Stephen Euin Cobb's Blog, page 28

The Future And You -- August 10, 2011

James Maxey (author and "big science geek") Charles White (magazine writer) and Stephen Euin Cobb (your host) are our featured guests.

Topic: Life enhancing and life extending advances in medical technology.

Hosted by Stephen Euin Cobb, this is the August 10, 2011 episode of The Future And You. [Running time: 33 minutes]. This is the second half of a discussion panel recorded before a live audience on June 4, 2011 in Charlotte North Carolina at the SF&F convention ConCarolinas. (The first half was presented last week.)

James Maxey is the author of the superhero novel Nobody Gets the Girl as well as the Dragon Age fantasy series which includes the novels Bitterwood, Dragonforge, and Dragonseed. Set a thousand years in the future, after the fall of our modern civilization, in a world dominated by the intelligent dragons we created through genetic engineering. Humans are reduced to slaves, and the remnants of long forgotten nanotechnology make the world a wondrous place of magic.

Charles White works for an organization which handles the recovery of solid organs for transplant. He has been involved in tissue banking for about ten years; is a regular contributor to World Forge Online Magazine; holds two masters degrees; and is a tissue recipient.

Stephen Euin Cobb is the author of Skinbrain (Cerebrodermus Fantastica) and Bones Burnt Black.

The Future And You -- August 3, 2011

James Maxey (author and "big science geek") Charles White (magazine writer) and Stephen Euin Cobb (your host) are our featured guests.

Topic: Life enhancing and life extending advances in medical technology.

Hosted by Stephen Euin Cobb, this is the August 3, 2011 episode of The Future And You. [Running time: 32 minutes]. This is the first half of a discussion panel recorded before a live audience on June 4, 2011 in Charlotte North Carolina at the SF&F convention ConCarolinas. (The second half will be presented next week.)

James Maxey is the author of the superhero novel Nobody Gets the Girl as well as the Dragon Age fantasy series which includes the novels Bitterwood, Dragonforge, and Dragonseed. Set a thousand years in the future, after the fall of our modern civilization, in a world dominated by the intelligent dragons we created through genetic engineering. Humans are reduced to slaves, and the remnants of long forgotten nanotechnology make the world a wondrous place of magic.

Charles White works for an organization which handles the recovery of solid organs for transplant. He has been involved in tissue banking for about ten years; is a regular contributor to World Forge Online Magazine; holds two masters degrees; and is a tissue recipient.

Stephen Euin Cobb is the author of Skinbrain (Cerebrodermus Fantastica) and Bones Burnt Black.

The Future And You -- July 27, 2011

Michael A. Stackpole (New York Times best selling author) is today's featured guest.

Topics: How an asteroid came to be named after him; why he is an advocate for skeptical thinking and a spokesperson for the skeptical community; how skeptical thinkers can more effectively relate to and debate faith-based thinkers; what happened the day he became an active skeptic; his work in the Advanced Research Department at Coleco; his defence of role playing games during the years they were under attack by educators and the media. 

Hosted by Stephen Euin Cobb, this is the July 27, 2011 episode of The Future And You. [Running time: 41 minutes]. This is part three of a two hour interview recorded using Skype on May 17, 2011.

Michael A. Stackpole is a science fiction and fantasy author best known for his Star Wars and Battletech books. Beginning in 1977, he worked as a designer of role-playing games for various gaming companies. In the 1980s he began designing computer games for Coleco and Interplay Productions, such as Bard's Tale III, Wasteland, Star Trek: 25th Anniversary and Star Trek: Judgment Rites. He also created the role-playing game Mercenaries, Spies and Private Eyes, which provided the game mechanics for Wasteland. In 1987 he began writing novels set in the BattleTech universe, and became one of the most popular authors in that genre. He was then selected to write a number of novels in the Star Wars universe. He is also a popular podcaster, essayist, speaker and has an asteroid named after him.

News item: A few weeks ago a young man named Julle created an article in Wikipedia about this show written in Swedish. Blog posts have long discussed the show in half a dozen languages (such as Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, French and Chinese) but this is the show's first Wikipedia article in a language other than English.

News Item: Your host's novel Skinbrain is selling nicely on two continents and has received another review at Amazon. "Excellent book! Hard Science fiction at its finest," wrote someone who goes by the code-name Monkey. "I enjoyed this book completely. Details of the alien's throughout the story is impressive. I recommend this to anyone interested in hard science fiction. I also listened to Bones Burnt Black, Stephen's audio-book, twice. Keep up the good work!"

