The Hidden History of GPS

My book, Little Blue Dot: How the Global Positioning System Shaped the Modern World, will be out this year.

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

The book will be published in the U.S. and Canada by Bloomsbury on June 16, 2026, and in the U.K. by MudLark (HarperCollins) on June 18.

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

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.