Writing

Novels

The Alchemy Wars Trilogy

Something More Than Night

The Milkweed Triptych

Short(er) Fiction

Stories, Novelettes, & Novellas

• “The Winnowing Metric” Sunday Morning Transport (Oct. 2024)
• “The Long, Long Fall of Josiah Eddy” Brave New Worlds anthology (Aug. 2022)
• “The Owl and the Reptiloid” Sunday Morning Transport (Jul. 2022)
  • Reprinted in The Sunday Morning Transport: Selected Stories 2022 (Aug. 2023)
• “Hammer and Tongs and a Rusty Nail” Tor.com (Dec. 2020) (a Wild Cards story)
• “When God Sits in Your Lap” Asimov’s Science Fiction (Sep./Oct. 2020) (a Something More Than Night story)
  • Reprinted in The Year’s Top Hard Science Fiction Stories 5  (Jun. 2021)
  • Reprinted in The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, 2021 Edition (Aug. 2022)
• “Come the Revolution” The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (Mar./Apr. 2020) (an Alchemy Wars tale)
  • Reprinted in The Year’s Top Tales of Space and Time (Sep. 2021)
  • Reprinted in The Year’s Top Robot and AI Stories: Second Annual Collection (Dec. 2021)
  • Reprinted in Forever Magazine (forthcoming)
• “Deus Ex Machina” Portals anthology (June 2019)
• “Testimony of Samuel Frobisher Regarding Events Upon His Majesty’s Ship Confidence, 14-22 June, 1818, With Diagrams” The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (Jul./Aug. 2014)
  • Republished in audio format by PodCastle (Episode 348, Jan. 2015)
  • Reprinted in Best New Horror #26 (2015)
• “The Cavorite Job” Clockwork Universe: Steampunk vs Aliens anthology (2014)
• “What Doctor Ivanovich Saw” Subterranean Press Magazine (Fall, 2013) (a Milkweed Triptych tale)
• “The Mainspring of His Heart, the Shackles of His Soul” Human for a Day anthology (Dec. 2011)
• “Steady Hands and a Heart of Oak”  After Hours: Tales From the Ur-Bar anthology (2011)
• “Still Life (A Sexagesimal Fairy Tale)” Apex Magazine (Oct. 2010)
  • Reprinted in The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume Five (2011)
  • Reprinted in The Best of Apex Magazine and The Book of Apex
• “What Doctor Gottlieb Saw” Tor.com (June 2010) (a Milkweed Triptych tale)
• “Come Dancefight, My Beloved Enemy” Trabuco Road (Mar. 2007)
  • Reprinted at Snackreads (Oct. 2013)

Wild Cards

As a member of George R. R. Martin’s shared-universe consortium, I’ve written chunks of five Wild Cards novels to date:

• Inside Straight (Tor, 2008) (9-way author interview here)
• Busted Flush (Tor, 2008) (10-way author interview here)
• Suicide Kings (Tor, 2009)
• Lowball (Tor, 2014)
• High Stakes (Tor, 2016)

Some of the characters I’ve created, including Wally ‘Rustbelt’ Gunderson and Mollie ‘Tesseract’ Steunenberg, have appeared all over the canon since they were introduced. I’ve also written a series of extraordinarily nerdy blog posts for the Wild Cards website, deriving a series of mathematical models of the expression statistics for xenovirus Takis-A:

• Part 1: The Fallacy of the 1% (May 2019)
• Part 2: The Fallacy of the 90% (Sep 2020)
• Part 3: Turning Cards, Collapsing Waves, and Lagrangian Mechanics (Jan 2023)

In fact, I’m SO nerdy that I managed to turn my mathematical model for Wild Cards into an honest-to-god peer-reviewed physics paper:

Ergodic Lagrangian Mechanics in a Superhero Universe, by I. L. Tregillis & George R. R. Martin, will appear in the American Journal of Physics in early 2025.

I’ve put together a whimsical (math-light, meme-heavy) hour-long presentation that takes an audience through the development of the third (and most sophisticated) of these models. To date I’ve presented “The Math (& Physics) of Wild Cards” to the Albuquerque Science Fiction Society (November, 2023) and at Bubonicon 55 (August, 2024). People seem to enjoy it quite a bit.

Realm (formerly Serial Box Publishing)

I was a proud member of the “writer’s room” for both seasons of the occult spy-fi thriller The Witch Who Came in From the Cold, a project from Serial Box Publishing (now Realm). I wrote the ColdWitch episodes

• The Golem (S01, E05)
• Radio Free Trismegistus (S01, E07)
• King’s Gambit Accepted (S01, E11)
• Old Game, New Players (S02, E03)
• Aftermath (S02, E09)
• We All Fall Down (S02, E13)

ColdWitch S01 was also published in novel format by Saga Press.

Lectures & Workshops

• Workshop: The Fractal Dimension of Surprise: Building Vibrant Prose from the Atoms Up
• Presentation: The Math (& Physics) of Wild Cards
• Lecture: Ten (or so) Things That Somebody Should Tell Up-and-Coming Writers

Miscellany

• Introduction to the Fantasy Masterworks edition of Tim Powers’s Earthquake Weather (Gollancz, 2015)
• Dispatches from the Future (Popular Science, June 2014)
• Today’s Best Science Fiction Writers Imagine the Future (Popular Science, June 2013)
• Perry Rodent and the Great Shoe Warehouse of Ophiuchus Zeta (written for the Bubonicon 42 Program Book, August 2010)