Wil McCarthy

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William Terence McCarthy (born September 16, 1966 in Princeton , New Jersey ) is an American writer and entrepreneur. He is best known as a science fiction writer, notably through the Queendom of Sol novel series .

Life

McCarthy studied at the University of Colorado at Boulder , where he graduated in 1988 with a bachelor's degree in aerospace engineering. He then worked at Lockheed Martin Space Launch Systems , from 1998 to 2001 at Omnitech Robotics and was a senior engineer at Galileo Shipyards . He became the founder and director of The Programmable Matter Corporation in Lakewood in 2003 . The company aims at the development of programmable matt , " programmable matter ", ie products in the border area of nanotechnology and innovative materials. For corresponding materials and concepts - which also play a central role in some of his narratives - McCarthy uses the term wellstone , a suitcase word made up of quantum well ( quantum dots ) and stone (ie silicon ). McCarthy also co-founded and until 2014 technical director of RavenBrick , a solar technology company , now renamed RavenWindow . The Programmable Matter Corporation was acquired by RavenBrick in 2006. From 2014 he worked for Brite-Line Technologies in Denver , Colorado .

From 1990 McCarthy began to publish SF stories, his first novel - apart from the short novel Dirtyside Down - was Aggressor Six (1996), in which mankind fights an alien race in the 34th century and the invaders only with the help of one Group of people trained to think like the enemy. The novel was nominated for the Locus Award . In 1998 the sequel The Fall of Sirius followed 1000 years later .

McCarthy's best-known work is the novel series Queendom of Sol , the first volume of which was The Collapsium in 2000. The Collapsium was nominated for the Nebula Award , the Seiun Prize and the Locus Award, for which the third and fourth volume were also nominated. The fourth volume To Crush the Moon (2005) was nominated for the Nebula Award and the Philip K. Dick Award . In the future of the novel series, the solar system is a monarchy . The development is not determined by the queen, but by new materials - especially the eponymous Collapsium , a type of Unobtainium consisting of tiny black holes - whose fantastic properties enable gigantic constructs, for example a collapsium ring around the sun. At the same time, however, these technical miracles involve enormous dangers on an apocalyptic scale. Similarly catastrophic is the course in Bloom (1998), where an out of control mass of nanobots is incorporating the inner solar system . Also Bloom was nominated for the Locus Award.

McCarthy is seen as a promising new generation Hard SF writer and as such has been compared to Greg Bear and Arthur C. Clarke . In the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction , John Clute wrote: "There is a definite impression that McCarthy's best work has not yet been seen." However, since 2005 only a few short stories have appeared.

From 1999 to 2009 McCarthy wrote the popular science column Lab Notes for the science fiction network Sci Fi Channel . From 2002 to 2006 he wrote articles for the technology magazine Wired .

McCarthy lives in Denver with his family.

Awards

  • 2006: Analog Readers Poll Award for Mission to Utah: A Science Fiction Writer's Adventures at the Mars Society Desert Research Station

bibliography

The series are arranged according to the year of publication of the first part.

Waisters (series of novels)
  • 1 Aggressor Six (1994)
  • 2 The Fall of Sirius (1996)
Dream (short story series)
  • The Dream of Houses (1995)
  • The Dream of Castles (1997)
  • The Dream of Nations (1998)
Queendom of Sol (series of novels)
  • 1 The Collapsium (2000)
    • German: Sol: The Creator of Eternity. Translated by Norbert Stöbe. Heyne, 2006, ISBN 3-453-52171-4 .
  • 2 The Wellstone (2003)
    • English: Sol: The Prince's Rebellion. Translated by Norbert Stöbe. Heyne, 2006, ISBN 3-453-52172-2 .
  • 3 Lost in Transmission (2004)
  • 4 To Crush the Moon (2005)
  • The Monarchs of Sol (2003, collective edition of 1 and 2)
Novels
  • Dirtyside Down (1991)
  • Flies from the Amber (1995)
  • Murder in the Solid State (1996)
  • Bloom (1998)
Short stories
  • What I Did with the OTV Grissom (1990)
  • Amerikano Hiaika (1991)
    • German: Amerikano Hiaika. 1998.
  • Looking For Pablo (1992)
  • A Midnight Clear (1994, with Gregory R. Hyde)
  • The Blackery Dark (1994)
  • Rocket Ghosts (1995)
  • Jarvik Hearts (1996)
  • Outcolony (1998)
  • Once Upon a Matter Crushed (1999)
  • Programmable Matter (2000)
  • No Job Too Small (2001)
  • Dinner with Gtoim (2002)
  • He Died That Day, in Thirty Years (2002)
  • Garbage Day (2002)
  • They Will Raise You in a Box (2005)
  • The Policeman's Daughter (2005)
  • Boundary Condition (2006)
  • Heisenberg Elementary (2006)
  • The Technetium Rush (2006)
  • Marklord Pete (2007)
  • The Necromancer in Love (2007)
  • How the Bald Apes Saved Mass Crossing (2008)
  • Soul Printer (2008) also appeared as:
  • Variant: The Soul Printer (2008)
  • The Freshmen Hook Up (2009)
  • Wyatt Earp 2.0 (2016)
  • The Last Biker Gang (2018)
anthology
Non-fiction
  • Hacking Matter: Levitating Chairs, Quantum Mirages, and the Infinite Weirdness of Programmable Atoms (2003)

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. a b Wil McCarthy , profile on the Lifeboat Foundation website , accessed January 16, 2019.
  2. Rocky Rawstern: Quantum dots, programmable matter, and wellstone: Interview with author Wil McCarthy . In: Nanotechnology Now , June 2003, accessed January 16, 2019.
  3. Rave Brick - About - Board of Directors ( Memento of 10 March 2014 Internet Archive )
  4. a b Wil McCarthy , LinkedIn profile , accessed January 16, 2019.
  5. Craig E. Engler: It Takes a Rocket Scientist: Amazon.com Interviews Wil McCarthy . Amazon.com, 1998, accessed January 16, 2019.
  6. Wil McCarthy , entry on PhantastikCouch.de , accessed on January 16, 2019.