David Zindell

David Zindell (born November 28, 1952) is an American writer known for science fiction and fantasy epics. He was born in Toledo, Ohio, and resides today in Boulder, Colorado, where he works as a test coach; he received a BA degree in mathematics and minored in anthropology at the University of Colorado at Boulder. His first published story was "The Dreamer's Sleep" in Fantasy Book in 1984; his novelette Shanidar, which formed the core of his first novel Neverness, won the Writers of the Future Contest in 1985. David Zindell's writing style is at once romantic, heroic, deeply poetic and concerns itself with deep philosophical issues in the human psyche. He was nominated for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1986. John Clute writes that the author of Neverness is "romantic, ambitious, and skilled.", and Gene Wolfe, who is connected with Zindell in a way Wolfe himself was with Jack Vance, described Zindell as "...one of the finest talents to appear since Kim Stanley Robinson and William Gibson — perhaps the finest."
In the series started by Neverness, David Zindell probes the nature of future humanity in "an extremely ambitious tale...The young protagonist has all the necessary complexity and drivenness to occupy centre-stage 'cosmogony opera'." His fantasy series, The Ea Cycle has as a theme the evolution of consciousness, through the MO of sword-and-sorcery.