The Hidden History of GPS

My book, Little Blue Dot: How the Global Positioning System Shaped the Modern World, is now out.

It’s got James Bond movies, superyachts, Nazi rockets, the iPhone, and lots more, and blends narrative history, journalism, science and geopolitics.

The book was published in June 2026 in the U.S. and Canada by Bloomsbury and in the U.K. by MudLark (HarperCollins). You can buy it wherever you buy books!

My U.K. agent is Sophie Lambert at C&W, and my U.S. agent is Laurie-Maude Chenard at United Talent.

Press

For the most accurate (and fun) taste of what the book is like, I recommend this episode of Slate’s Decoder Ring podcast, “Weapons of Map Destruction.” It’s about the hacking of a superyacht, and much more!

The book has also been both reviewed and featured by the New Yorker, and reviewed by The Telegraph, Publisher’s Weekly, Library Journal, and The Space Review. Excerpts have appeared in The Walrus, the Washington Post and Literary Hub.

You can listen to me talk about GPS on BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week, on CBC’s Sunday Magazine, on the Secrets and Spies podcast, and across NPR, including on Cool Science Radio, Marketplace, and Science Friday.

What is it about?

We often think about GPS as just SatNav or Google Maps, taking us from place to place. But GPS is so much more than that. It plays a crucial role not just in understanding where we are in the world, but in underpinning precise time, too. In fact, it’s used for everything from shipping to finance to farming, to tracking workouts, finding dates, and ordering takeaways. Not to mention war.

So when GPS started to get a little weird—suddenly sending boats, planes and people into places and times where they shouldn’t be—the implications were potentially huge (and surreal.)

This is a book about how a tool for precision bombing overturned daily life in ways we never expected, and the role it played during key moments in 20th and 21st century history. It’s also a book for people who just love mysteries.