Neal Barrett Jr ., the award-winning author of over fifty novels of science fiction, fantasy, mystery/suspense, and historical novels, as well as 'off-the-wall' mainstream fiction, is today's featured guest. In today's interview Neal Barrett Jr. provides us with his assessment of the future. 'I have seen entirely too much of what's going on; of the good and the bad and the indifferent.' he said. He also said, 'Every emperor and king and president and governor and mayor promises you what they are...
Sep 03, 2008•41 min
David Pearce , the British philosopher, activist and co-founder of the World Transhumanist Association, is today's featured guest. Topics include : Wireheading, recreational drugs, chewing coca leaves for micro-doses of cocaine, the abolition of suffering in all sentient life, veganism verses vegetarianism, why he is a founding member of the Order of Cosmic Engineers , the journal Medical Hypotheses , how he learned that he was a transhumanist, and how this lead to his co-founding of the World T...
Aug 27, 2008•1 hr 7 min
Les Johnson , author, lecturer and NASA scientist, is today's featured guest. Topics include: one of NASA's advanced electromagnetic propulsion systems which uses no fuel and no rocket engines whatsoever; NASA's near future projects such as the next lunar lander and the new heavy lifting vehicle Aries V ; and how we might eventually find ourselves fulfilling the vision of his non-fiction book: Living off the Land in Space . Hosted by Stephen Euin Cobb, this is the August 20, 2008 episode of The ...
Aug 20, 2008•1 hr 4 min
Ben Goertzel , noted scientist, author, futurist and pioneer in the field of Artificial Intelligence, is today's featured guest. Topics he discusses include: Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), the singularity, transhumanism, human immortality and how long he expects to live, and why (like your host) he is a founding member of the Order of Cosmic Engineers. Highlights of the interview include: The mechanism of human empathy seems to have been identified, and so can be reproduced in AI; even A...
Aug 13, 2008•1 hr 13 min
Owner of the BDSM and fetish performance-art theatrical troupe in Charlotte NC called Purgatory , our guest today goes by the name of 'Torch.' Purgatory's live events feature a festival atmosphere, dance music by DJs, and performances of a BDSM and fetish nature which are partly scripted and partly improvisational. In addition to describing Purgatory, Torch also talks about: the confusion between BDSM and Goth; BDSM becoming trendy and fashionable; how the internet has changed BDSM, and the diff...
Aug 06, 2008•45 min
Catherine Smith (insect genetics lab-tech), Bruce Gehweiler (publisher at Marietta Publishing ), Mike McPhail and his wife Danielle Ackley-McPhail ( authors ), Warren Buff (chairman of the SF&F convention Stellarcon ), Shannon Souvinette and her daughter Elaina (art show organizers at LibertyCon ), Shannon Presley (Radio DJ at WBVR ), Klon Newell (book dealer), and David Benedict (of the Atlanta Radio Theater Company ) are our guests today. This is the second of our two episodes containing inter...
Jul 30, 2008•1 hr 19 min
Authors David B. Coe and Travis Taylor ; artist David Mattingly ; and convention organizers Uncle Timmy, Brandy Spraker and Derek Spraker are our guests today. Topics: David Mattingly discusses trends in the digital production of commercial art. Travis Taylor talks of the launch vehicle that will replace the soon to be retired Space Shuttle. David B. Coe describes his take on our escalating energy crisis and the bold proposals of T. Boone Pickens. Recorded at the SF&F convention LibertyCon on Ju...
Jul 23, 2008•1 hr 7 min
Harry Turtledove , David B. Coe , and Toni Weisskopf are our featured guests today. Interviewed as a group and recorded before a live audience, they discuss the future of books and the trends they see in publishing. In the process of sharing their vision of the future they also share many personal anecdotes about themselves and about famous authors they have met, including: Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, L. Sprague de Camp, Mike Resnick, Sarah A. Hoyt, Lois McMaster Bujold, ...
Jul 16, 2008•1 hr 9 min
Mark Forman , who has lived and worked in Taiwan for over twenty years and is host of the podcast Big in Asia , is our featured guest. (His websites: business , personal , podcast .) An eye-witness to the trends which are shaping Asia's rapidly changing future, Mark Forman is an American businessman from Brooklyn New York who studied Chinese language and culture at the University of Arizona and, during the last two decades, has traveled a great deal in China as well as within many of its neighbo...
Jul 09, 2008•59 min
Kevin J. Anderson , the best selling science fiction and fantasy author, is our guest today. ( His website .) Co-author of the Dune prequels, his original works include the Saga of Seven Suns series and the Nebula Award-nominated Assemblers of Infinity . A prolific science fiction author, he has had at least 32 of his novels on the various best seller lists including the famous New York Times Bestseller's list. His books have been translated into at least twenty-four languages, and have sold ove...
