Jeff G. Carlson (born July 20, 1969) is an American science fiction and thriller writer whose novels are international bestsellers.

Son of a former division head at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Carlson was born in Sunnyvale, California and has since lived in several cities up and down the Californian coast. In the early 1990s, he also lived in Arizona, Colorado and Idaho before returning to his native California in 1997. He now lives with his wife Diana and their children near San Francisco.

Carlson left high school at age fifteen after passing the California High School Equivalency Examination and now holds a B.A. in English Literature. His past jobs include driver, pressman, salesman, waiter, phone representative, cashier and construction worker.

First known for his short stories, to date Carlson has written three novels known as the Plague Year trilogy. His 2007 debut, Plague Year, is a present-day thriller about a worldwide nanotech contagion that devours all warm-blooded life below 10,000 feet in elevation. Plague War and Plague Zone are its two sequels.

After the release of Plague Year, Carlson was shortlisted for the 2007 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, an award voted on by the fandom of science fiction. In a minor controversy, Carlson was forced to decline the nomination due to a rule change by the award administrators, which retroactively made Carlson ineligible due to some of his earliest short fiction sales to Strange Horizons.

In 2008, Plague War was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award, a juried prize which goes annually to the best science fiction paperback original.

Among his short stories such as those for Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine and the Fast Forward 2 anthology, Carlson has also written an award-winning novelette called The Frozen Sky, a near-future adventure which deals with the surprise discovery of an intelligent amphibian species in the oceans beneath the frozen surface of Jupiter’s sixth moon, Europa.

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