F. Paul Wilson

Francis Paul Wilson (born May 17, 1946) is an American author of horror, adventure, medical thrillers, and science fiction. His books include the Repairman Jack novels—including Ground Zero, The Tomb, and Fatal Error—the Adversary cycle—including The Keep—and a young adult series featuring the teenage Jack. Wilson has won the Prometheus Award, the Bram Stoker Award, the Inkpot Award from the San Diego ComiCon, and the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Horror Writers of America, among other honors. He lives in Wall, New Jersey.

Career Wilson made his first sales in 1970 to Analog while still in medical school (graduating in 1973), and continued to write science fiction throughout the seventies. His debut novel was Healer (1976). In 1981, he ventured into the horror genre with the international bestseller The Keep, which was adapted into a film in 1983. In the 1990s, he moved from science fiction and horror to medical thrillers and interactive scripting for Disney Interactive and other multimedia companies. He, along with Matthew J. Costello, created and scripted FTL Newsfeed, which ran daily on the Sci-Fi Channel from 1992 to 1996.

Among Wilson's best-known characters is the anti-hero Repairman Jack, an urban mercenary introduced in the 1984 New York Times bestseller The Tomb. Unwilling to start a series character at the time, Wilson refused to write a second Repairman Jack novel until Legacies in 1998. Since then he has written one per year along with side trips into vampire fiction (the retro Midnight Mass), science fiction (Sims), and even a New Age thriller (The Fifth Harmonic). Current book sales are around six million.

Throughout his writing – especially in his earlier science fiction works (most notably An Enemy of the State) – Wilson has included explicitly libertarian political philosophy which extends to his "Repairman Jack" series. He won the first Prometheus Award in 1979 for his novel Wheels Within Wheels and another in 2004 for Sims. The Libertarian Futurist Society has also honored Wilson with their Hall of Fame Award for Healer (in 1990) and An Enemy of the State (in 1991). In 2015 he received the third special Prometheus Award for Lifetime Achievement; the previous two recipients were Poul Anderson and Vernor Vinge. In 2021, his "Lipidleggin'" won the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award.

Wilson is a noted fan of H. P. Lovecraft.

Why? Because HPL is special to me. Donald A. Wollheim is to blame. He started me on Lovecraft. It was 1959. I was just a kid, a mere thirteen years old when he slipped me my first fix. I was a good kid up till then, reading Ace Doubles and clean, wholesome science fiction stories by the likes of Heinlein, E. E. Smith, Poul Anderson, Fred Pohl, and the rest. But he brought me down with one anthology. He knew what he was doing. He called it The Macabre Reader and slapped this lurid neato cool Ed Emshwiller cover on it. I couldn't resist. I bought it. I read it. And that was it. The beginning of my end.

Like other American science fiction writers directly or indirectly influenced by Campbell's view of the genre as a literature of ideas, Wilson makes use of his work to explore trends and technologies speculatively as they manifest. A prominent example is his novel An Enemy of the State (published in 1980), which was written during the 1970s, an era that saw stagflation develop in the U.S. economy. Throughout the book, Wilson runs chapter headings quoting from economic works such as Fiat Money Inflation in France and KYFHO, a kind of anarchic philosophy that he invented as model for a perfect society. The protagonist La Nague was born on Tolive, where the philosophy led to a government described in detail in "The Healer".

The Keep was later made into a movie. Wilson said in 2003 that there was talk of a film based on a Repairman Jack novel.

Hate to say it (being a devout believer in Murphy's law), but The Tomb looks like it's on its way to being filmed this year. Last October, after seven years of development, numerous options, five screenwriters, and eight scripts, Beacon Films (Air Force One, Thirteen Days, Spy Game, etc.) finally bought film rights. Disney/Touchstone/Buena Vista will be partnering and distributing the film here and abroad. The film will be called Repairman Jack (the idea is to make him a franchise character).

His short stories "Foet", "Traps", and "Lipidleggin'" were filmed as short films and collected on the DVD OTHERS: The Tales of F. Paul Wilson.

His short story "Pelts" was adapted into the season 2 episode of Masters of Horror titled "Pelts".

Short stories "Definitive Therapy" (published in The Further Adventures of The Joker) and "Hunters" (published in Soft and Others) were adapted as short films.

In January 2012, Wilson began writing for the tech website Byte, mostly in the persona of Repairman Jack.

Personal life Wilson has been a resident of Wall Township, New Jersey. He is a practicing physician as a Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine.