My parents, a bearded mountebank and a discredited tarot-card reader, settled in the Minnesota Territory after fleeing the wrath of a Flemish prince. There they conspired to mark me with a Cornish surname and Macedonian blood. The details of this improbably union remain hidden to me even today, though what little I have uncovered involves a Dutch tramp steamer, taconite ore, and a stolen horse.
Ian attended the University of Minnesota from his sophomore year in high school through the end of graduate school many years later. Eventually the university decided it had seen quite enough of him, so it politely but firmly asked him to leave, grow up, and get a real job. Ian's parting gift was a doctorate in physics for his research on radio galaxies. In 2002 he joined a research collaboration between Los Alamos National Laboratory and Princeton University. He spent the next year unwisely living in New Mexico and New Jersey simultaneously, and making frequent cross-country trips.
In 2005, Ian attended the Clarion Writers' Workshop in East Lansing, Michigan. (This was the second-to-last Clarion class in the program's 35 year run at Michigan State University, before the program moved to its new home at UCSD in 2007.) There he spent six weeks living in a sweltering, slightly creepy, soon-to-be-condemned sorority house with twelve other aspiring writers. Scurvy was a problem. However, in spite of many predictions, cannibalism was not.
After Clarion, he joined Critical Mass, New Mexico's premier writing critique group. There he strives to make the science-fictional imaginings of Walter Jon Williams, Daniel Abraham, Melinda Snodgrass, S. M. Stirling, and George R. R. Martin bear at least a passing resemblance to real science. In return, they strive to make his prose bear at least a passing resemblance to English.
Nowadays he lives in northern New Mexico, where he consorts with writers, scientists, and other disreputable types.
In 2005, Ian attended the Clarion Writers' Workshop in East Lansing, Michigan. (This was the second-to-last Clarion class in the program's 35 year run at Michigan State University, before the program moved to its new home at UCSD in 2007.) There he spent six weeks living in a sweltering, slightly creepy, soon-to-be-condemned sorority house with twelve other aspiring writers. Scurvy was a problem. However, in spite of many predictions, cannibalism was not.
After Clarion, he joined Critical Mass, New Mexico's premier writing critique group. There he strives to make the science-fictional imaginings of Walter Jon Williams, Daniel Abraham, Melinda Snodgrass, S. M. Stirling, and George R. R. Martin bear at least a passing resemblance to real science. In return, they strive to make his prose bear at least a passing resemblance to English.
Nowadays he lives in northern New Mexico, where he consorts with writers, scientists, and other disreputable types.