[edit]
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,[34] 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.”[34] 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."[35]
Writing in The New Republic, the critic Rebecca Onion noted a common theme in Nevala-Lee's choice of subjects: "Nevala-Lee is something of an expert in a very specific type: twentieth-century men, working on the fringes of stem careers, who channeled the technological optimism of the years between World War I and the 1970s into careers as media icons."[36] Nevala-Lee's work has been cited by multiple publications, including The Atlantic,[37] for its treatment of the author Isaac Asimov's conduct toward women and its impact on the science fiction community.[38] 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."[39] On June 30, 2022, Nevala-Lee published an investigative article in Slate, "False Flag," that debunked the myth—which had been cited as fact in numerous sources, including Wikipedia—that an Ohio teenager named Robert G. Heft had designed the 50-star flag of the United States.[40]
Work[edit]
Nevala-Lee's debut novel, The Icon Thief, a conspiracy thriller inspired by the work of artist Marcel Duchamp,[41] received a starred review from Publishers Weekly.[42] A sequel, City of Exiles, is partially based on the Dyatlov Pass incident,[43] while the concluding novel in the trilogy, Eternal Empire, incorporates elements from the myth of Shambhala.[44] 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.”[45] Analog has characterized him as an author of "tale[s] set in an atypical location, with science fiction that arrives from an unexpected direction,”[46] 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."[47] The Wall Street Journal has called Nevala-Lee "a talented science fiction writer,"[48] and Jim Killen of Tor has written that he has earned "a reputation as one of the smartest young SFF writers out there."[49]
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]—was a 2019 Hugo Award finalist for Best Related Work[50] and Locus Award finalist for Non-Fiction.[51] Its Chinese translation by Sun Yanan received a Silver Xingyun Award for Best Translated Work.[52] 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."[53] The science fiction writer Barry N. Malzberg described it as "the most important historical and critical work my field has ever seen,"[54] while the editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden praised it as "one of the greatest works of science fiction history ever,"[55] and the author George R.R. Martin called it "an amazing and engrossing history."[56] In a starred review, Publishers Weekly described it as "a major work of popular culture scholarship,"[57] and it received positive notices from Michael Saler of The Wall Street Journal,[48] James Sallis of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction,[58] and Michael Dirda of The Washington Post.[59] 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."[60]
In 2022, Nevala-Lee published Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller, which was positively received by critics.[61] The biography was a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice[62] and received starred reviews from Kirkus Reviews[63] and Booklist.[64] In the New York Times, the architect Witold Rybczynski wrote, "In his public appearances, Fuller could come across as a selfless seer, almost a secular saint; in Nevala-Lee’s biography he is all too human...The strength of this carefully researched and fair-minded biography is that the reader comes away with a greater understanding of a deeply complicated individual who overcame obstacles—many of his own making—to achieve a kind of imperfect greatness."[65] Rebecca Onion of The New Republic praised the book as "meticulous and clearly written," but questioned the value of Fuller's legacy: "Despite his shortcomings as a thinker and a person, Inventor of the Future insists, many brilliant people—from the sculptor Isamu Noguchi, his longtime friend and collaborator; John Cage and Merce Cunningham, his colleagues at Black Mountain College; designer Edwin Schlossberg, his later-in-life protégé; Nevala-Lee himself—have loved Fuller, and found something in his ideas. This must mean something, but what?"[66] In The New York Review of Books, James Gleick noted that the biography "diligently deconstruct[s] Fuller’s mythmaking."[67] A review in The Economist, which named it one of the best books of the year,[68] described Nevala-Lee as "a sure-footed guide to a dizzying life," while also noting, "The book’s approach to this protean career is relentlessly chronological; incident follows incident at breakneck speed, a structure that captures Fuller’s irrepressible energy but sometimes leaves the reader exhausted."[69]