His 2007 debut, Plague Year, is a present-day thriller about a worldwide nanotechnology contagion that devours all warm-blooded organisms living below 10,000 feet in elevation.
In 2008, Plague War was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award,[1] 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 also wrote 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.
In 2011, Carlson published a collection of his short fiction entitled Long Eyes.
In 2014 and 2016, Carlson published two sequels to The Frozen Sky entitled Betrayed and Blindsided.