Jul 02, 2008•55 min
Catherine Asaro , physicist and Nebula award winning author, is our featured guest. ( Her website ) She discuses nanotech, biotech, artificial intelligence and the singularity. She also describes her expectations concerning aging and longevity, oil and alternative energy; and she agrees to let the host arrange for her to do a personal appearance inside Second Life. She mentions that she has begun composing music on the computer, says a few words about her new novel ( The Night Bird ) and briefly...
Jun 25, 2008•1 hr 6 min
Authors Robert V. Aldrich , Michael D'Ambrosio and Steve Cross are our featured guests today. Recorded on location at ConCarolinas ( web ): the science fiction and fantasy convention held a few weeks ago in Charlotte NC. Robert V. Aldrich ( web ) (author of the anime-style novels Crossworld and Queendom ) describes trends in anime, manga, illegal downloading as well as the movies Speed Racer and Ironman . Michael D'Ambrosio ( web ) (author of the Fractured Time trilogy) has been expanding his ca...
Jun 18, 2008•49 min
Professor Amy H. Sturgis is our featured guest. She talks about many of the trends she sees in colleges in general, and the increasing scholarly studies of science fiction and fantasy literature and media in particular. She also mentions her work for StarShipSofa , the enthusiasm students have for classes on speculative fiction, and how these studies augment their study of history. Amy H. Sturgis earned her Ph.D. in Intellectual History from Vanderbilt University, and she teaches Interdisciplina...
Jun 11, 2008•35 min
Gary Jones (from the TV shows Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis ) is joined by the authors Mike Resnick and David B. Coe , and the editor of Orson Scott Card's online magazine, Edmund R. Schubert . Recorded at the science fiction and fantasy convention ConCarolinas in Charlotte NC, this episode is dedicated to ConCarolinas. ConCarolinas is very special to your host for several reasons. Six years ago, it became the first con he ever attended as part of the entertainment; for the last five years...
Jun 04, 2008•1 hr 10 min
Two Radio DJs, each from a different part of the country and having traveled a different career path, describe the trends which are forcing commercial radio to change from what it once was into what it is yet to become. Kelly Lockhart ( website ) started his DJ career in Key Largo Florida, when fresh out of the military and has worked at radio stations in Atlanta, Tallahassee and Chattanooga. He is a feature writer for The Chattanooga Pulse newspaper, is an award-winning advertising copywriter, ...
May 28, 2008•1 hr 8 min
Five professional artists discuss the trends in the popular arts, including comics, Muppets, children’s book illustrations, commercial art and movie animation (both hand-drawn and CGI) and much, much more. Each artist shares anecdotes from their experiences and describes the trends they see within their specific field. They five artists are: Cheralyn Lambeth , who worked on the Muppet costumes for Sesame Street Live! worked with Jim Henson Productions on the TV series Dinosaur! and the film The ...
May 21, 2008•1 hr 24 min
Paul Fischer , Information Technology professional and one of podcasting’s pioneers, is our guest today. The team of Paul Fischer and Martha Holloway are widely known for their Balticon Podcast and A.D.D. Podcast . In this interview Paul describes: How cellular phone companies manage to charge $3 for only part of a song when the entire song can be bought on Amazon.com for under a dollar. And why this eight billion dollar ringtone business in the US is even worse in Europe where ringtones cost in...
May 14, 2008•58 min
Katherine Kurtz , the best selling author of many fantasy novels including those in her Deryni Series , is our featured guest, in an interview recorded at the science fiction and fantasy convention, RavenCon in Richmond Virginia. In this interview Katherine Kurtz talks about: her writing methods and style; which of her books were the most difficult to write and which ones were the most fun, and shares anecdotes from her travels, her life and her work. A friend of Anne McCaffery, Katherine has li...
May 07, 2008•48 min
Authors C.J. Henderson, Allen Wold and Michael Ventrella are joined by Thomas cmdln Gideon (digital media activist and host of The Command Line podcast), The Wombat (RavenCon's Fan Guest of Honor back in 2007), as well as Bill Mann, Tera Fulbright and many others in this special episode recorded on location at the science fiction and fantasy convention in Richmond Virginia called RavenCon. Also included is an exclusive interview with one of the inside experts on a new massively multiplayer onlin...
Apr 30, 2008•1 hr 17 min
David Brin , fresh from a personal appearance inside the virtual world of Second Life, is our featured guest. The best selling science fiction author, scientist and public speaker, expands on the ideas he presented there and describes his impression of that virtual world based on his first-hand experience. David Brin has won multiple Hugo and Nebula awards and is the author of the novel Kiln People and The Life Eaters as well as six novels within his Uplift Series. He holds a Bachelor’s in astro...
