My novel The Silk Code won the Locus Award for Best First Novel of 1999. My other science fiction and mystery novels include Borrowed Tides (2001), The Consciousness Plague (2002), The Pixel Eye (2004), The Plot To Save Socrates (2006; Entertainment Weekly called it "challenging fun"), Unburning Alexandria (2013), Chronica (2014), and It's Real Life: An Alternate History of The Beatles. The Plot to Save Socrates and The Consciousness Plague are available as audiobooks on Audible. My short stories have been published in Analog, Amazing Stories, Nature, Buzzy Mag, and other leading magazines, and have been nominated for Nebula, Hugo, Edgar, Sturgeon, and Sidewise Awards. "The Chronology Protection Case" (Nebula nominee, 1995) was made into a short film by Jay Kensinger, now on Amazon Prime, and was a Finalist in the Movies4Movies Film Festival Summer 2017. A radio play of "The Chronology Protection Case," nominated for the Edgar Award, is available as an audiobook on Audible. My alternate history story about The Beatles, "It's Real Life" (2022), was made into a radio play in 2023, is available as an audiobook on Audible, and was expanded into a novel, published in 2024. (The short story won The Mary Shelley Award fo Outstanding Fiction in 2023.) Nine nonfiction books, including The Soft Edge (1997), Digital McLuhan (1999), RealSpace (2003), Cellphone (2004), and New New Media (2009, 2012) have been the subject of major articles in the New York Times, Wired, the Christian Science Monitor, and have been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Polish, Arabic, and ten other languages. I co-edited Touching the Face of the Cosmos: On the Intersection of Space Travel and Religion in 2015. My short books McLuhan in an Age of Social Media (2015), Fake News in Real Context (2016), and Cyber War and Peace (2017) are published on Kindle and in paperback and continuously updated. I appear from time to time on MSNBC, CNN, The History Channel, The Discovery Channel, National Geographic, NPR, BBC Radio and other TV and radio programs -- I like talking just as much as writing. I'm also a songwriter, and have been in several bands over the years - one (The Other Voices) had two records out on Atlantic Records in 1960s. My 1972 album Twice Upon a Rhyme (on HappySad Records) was reissued on CD by Beatball/Big Pink Records and on Vivid Records in 2009, and on re-pressed vinyl by Whiplash/Sound of Salvation Records in 2010. In the Fall of 2018, I recorded Welcome Up: Songs of Space and Time, a new album of my science fiction songs; it was released in early 2020 on Old Bear Records, with vinyl distributed by Light In The Attic Records. I was listed in The Chronicle of Higher Education's "Top 10 Academic Twitterers" in 2009. I review television in my Infinite Regress.tv blog. Last but not least: I have a PhD in Media Ecology from New York University and am Professor of Communication & Media Studies at Fordham University in New York City.Read more about this authorRead less about this author