As a child, C. W. Johnson lived in a world of his own, much to the exasperation of his family. He trained in theoretical physics, mathematics, computers, science fiction, poetry, and many other impractical topics. Today he is a professor of physics at a university in San Diego. He has published more than a dozen short stories in professional science fiction magazines such as Analog, Asimov’s, and others, as well as more than two dozen poems.

I grew up in Northern California, with early formative years in Davis and in Corte Madera, but from fifth grade on lived in Sacramento. For fun my friends and I recorded audio skits and made silent super-8 films. We did not belong to the popular cliques. After discovering fantasy (starting with J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis) and science fiction, I soon began writing my own stories. They were derivative and terrible, of course. Around the same time I tried (and failed) to teach myself algebra and, later, calculus; eventually I learned them in proper courses. I was more successful in teaching myself computer programming, on computers you now find in museums. After high school I went to UC Davis, where I majored in physics and mathematics, and worked at the campus cyclotron, where in my efforts to learn FORTRAN I managed to freeze up the entire lab computer system. Nonetheless, this was good enough to get me accepted into graduate school, where my first research task was to program a Cray-2 supercomputer, a machine you can also find now in museums. After receiving my Ph.D in physics from the University of Washington (where my career was nothing at all like that depicted in the novel), I did postdocs at Caltech and Los Alamos, then a faculty position at LSU (where my career was nothing at all like that depicted, etc.), where I won money in bars reading my poetry, and then followed my wife to Southern California. I have a small list of moderate achievements and accolades--a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the 2024 Director of the executive board of the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams Theory Alliance--but mostly I enjoy traveling to conferences around the world meeting my physicist friends and talking about interesting ideas that no one else understands. At this time I eschew social media presence.

“Packed with deep pathos and unrelenting dark humor, the novel delves deeply into questions about the true nature of love in all its mysterious—and quite possibly mystical—components…. Heartbreaking and hilarious.”
– Kirkus Reviews