I've been writing fiction since the age of fifteen, when I borrowed my neighbour's typewriter and banged out half of a science-fiction novel set on Mars. Later, equipped with my own machine, I finished two more novels (both unpublishable and both long since lost), and wrote several stories, one of which was bought by a US magazine, Worlds of If, that almost immediately ceased publication.  My story wasn't published, I wasn't paid, but in hindsight it was a lucky escape because the story wasn't especially good (although I thriftily repurposed its best sentence for my third novel, Eternal Light). At the time of that sale, I was just 19, studying for a B.Sc in Botany and Zoology at Bristol University. After I graduated, I completed a Ph.D on plant-animal symbioses and worked as a researcher and lecturer in various universities, including Oxford, St Andrews and the University of California, Los Angeles. In 1996 I dropped out of academic life to become a full-time writer. By then I had published six novels, including Fairyland, which won the Arthur C. Clarke and John W. Campbell Awards. I've been labelled as a writer of 'hard science fiction', and my scientific background has certainly informed my writing, but I've always been interested in the way technology can change and inform the rich strangeness of human lives. And while I'm still invested in science fiction and its vast canvases, I have also written a good number of stories in the horror genre, as well as thrillers and a police procedural.

I've now published twenty-four novels and more than a hundred short stories, co-edited an anthology, In Dreams, with Kim Newman, and published a Doctor Who novella and a BFI Film Classic on Terry Gilliam's film Brazil. I'm still a huge science junky, but I'm happy to observe from the sidelines, only occasionally miss my laboratory, and have been lucky enough to participate in science workshops whose topics have ranged from neurobiology to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. I wrote a regular book review column in Interzone magazine back in the 1990s, and have written book and film reviews and pieces of journalism for a variety of publications, including the Guardian and Independent newspapers, Crime Time, Arc magazine, New Scientist, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Currently, my twenty-fifth novel, Loss Protocol, is inching towards publication, and I've just turned in my twenty-sixth, Heaven's Grand Design. I live in North London, but spend as much time as possible getting lost in the woods.