The Future And You -- July 20, 2011

James Maxey (author and "big science geek") and Jim Craig (planetarium director) are our featured guests.

Topic: The Year in Science. What's new and what's happening. Such as: Life extension using telomeres; TA-65; three parent embryo; antimatter made and trapped in lab; stem cell research; stem cells from breast milk; 3D printers to print human organs for surgical implant; a machine that can test a single sample for 10,000 toxins; the first person ever has been cured of AIDS.

Hosted by Stephen Euin Cobb, this is the July 20, 2011 episode of The Future And You. [Running time: 31 minutes]. This is the second half of a discussion panel recorded before a live audience on June 4, 2011 in Charlotte North Carolina at the SF&F convention ConCarolinas. (The first half was presented last week.)

James Maxey is the author of the superhero novel Nobody Gets the Girl as well as the Dragon Age fantasy series which includes the novels Bitterwood, Dragonforge, and Dragonseed. Set a thousand years in the future, after the fall of our modern civilization, in a world dominated by the intelligent dragons we created through genetic engineering. Humans are reduced to slaves, and the remnants of long forgotten nanotechnology make the world a wondrous place of magic.

Jim Craig is the director of the James H. Lynn Planetarium at the Schiele Museum in Gastonia NC. He is a lifelong science fiction fan and has given presentations on the history of science fiction. He is an outspoken activist for science education, critical thinking, skepticism and free thought. In 2006 he was allowed to name a crater on Mars.

Bonus: your host reads a few more paragraphs from his new novel Skinbrain (Cerebrodermus Fantastica) which features the alien character who calls herself Pug. 

Within human civilization, hundreds of individuals resembled Pug. None were real. All were fake, every last one. They were androids intended to give humanity the impression that Pug's civilization was interacting with theirs. It was not. Nor would it ever. These decoys visited human tourist sites, shopped in stores, ate in restaurants, made business contacts, set-up shop, bought and sold real estate, and did all the other things human beings would expect of them. To Pug their activities were meaningless. They were not spies or manipulators, they were just cover. They existed only to provide a signal-to-noise problem for anyone who might otherwise realize that Pug was the only member of her species in this galaxy.

The Future And You -- July 13, 2011

James Maxey (author and "big science geek") and Jim Craig (planetarium director) are our featured guests.

Topic: The Year in Science. What's new and what's happening. Such as: Is science slowing down?; water verified on the moon; eyeglass head-up computers; a thousand planets discovered outside our solar system; and a vast cloud of alcohol discovered in space large enough to keep every living human drunk for the next three million years.

Hosted by Stephen Euin Cobb, this is the July 13, 2011 episode of The Future And You. [Running time: 38 minutes]. This is the first half of a discussion panel recorded before a live audience on June 4, 2011 in Charlotte North Carolina at the SF&F convention ConCarolinas. (The second half will be presented next week.)

James Maxey is the author of the superhero novel Nobody Gets the Girl as well as the Dragon Age fantasy series which includes the novels Bitterwood, Dragonforge, and Dragonseed. Set a thousand years in the future, after the fall of our modern civilization, in a world dominated by the intelligent dragons we created through genetic engineering. Humans are reduced to slaves, and the remnants of long forgotten nanotechnology make the world a wondrous place of magic.

Jim Craig is the director of the James H. Lynn Planetarium at the Schiele Museum in Gastonia NC. He is a lifelong science fiction fan and has given presentations on the history of science fiction. He is an outspoken activist for science education, critical thinking, skepticism and free thought. In 2006 he was allowed to name a crater on Mars.

Bonus: Your host reads a few paragraphs from his new novel Skinbrain (Cerebrodermus Fantastica) which features the alien character who calls herself Pug. Pug believes our galaxy belongs to her, which would be a meaningless notion if she did not have the power to destroy whole civilizations. And indeed, the habit.

The Future And You -- July 6, 2011

Gail Z. Martin, Emillie P. Bush, Jim S. Bernheimer and Theresa Bane are our featured guests.

Topic: Writing for the Web is radically different from writing for print. This episode explores the down and dirty facts of those differences. For example: its immediacy (and the dangers of that immediacy); how it is used, miss-used, tweaked and manipulated; how it can be promoted and cross promoted; how what is written stays available for years; examples of people who have mastered its power to the benefit of their careers; as well as how to get started and how to get large numbers of people to read what you have written. 

