Hunter Heyck

Hunter Heyck is Professor of History of Science, Technology, and Medicine at the University of Oklahoma and a recovering Department Chair. He is also a novelist with a passion for fantasy and science fiction, because sometimes you just need dragons in your life. His first novel, a high fantasy adventure titled The Sleepers Wake, is now available on Kindle and in paperback. It is the first book of a three book series, titled A Dream of the Last Days. The second book of the series, The Spirits Walk, will be released summer 2022.

When he's wearing his scholarly hat, Professor Heyck is interested in the ways that different tools and technologies have been used to represent, investigate, and model the workings of the mind and society, and in the social context and meaning of technological change. His first book was a biography of Herbert Simon, who played a vital role in the transformation of the social sciences into the behavioral sciences in the decades after World War II. (He won a Nobel Prize in economics, was a founder of cognitive psychology, and was a crucial figure in the history of AI, as well as being one of those people who was on every influential committee, such as the President's Science Advisory Committee.) Professor Heyck's second book, Age of System, is an investigation of the broader trends characterizing the social and behavioral sciences between roughly 1920 and 1980. Age of System connects the advent of Simon’s style of ‘high modern social science’ to the ‘Organizational Revolution’ and its associated technological changes and challenges. They are quite good books, but, sadly, there are no dragons in them.

Professor Heyck is currently working on a socio-cultural survey of the history of technology, intended for a broad audience, with the working title, Artifice: Creating a Chosen World. It should appear in 2023. Again, no dragons, but it should be a fun read nonetheless.