Christopher McKitterick biography

News: In March, 2026, Chris will serve as Author Guest of Honor at ConStellation 15 in Lincoln, NE, where he'll launch his newest book!

IN RETROSPECT, Chris's diverse experiences and education seem to have been tailored for a life in science fiction. A childhood spent moving from town to town and living in Korea for a year taught him to love and seek new places and people, and being the alien helped him to understand the notion of the "other." His earliest idol was spaceflight pioneer Robert H. Goddard, which led him to (mostly failed) rocketry experiments. Autodidactic education in paleontology, geology, and anthropology led to formal college coursework in astronomy, so that he could teach directed studies during high school. His first years at the University of Minnesota focused on astrophysics, until Chris recognized that his real passion was observational astronomy; this led him to work for the Physics and Astronomy Department at the University of Wisconsin in Eau Claire, where he served as planetarian in the Phillips Planetarium, as well as Assistant Director at Hobbs Observatory in Fall Creek. Also in his undergraduate years, a desire to understand people better drove him to study psychology, particularly child development.

But his first love has always been expressing joy and wonder and hopes and fears in the form of fiction and poetry, so in his fourth (of six) year of college, he shifted his goal of becoming an astrophysicist or therapist and embraced his true calling - writing - and earned a BA in English-Writing. After graduation, he served as the primary substitute teacher for a K-12 school in a tiny northeastern Montana town, where he wrote several stories, a book of poetry, and a novel. As much as he loved the badlands bristling with fossils, dark skies, and endless prairie of this rough territory, he moved on to pursue studies in science fiction literature and writing under SF Grand Master James Gunn at the University of Kansas. This was a pivotal experience, and several of the stories and papers he wrote for Gunn, as well as his thesis, saw publication. He became involved in Jim's original science fiction center in 1992, returning after grad school to continue studying with and apprenticing with Gunn by co-teaching their unique, month-long, literature-and-fiction-writing summer SF program. Meanwhile, Chris worked for a number of gaming and high-tech companies in the Seattle area, finally landing as a technical writer, editor, and documentation project manager for Microsoft. After seven years away, he returned to KU to teach writing and SF, and succeeded Gunn as the final director of his center (McKitterick's summer 2022 Spec-Fic Workshop marked his 30th anniversary of serving SF in LFK).

In 2021, after a college department began to subsume Gunn's original SF center and make it more inwardly focused on internal academics, Chris announced his resignation and launched the KU Ad Astra Center to pursue our vision of "Saving the world through science fiction" and carry on and grow our shared educational-outreach legacy. It began operations in 2022, marking Chris' 30th annniversary of serving SF at KU [omg]. Here's the press release. In 2023, new KU rules prompted him to expand Ad Astra into the independent, not-for-profit Ad Astra Institute for Science Fiction & the Speculative Imagination to focus on educational outreach and serving underserved communities.

He runs a Patreon, so follow to see all kinds of works in progress, new things, and general blog fun. Thanks to generous patrons, almost everything there is free for all!

Other writing projects have included a weekly astronomy newsletter, science articles, and software-related documentation and advertising materials. When he lived in Seattle, he served as editor, writer, and documentation manager for the Microsoft Windows Resource Kits, which technically made him a best-selling author. He doesn't like to think too much about that. On the other hand, his contributions to those projects helped win a bunch of STC awards in technical communication, which he thinks is kinda cool.

Chris has been director (with invaluable help from Kij Johnson and a bunch of volunteers) of two SF centers, including the first science-fiction research center in the world! We offer a ton of stuff, including a diversity of courses and programs to get science fiction into the hands of young people. If you're interested in helping keep our genre vital through the influx of new readers, and you want to help youngsters enjoy the thrill and sense of wonder you remember, get involved! He also helped launch an educator-focused outreach and resource program. Other science fiction duties include organizing and serving as nominations director for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for best short SF story of the year from 1993-2016, and as nominations director and juror for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best SF novel of the year (Chair since 2018). In 2016, he was asked to organize and head up the academic-programming track of the World Science Fiction Convention in Kansas City.

As a young'un, Chris started the Ortonville space program - whose most successful launch only reached about 30 feet - as part of the Ortonville Science Society (the OSS, natch), and edited the monthly journal. He has built nearly 100 telescopes.

Chris lives in Lawrence, where he teaches science fiction and writing, as well as science/tech writing and editing, through the Ad Astra Institute, the University of Kansas, and beyond (see his classes here), dwells amid thousands of books and dozens of critters, restores old vehicles, watches the sky, and enjoys life with the best kitty, cockatiels, wife, and baby in the history of ever. Current hobbies include astronomy, blogging, gaming with friends, building and restoring ridiculous vehicles, gardening, and many other things he'd like to be doing but hasn't had time to do. But ain't that always the case.

One of his happiest claims to fame is one of his stories being quoted in a medical journal: "Anecdotal evidence is legitimate if it appears in sufficient quantity."

I believe strongly in the free sharing of information, so you'll find a lot of content - including course syllabi and many materials from our classes - on this and related sites and social networks as educational outreach. Feel free to use this content for independent study, or to adapt it for your own educational and nonprofit purposes; just please credit us and link back to this website. I'd also love to hear from you if you used our materials!

This site is associated with the Ad Astra Institute for Science Fiction & the Speculative Imagination, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA), the Science Fiction Research Association (SFRA), and other organizations, and its contents are copyright 1992-present Christopher McKitterick except where noted, and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License: Feel free to use and adapt for non-profit purposes, with attribution. For publication or profit purposes, please contact McKitterick or other creators as noted.

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Works on this site are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Biography