Tom Sweterlitsch Books in Order

Tom Sweterlitsch was born in Iowa and grew up in Canton, Ohio. He later made his home in Pittsburgh, a city that has become central to his fiction. His novels blend science fiction with crime stories, but the big ideas never crowd out the people caught inside them.

He started writing young. Sweterlitsch has recalled filling notebooks with stories as a child, including horror tales and adventures shaped by the movies and pop culture he loved. That early habit stuck, even as his route to publishing took time.

At Carnegie Mellon University, he earned a master's degree in literary and cultural theory. Afterward, he spent twelve years working at the Carnegie Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped. It was practical work, close to books and to the people who relied on them.

The library job also fed his reading life. Readers there pointed him toward writers such as Raymond Chandler, and that hard-boiled influence later found its way into his own science fiction. He has spoken about discovering Philip K. Dick in his twenties and realizing that science fiction could hold the kinds of stories he wanted to tell.

A short story called “The City That Lies Within” helped set his first novel in motion. After writer Stewart O'Nan read it, he encouraged Sweterlitsch to turn the idea into something larger. The first version of the resulting manuscript was rejected, so Sweterlitsch went back and rewrote it over the course of a year.

That book became Tomorrow and Tomorrow, published in 2014. It follows Dominic Blaxton, a man mourning his wife and unborn child after Pittsburgh is destroyed, who loses himself in a virtual recreation of the city. When he investigates a murder whose digital traces are being erased, the novel becomes part noir mystery, part grief story, and part uneasy look at life inside a screen-filled future.

Pittsburgh is more than scenery in his work.

His second novel, The Gone World, arrived in 2018. It centers on NCIS agent Shannon Moss, who uses travel into possible futures to investigate the murder of a Navy SEAL's family and the disappearance of his daughter. The book brings together an investigative case, time travel, trauma, and a looming threat that makes each trip forward more frightening.

Across both novels, Sweterlitsch returns to memory, loss, technology, and the way people try to make sense of terrible events. His characters are often investigators or survivors, pushed to keep looking when the truth becomes stranger and more personal than they expected.

He lives in Pittsburgh with his wife and daughter. His published novels may be few, but they show a clear interest in the meeting point between intimate human grief and very large, very unsettling questions.