American · b. 1977
Tom Sweterlitsch is an American science fiction novelist born in Iowa in 1977 and raised in Canton, Ohio. He holds a master's degree in literary and cultural theory from Carnegie Mellon University, where he later worked for over a decade at the Carnegie Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped digitizing archival material. He now lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with his wife and daughter, writing full-time. His debut novel, Tomorrow and Tomorrow (2014), reimagines a technology-saturated 2058 Pittsburgh through the lens of noir influences like Raymond Chandler and Philip K. Dick. His second novel, The Gone World (2018), fuses a police procedural with time travel and cosmic horror, following a Naval Criminal Investigative Service agent probing a family's murder and a missing teenager. Both novels have been optioned for film, and filmmaker Neill Blomkamp invited Sweterlitsch to co-write short films. His fiction blends hard-boiled crime plotting with speculative and horror elements.