Ian Tregillis lives near Santa Fe, New Mexico where he works as a physicist at Los Alamos Laboratory. He is a member of George R. R. Martin's "Wild Cards" writing collective. "What Doctor Gottlieb Saw" is a "side story" to the events of his first novel, Bitter Seeds (Tor, 2010). The novel is the first of a trilogy, Milkweed, concerning a 20th century in which the determining conflicts of World War II were fought between scientifically-modified Nazi ubermenchen and elderly mad British warlocks.