Neal Stephenson & Iowa City

Neal Stephenson, who's one of the few American sci-fi authors that I can think of who can stand up to a recent wave of British space opera/cyber-punk writers (Richard K. Morgan, Alastair Reynolds, Peter F. Hamilton, and Neal Asher), turns out to have an Iowa City connection!  After graduating from Boston University, Stephenson moved to Iowa City (he'd grown up partly in Ames, Iowa) in 1981, where he worked on his first novel "The Big U."

Yea for Iowa City!