About

Thomas Flake served in the United States Navy’s nuclear submarine force as a machinist’s mate, engineering laboratory technician, and radiological controls shift supervisor, managing reactor chemistry, radiation health, and crew radiation dose aboard nuclear vessels. It is an odd apprenticeship for a novelist and the most useful one he could have had. The job is to know what the instruments actually say, to know the difference between a number you measured and a number you assumed, and to be answerable for the difference.

Everything since has been that same habit pointed somewhere new.

At NASA he ran NASA iTech, the programme that decided whether outside technology was real: five thousand companies examined, a hundred and ten put in front of agency leadership, and the partnership model he built adopted afterwards by the Departments of Defense, Energy, State and Agriculture and by the EPA. He founded Picus and bcause, and across those ventures designed and built thirteen data centres — among them a fifty-megawatt, eighteen-thousand-computer facility, the largest of its kind in North America at the time. In 2009 he filed a patent for coordinating generation, storage and injection across a distributed renewable grid, which is roughly the argument the industry began having in earnest fifteen years later. He is now managing partner of ISS Mining, building generation-first computing capacity. He holds an MBA from the College of William & Mary and is a Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt, a discipline he has applied to Naval Special Warfare command systems and to a cryptocurrency exchange with equal seriousness.

The intellectual work is the part he would rather be asked about.

He has written a doctoral dissertation, Factor-Interval Structure in Fixed-Length Semiprimes, on where the smaller factor of an RSA-shaped number can actually live and what that does to the cost of hunting for it. He spent four years as a bishop, responsible for a congregation of more than four hundred and fifty people, and has read the biblical and Restoration texts closely enough to argue about them in print — in Bridging Biblical Divides, The Comprehensive Bible of Book of Mormon Evidence, and The Reopened Court. Those books spend as much time on what would count as evidence as they do on the evidence itself, which is the tell: the question that interests him is not what to believe but how you would know.

He has spent fourteen years advising a governor’s school for innovation and entrepreneurship.

He is also, improbably, part of the Chuck Norris facts. He and Greg were working the ROME contract at NASA Langley — 2002 to 2009 — when a colleague named Ian put up that site; it took more than a million hits in its first month, on nothing but jokes strangers sent in. That was the interesting part — not the jokes, the mechanism. This was before social media existed to settle whether a site could be populated entirely by the people who came to visit it, so they built the Vin Diesel and Mr. T versions to find out whether the effect was the celebrity or the mechanism. It was the mechanism. Nobody remembers those two, which is its own kind of result.

And he built a mission simulator, validated against five flown spacecraft, that tells you the truth about your rocket whether or not you want it. The novels came out of that machine rather than the other way round: every trajectory in Platinum Void was flown before it was written, and where the mission would not close, the chapter changed rather than the physics. It is the reactor discipline, and the dissertation’s, aimed at a story — find out what is true first, then say it.

He lives in San Antonio, Texas.