Apr 23, 2008•49 min
Randal L. Schwartz , the widely known computer programmer and programming consultant, is our featured guest today. Randal has acquired a level of renown through his longstanding work in popularizing and promoting the programming language called Perl . He has authored and co-authored many widely used books on the subject, and has written over 200 articles about it for various computer magazines. He is also the co-host of FLOSS Weekly (a podcast from the TWiT podcasting Network which features prom...
Apr 16, 2008•1 hr 9 min
Greg Bear , the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author of more than thirty books of science fiction and fantasy, is our featured guest today. Greg Bear has served on political and scientific action committees and has advised Microsoft Corporation, the U.S. Army, the CIA, Sandia National Laboratories, and Homeland Security. And just recently--like your host--he has joined the advisory board of the Lifeboat Foundation. In today's interview Greg Bear describes his TV appearance on The Daily Show with...
Apr 09, 2008•1 hr 2 min
Dr. Gregory L. Matloff , astronomer and author of six popular books on astronomy and astronautics, is our featured guest. His latest book, Living Off the Land in Space , was co-authored with NASA’s Les Johnson and Brooklyn artist C Bangs. Future and current trends in spaceflight and propulsion are covered in this interview, as well as all the following topics: where the big money will be made in space; space-based solutions to our energy problems on earth today; the inflatable space habitats and...
Apr 02, 2008•1 hr 11 min
Kim Stanley Robinson , the best selling and award-winning science fiction author is our featured guest. Probably best known for his Mars trilogy ( Red Mars , Green Mars and Blue Mars ); his other novels include: Fifty Degrees Below, Forty Signs of Rain, The Years of Rice and Salt , and most recently, Sixty Days and Counting . Hosted by Stephen Euin Cobb, this is the March 26, 2008 episode of The Future And You . [Running time: 83 minutes] In today’s interview Kim Stanley Robinson covers many top...
Mar 26, 2008•1 hr 22 min
Peter Norvig , Director of Research at Google (yes, THE Google) is our featured guest today. Peter is co-author of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach , the leading textbook in the field of AI. He has written more than fifty publications in the computer sciences - concentrating on Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing, and Software Engineering. He is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and the Association for Computing Machinery. And he was the ...
Mar 19, 2008•2 hr 37 min
David B. Coe the award-winning, and critically acclaimed, author of nine fantasy novels (some of which have been translated into no less than six languages, including Russian, German, Dutch, and French) is our featured guest today. David has a doctorate in American history from Stanford University, and he enjoys nature photography, bird and butterfly watching, and playing guitar. David talks about Wikipedia, e-books and Amazon's Kindle , Green investment funds, solar power, his belief that clean...
Mar 12, 2008•1 hr 22 min
Michael Anissimov , the well known futurist, blogger and transhumanism activist is today's featured guest. Michael talks about many future-oriented topics such as: transhumanism and the singularity; cryonics and Paris Hilton; solar power verses nuclear power; synthetic biology and Craig Ventor's new artificial organism; and his own involvement with the founding of the Immortality Institute. The Immortality Institute is a life extension activist organization that today includes hundreds of paying...
Mar 05, 2008•1 hr 11 min
Philippe Van Nedervelde , international spokesperson for the Lifeboat Foundation, is today's featured guest. (He is also Executive Director for the Foresight Nanotech Institute in Europe, and a Global Task Force Member for the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology.) Philippe describes the Lifeboat Foundation, its work to define and evaluate the many coming risks to humankind, and how the foundation has already begun formulating specific recommendations on how we may prepare for these risks. This...
Feb 27, 2008•2 hr 32 min
Giulio Prisco (futurist, scientist, corporate consultant and until recently the Executive Director of the World Transhumanist Association) is today's featured guest. He serves on the Board of Directors of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies and on the Global Task Force on Implications and Policy for CRN, the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology. Argent Bury (a digital person living exclusively within Second Life ) provides an essay concerning the tension between immersionists and...
Feb 20, 2008•1 hr 19 min
Catherine Asaro , scientist and Nebula award winning author, is our featured guest; while Glen Walkerson who writes tech-manuals for the F-16 fighter jet provides a brief bonus interview. Catherine Asaro describes her thoughts on the rise of nanotechnology, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, the ongoing feminization of civilization, and how non-lethal weapons might alter the nature of war. Glen Walkerson shares a few comments on the new F-22 fighter jet, which is under production, as ...
Feb 13, 2008•41 min