Hosted by Stephen Euin Cobb, this is the July 6, 2011 episode of The Future And You. [Running time: 38 minutes]. This is the second half of a discussion panel recorded before a live audience on June 4, 2011 in Charlotte North Carolina at the SF&F convention ConCarolinas. (The first half was presented last week.)

News and Commentary: According to a Pew Poll, ownership of ebook reading devices has doubled in the last six months. (from November 2010 to May 2011) Pew reports that twelve percent of all adults in the USA now say they own a Kindle or other eReader. Your host emphasizes that the transition to ebooks is in full swing but will take from two to three years to play out. He discusses how this will hurt publishers, editors, bookstores, literary agents, and that it will add to our current unemployment. Authors and readers however will benefit massively. 

Listener Email: Tim Proffitt wrote: "Hey stephen. Love your show! This week google released its answer to Facebook with Google+." (Tim described his expectations of Google+ verses other social media, as well as the future of the Internet as a whole.)

Announcement: Skinbrain (Cerebrodermus Fantastica), your host's new novel is also selling well in the UK, where it has begun to generate additional sales of Stephen's previous novel Bones Burnt Black. 

Bonus: A qoute from Skinbrain: "Einstein did not replace Newton. His was a new level of understanding that overlaid the existing model. So too, this model will not replace those of Einstein or Newton. Instead, it will explain the mystery we all pretend does not exist. The mystery of why Newton and Einstein are correct." That quote was spoken by an alien physicist who was being tortured to reveal the secrets of advanced physics which he'd recently learned from a far more advance alien civilization known only as The Cold People. Little known and rarely seen, The Cold People are human-like in shape but may have evolved on a world with rivers and oceans of methane.

The Future And You -- June 29, 2011

Gail Z. Martin, Emillie P. Bush, Jim S. Bernheimer and Theresa Bane are our featured guests.

Topic: Writing for the Web is radically different from writing for print. This episode explores the down and dirty facts of those differences. For example: its immediacy (and the dangers of that immediacy); how it is used, misused, tweaked and manipulated; how it can be promoted and cross promoted; how what is written stays available for years; examples of people who have mastered its power to the benefit of their careers; as well as how to get started and how to get large numbers of people to read what you have written.

Hosted by Stephen Euin Cobb, this is the June 29, 2011 episode of The Future And You. [Running time: 35 minutes]. This is the first half of a discussion panel recorded before a live audience on June 4, 2011 in Charlotte North Carolina at the SF&F convention ConCarolinas. (The second half will be presented next week.)

News item: Skinbrain (Cerebrodermus Fantastica), your host's new novel, is selling very well and has received its first review. Joseph S. gave it five stars and titled his review: "Great Book." His review reads: "With outstanding attention to detail, Mr. Cobb puts you right in the middle of the action from the beginning. If you're looking to escape into the future for a few hours, and enjoy a great SF read, this book is for you."

The Future And You -- June 22, 2011

Nancy Kress (award winning science fiction author) is our featured guest.

Topics: how the great ebook stampede going on now within the publishing industry is affecting her and her novels (she is working to get her earlier books up on the Kindle); the anti-vaccination movement; the growing political struggles over fresh water; extending our healthy years; TV cameras in public places and intersections which are leading to a loss of privacy; the future of robots; stem cell research; gene sequencing and synthesis; Small Pox and other plagues; extreme life extension; The Singularity; human augmentation for IQ and for memory recall; the possibility of a new space race because of the Chinese going to the moon; as well as her advice to all young people.

Nancy Kress is a science fiction author who tends to write technically realistic stories set in a fairly near future. Her fiction often involves genetic engineering, and, to a lesser degree, artificial intelligence. She has written more than 20 books and several hundred short stories. Her work has won four Nebula awards and two Hugos. She participated in the 2006 annual meeting of the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency in San Diego. And she has appeared on TV shows on Fox and the Discovery Channel concerning the future of the human race.

Hosted by Stephen Euin Cobb, this is the June 22, 2011 episode of The Future And You. [Running time: 41 minutes].

News item: Ten days ago your host's new novel Skinbrain (Cerebrodermus Fantastica) was released on the Amazon Kindle. Here is a one sentence description of its story: A runaway teenage girl suffers many dangers as she: falls in love with a criminal, becomes part of a murderous gang, makes an enemy of a psychopath, travels to alien worlds, meets aliens of many different types, makes first contact with an unknown alien race, and tries to save one alien from torture and death.

