Christopher Brown (author)

Christopher Brown is an American author, who is known for writing science fiction and nature-focused nonfiction.

His first novel, Tropic of Kansas, was published in 2017 by Harper Voyager, and was a finalist for the 2018 John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel of the year. Tropic of Kansas tells the story of a brother and sister traveling across an ecologically damaged United States during a period of political unrest.

His work frequently focuses on issues at the nexus of technology, politics, economics and ecology. His short fiction and criticism has been published in a variety of anthologies and magazines, including MIT Technology Review’s Twelve Tomorrows, LitHub, Tor.com, Reckoning, and The Baffler.

He was a 2013 World Fantasy Award nominee for the anthology he co-edited, Three Messages and a Warning: Contemporary Mexican Short Stories of the Fantastic.

His novel Rule of Capture, a speculative legal thriller about a lawyer defending an accused eco-terrorist, was published by Harper Voyager in 2019. The sequel, Failed State, follows the further escapades of defense lawyer Donny Kimoe as he appears before a post-revolutionary truth and reconciliation tribunal, and was nominated for the 2021 Philip K. Dick Award.

In 2020 Brown began writing a weekly newsletter about urban nature and wildlife, Field Notes, and his new narrative nonfiction book drawing on the same material, A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys and other Wild Places, is slated for publication by Timber Press in September 2024.

Prior to 2012, Brown wrote under the name Chris Nakashima-Brown.

Brown lives in Austin, Texas, where he is a member of the Turkey City Writer's Workshop and also practices technology law.