Ian Tregillis Books in Order

Ian Tregillis was born in McLeod County, Minnesota, in 1973 and grew up in New Brighton. Long before he published novels, he was the kind of student who started taking University of Minnesota math classes while still in junior high through its youth mathematics program.

He stayed at the university for both his undergraduate and graduate work, studying physics and astrophysics. His doctoral research focused on cosmic-ray acceleration in radio galaxies, the huge jets that help make distant galaxies visible across space. He earned his Ph.D. in 2002.

After finishing the thesis, Tregillis moved to New Mexico for a research job at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He began as a postdoctoral scientist, then became a staff scientist in 2005. Physics has remained his day job, with research ranging from astrophysics to shock waves moving through materials.

That move also made room for a second career.

Tregillis had wanted to make writing a serious hobby, but waited until his Ph.D. was done because he knew he was not great at splitting his attention. In New Mexico, he joined an online workshop, learned by critiquing other writers, and began building a regular practice around evenings and weekends. In 2005, he attended the six-week Clarion Writers' Workshop in Michigan, a step that put him in contact with working science-fiction and fantasy writers.

Back home, Walter Jon Williams invited him into Critical Mass, a New Mexico writing group that included writers such as Melinda Snodgrass, Daniel Abraham, Ty Franck, S. M. Stirling, and George R. R. Martin at different times. That community helped turn a private writing habit into a real publishing path. Through the Wild Cards shared-world project, he also found his literary agent before he had sold a novel.

His first novel, Bitter Seeds, arrived in 2010. It began the Milkweed books, a dark alternate history in which British spies and warlocks confront Nazi-created superhumans during World War II. The later The Coldest War and Necessary Evil widen that story into Cold War paranoia, time fractures, and a long contest with the frighteningly prepared seer Gretel.

The setups may be wild, but the pressure usually comes down to people caught inside systems that treat them as tools.

That is true of The Mechanical, which starts the Alchemy Wars trilogy in a Dutch-led alternate world built on enslaved clockwork people. It is also true of Something More Than Night, a standalone that turns a murder in Heaven into a hard-boiled noir investigation. Tregillis enjoys mixing espionage, strange science, occult bargains, and big moral questions, then making the characters deal with the personal cost.

He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with his wife, Sara, a playwright, and commutes to Los Alamos for his physics work. Writing still fits around the rest of life, often in the practical spaces between work and home.