Daniel H. Wilson

Daniel H. Wilson is an American science fiction author with an unusual set of credentials for the job: a PhD in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University, plus master's degrees in artificial intelligence and robotics from the same program. A Cherokee Nation citizen who grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, he first reached a wide audience not with fiction but with the tongue-in-cheek nonfiction guide How to Survive a Robot Uprising, before turning his technical background toward novels. His breakout, Robopocalypse (2011), imagines a near-future AI uprising with the plausibility of someone who has actually built robots for a living, and its sequel Robogenesis continued the story; the pair became his best-known work, drawing enough attention that Steven Spielberg optioned the original novel for film. Wilson's engineering instincts extend beyond his own original fiction. In 2019, at the invitation of Michael Crichton's widow Sherri Crichton, he wrote The Andromeda Evolution, an authorized direct sequel to Crichton's 1969 debut The Andromeda Strain, set fifty years after the original outbreak — a rare case of a novelist being handpicked to continue another author's signature work from scratch rather than complete an unfinished manuscript. He has also written Amped, about a near-future underclass of the neurally augmented, and several other novels blending hard technological speculation with thriller pacing. Readers curious about AI, robotics, or techno-thrillers grounded in real science are his natural audience.