Carl A. Posey

Novelist and award-winning science writer Carl A. Posey is the author of six published novels, a number of non-fiction books, and dozens of magazine articles, most of them about science and aviation. A talented natural cartoonist, he had expected as a young man to make his way by writing and drawing comic strips, but instead turned to the novel and magazine journalism. But he wasn't through with graphic storytelling. In 1995, DC Comics published The Big Book of Weirdos, "by Carl Posey and 67 of the world's top comic artists."Now, when asked what he does for a living, he likes to use the Victorian term: writer of all work.

Born in the Panama Canal Zone, Mr. Posey spent much of his youth in Latin America. After a year at Texas A&M University, he joined the U. S. Army, trained for the infantry at Indiantown Gap, Pa., and spent the final half of his two-year enlistment as an illustrator at the antiaircraft artillery school in Ft. Bliss, Tex. He later completed his bachelor’s degree in English at Texas A&M.

He has worked as a newspaper artist/​copywriter and as a technical writer and editor in the aerospace industry. In 1963 he was recruited by what is now the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Washington, D.C. There he developed a series of prize-winning publications describing NOAA’s mission, and implemented seminars and workshops for television meteorologists and science reporters.

He stayed at NOAA for almost twenty years, from 1972 onward as director of NOAA's public affairs office in Boulder, Colo. In 1976 he was awarded the U. S. Department of Commerce Silver Medal “for outstanding achievement in creating national awareness of vital research programs through expert reporting and writing.”

Mr. Posey left NOAA in 1981 to direct the Office of Communications at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), an east-west think tank near Vienna, Austria.

In 1984 he joined the National Optical Astronomy Observatories in Tucson, Ariz., as public information officer, covering research using the large telescopes at Kitt Peak, Ariz. and in northern Chile.

In 1987, Mr. Posey accepted an editor’s position with Time-Life Books in Alexandria, VA, where he spent almost a decade on such series as Voyage Through the Universe and True Crime, and as series editor of The Library of Curious and Unusual Facts. He left Time-Life Books in 1996 to pursue a freelance career and continue with his novels.

His first, Kiev Footprint, had been published in the U.S. and U.K. in 1983, while he was in Vienna. Prospero Drill, a thriller built around a hurricane-seeding project, appeared in the U.K. in 1983, in the U.S. in 1986, and in Japan in 1992. His first Vienna novel came out in 1985 as Dead Issue in the U.K. and Red Danube in the U.S.

Benchley’s Chip, which unfolds mainly in Vienna and Bulgaria, was published in the U.K. in 1990. “One of the most readable, and ambitious, thrillers of the year—Dostoevsky in the Balkans,” said the Times of London. Posey “writes like an angel,” wrote the Daily Telegraph reviewer. “...He deserves flag-waving and fame.”

Bushmaster Fall, a thriller set in the coca-growing region of Bolivia, came out in the U.S. and U.K. in 1992, to good reviews (see Bushmaster Fall).

Mr. Posey published his next novel, Red Man’s Will, in 2003.

The Tenth Chalice, a bioterror thriller, was recently completed. Lenin’s Ghost, set mainly in northeastern Siberia, is in work, along with Shot@​Dawn, a noir comedy of life and death at Dawn Books, a division of Dawn magazine's media empire.

Mr. Posey’s articles have appeared in Smithsonian, The Atlantic Monthly, Time, and other national magazines. His Science 85 article on nuclear safeguards shared a National Magazine Award in 1986. A 1992 article for Omni on the world’s new nuclear geography received New York University’s Olive Branch Award. Not surprisingly, nuclear safeguards inspectors have appeared as characters in several of his novels.

A licensed pilot with a life-long association with airplanes and pilots, Mr. Posey has been a regular contributor to Air & Space/​Smithsonian since its second issue in 1986.

He is married to Catherine Elizabeth Ann Wadia, a Londoner he met in Vienna in 1981, and has four grown children from a first marriage. He is also Dad to Freki of Midgard, a Norwegian elkhound.