The Future And You -- June 15, 2011

Michael A. Stackpole (New York Times best selling author) is today's featured guest.

Topics: Artificial intelligence verses artificial crazy; the rise of robots and how we will develop relationships and affections for them including romance and love; the possibility that marrying a robot will go through the same controversies we have today concerning gay marriage; extreme human longevity; human augmentation for life extension verses augmentation for improved senses or IQ; authors he knows who write by speaking into voice recognition software instead of tapping on a keyboard; the spreading loss of privacy with video cameras in intersections and public places; the value of taking a vacation from being connected to phones and the Internet; connecting the Internet directly into the human brain; as well as the BBC, Mensa, and the sceptical community. He also mentioned that he does weekly chats with authors inside the virtual world of Second Life.

Hosted by Stephen Euin Cobb, this is the June 15, 2011 episode of The Future And You. [Running time: 35 minutes].  This is part two of a two hour interview recorded using Skype on May 17, 2011.

Michael A. Stackpole is a science fiction and fantasy author best known for his Star Wars and Battletech books. Begining in 1977, he worked as a designer of role-playing games for various gaming companies. In the 1980s he began designing computer games for Coleco and Interplay Productions, such as Bard's Tale III, Wasteland, Star Trek: 25th Anniversary and Star Trek: Judgment Rites. He also created the role-playing game Mercenaries, Spies and Private Eyes, which provided the game mechanics for Wasteland. In 1987 he began writing novels set in the BattleTech universe, and became one of the most popular authors in that genre. He was then selected to write a number of novels in the Star Wars universe. He is also a popular podcaster, essayist, speaker and has an asteroid named after him.

News Item: This week my latest novel was released on the Amazon Kindle. Skinbrain (Cerebrodermus Fantastica) is a hard science fiction story which incorporates most of the topics we have discussed on The Future And You during the last five years. 

You need not have a Kindle to read Skinbrain. A free app is offered for nearly every type of smart phone which allows that phone to mimic a Kindle.  Likewise a free downloadable program allows any computer to mimic a Kindle. Additionally, the Kindle allows the first thousand words or so of every novel to be read for free. So, if you would, please take a look at the opening scene of Skinbrain. Thank you.

The Future And You -- June 7, 2011

Nine diverse interviews from ConCarolinas 2011.

Gathered from locations scattered throughout the Hilton Hotel in Charlotte NC during the weekend of ConCarolinas, these interviews provide trends and insight into what is happening behind the scenes in a wide variety of professions, interests, enthusiasms and fields. This collection is partly intended give you a sense of what is likely to come in the future, but also to provide you with a feel for the flavor of the annual convention.

Our guests today (with their topics) in the order in which they appear: 

David H. Lawrence XVII (of the TV show Heroes) decribes trends in acting and voice acting based on his personal expereinces. He also mentions two online services where voice actors can get jobs and those who need voice actors can hire them (voice123 and voices.com).

(an eleven year old actress) played the young Dakota Fanning in the movie The Secret Life of Bees;and the "Little Girl Zombie" on the new TV series The Walking Dead; and a murdered pageant girl who returns to haunt the paranormal investigators in the TV show Ghost Trek. She describes behind the scenes aspects of her work.

Nigel Sade (a professional fine artist) talks about trends in fine art, art collecting, artistic training and in the art profession.

Culio Defavio, Johannes Presley and John Martin (who were at the ConCarolinas Scavenger Hunt table) talk about trends in fandom, conventions, comicbooks and popular culture.

Scott Messer (of Empire Games) talks about trends in his industry--card games, board games and role playing games.

Jason "Spanky" Davis (a former radio audio engineer) talks about trends in commercial radio and TV. 

Djinn the Nytechylde (a beautiful costumer dressed as a drow--a dark elf--in bikini armor) describes trends in steampunk, vampires, and her work in Purgatory for Single Cell Productions. 

Warren Buff and Yair Goldberg (two con organizers promoting their two cons: Illogicon and StellarCon) cover trends in fandom, webcomics, cons, filk and popular culture.

Hosted by Stephen Euin Cobb, this is the June 7, 2011 episode of The Future And You. [Running time: 96 minutes].

ConCarolinas is a multi-genre multi-media convention which covers all manner of speculative fiction: science fiction, fantasy and horror. It hosts a variety of fandom related events and guests, including gaming, discussion panels, costume events, music events like Klingon Karaoke, a charity auction, SCA events, fan groups like the 501st Stormtroopers, Starfleet, and Klingon Assault Group, and something different every year.