Born in Chicago, Illinois, in the 1950s, Dr. John L. Flynn is a three-time Hugo Award-nominated author, psychologist, teacher, and college dean. In 1977, he received the M. Carolyn Parker Award from the University of South Florida for excellence in creative writing. He received his Bachelor's and Master's degrees in English from the University of South Florida and worked as an English teacher in Baltimore, Maryland. He published his first book Future Threads in 1985. In 1998, he earned his PhD as a clinical psychologist from the University of Southern California.

He has published nearly twenty books and dozens of articles. He currently resides in Lake Worth, Florida. Bob Blackwood taught English, literature, film study, and photography at Wilbur Wright College in Chicago until 2000. For more than forty years, he has reviewed books on film criticism and film history for Choice magazine. His book From the Silent Era to "The Sopranos": Italian American Gangsters in Trend-Setting Films and Television Shows contains critical commentary on the major Italian American gangster films and TV shows from The Black Hand (1906) to The Sopranos (1999-2005). Blackwood began reading the James Bond novels in the 1950s and is a life-long devotee to Ian Fleming. He has co-authored two books with John L. Flynn: Everything I Know About Life I Learned From James Bond and Future Prime: Top Ten Science Fiction Films .