John AkersJohn Akers was born in New York City and grew up in Westchester County. He got his undergraduate degree in behavioral sciences at Rice University, and to this day he enjoys telling people that he got a B.A. in B.S. A few years later he earned a maste's in human factors engineering from Georgia Tech. He went on to work at several well-known hardware and software companies as a human factors engineer and user experience designer. John has always been fascinated by man-machine systems and the ways we design interfaces for the technology we create. He is a big fan of Big History, particularly the evolution of life on Earth, as well as human civilization and the ever-accelerating development of human technology. These interests, plus his observations over 20 years of working in high-tech, became the inspiration for his first novel, The Infinet. Long an avid reader, John read Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash while he was in graduate school and fell in love with science fiction as a literary genre. In addition to Stephenson, John counts Kurt Vonnegut, Ursula Le Guin, Philip Dick, Orson Scott Card, and more recently Hugh Howey and Justin Cronin among his literary inspirations. John lives with his family in San Diego, California. Read More Read Less