Greetings Futurismic readers. My name is Stephen Years and I’m one of the new contributors to the Futurismic blog. I’m a high-tech management professional and entrepreneur in California’s Silicon Valley. My current business endeavor is a start-up company that is focused on energy efficiency in data centers.

As a blogger I’m very interested in the intersection of technology, market-forces and culture – and how each changes and modifies the other in a bizarre, continuous feedback loop. As an example, I’m fascinated how the cost of energy is forcing the market to invest in alternative energy sources – and how those new energy sources, once employed significantly, will impact the geopolitical structure. What cultural forces will be unleashed in a Middle East deprived of its primary source of revenue?

I would like to thank Futurismic for this opportunity and I hope you will find my posts enlightening, entertaining and challenging.

First posts are fraught with danger–"you never get a second chance to make a first impression," and all that–but at least in this instance the nerve-wracking decision of what to post about has been taken out of my hands: I’m supposed to introduce myself. (Which also removes the fear of blabbing on about something I know nothing about, I suppose: bonus!)

So. I’m Edward Willett, one of your new Futurismic bloggers. My interest in science fiction goes back to childhood, thanks to the corrupting influence of my two older brothers, and my interest in science stems very much from my interest in SF. I was born in New Mexico, but moved to Weyburn, Saskatchewan, Canada from Texas when I was eight. I studied journalism and art at Harding University in Arkansas, then returned to Weyburn, where I was a newspaper reporter/photographer/columnist/editor/cartoonist (it was a smallish paper) for eight years, before chucking it all in and becoming communications officer for the Saskatchewan Science Centre here in Regina, where I now live.

In 1993 I dumped the workaday life to become a fulltime freelance writer. I’m the author of more than 30 books. First came computer books, then I branched into children’s nonfiction, which I continue to write, on topics that have run the gamut from Ebola Virus to the Iran-Iraq War to biographies of Jimi Hendrix, Orson Scott Card, Janis Joplin and J.R.R. Tolkien (coming soon: Johnny Cash and Andy Warhol!). I’ve also written adult non-fiction, including Genetics Demystified for McGraw-Hill.

Somewhere along the way I sold a few young adult science fiction and fantasy novels to small publishers. In 2005 I sold my first adult science fiction novel, Lost in Translation, to Five Star, and in 2006 DAW Books put it out in mass-market paperback. I have a new science fiction novel, Marseguro, coming out from DAW in February.

I’m the administrative assistant for SF Canada, the association of professional speculative fiction writers of Canada, and maintain the SF Canada news blog. My own personal blog is here.

I write a weekly newspaper science column, which I also podcast. I’m married to a telecommunications engineer and have one daughter. (Oh, and on the side, I’m a professional actor and singer, so if I sneak in a few references to SFnal musical theatre productions, you’ll know why.)

Whew! I’m glad that’s out of the way. That’s way more than enough about me. Now I can think about my first real post…

[tags]bloggers, Futurismic, staff[/tags]

Greetings. My name is Tomas L. Martin, one of the new faces here at Futurismic. I’m a writer and physics student from Bristol, England. I’ve been writing book reviews for SFCrowsnest for years now and if I link to a book I’ve been enjoying, I’ll probably include a link to my review. My short story ‘A Shogun’s Welcome’ featured in Aberrant Dreams #7 and a semi-sequel, ‘The Shogun and The Scientist’ will be out in the anthology The Awakening this January.

Anyone interested in reading my fictional work today could do worse than read miawithoutoil, my fictional blog for the World Without Oil project, in which every day of May this year documented a week of a global oil crisis.

On this blog I hope to produce many posts that will pique the interest of readers. In this strange world, I’m especially interested in some of the major changes happening before our eyes so expect a few entries on climate change, alternative energy and peak oil as well as any other cool stuff I come across on my web travels.