Stephen Euin Cobb
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Stephen Euin Cobb (born February 3, 1955) is a U.S. science fiction author, futurist and the host of the award-winning podcast The Future And You. He also writes a regular column in Jim Baen's Universe, the online magazine from Baen Books. He is also a game designer, artist, essayist and transhumanist.
As the host of The Future And You, a two hour long talk-show style podcast, he interviews authors, celebrities, scientists and "pioneers of the future" as to what they believe both the near future and distant future will be like.
Bones Burnt Black (2004) is his most widely read novel (and is being serialized as an audio book in each episode of his podcast). It is an action/adventure, murder/mystery involving a series of murders aboard a large passenger spacecraft which has been catastrophically sabotaged by the killer. His first published novel was Plague at Redhook (1999), which dealt with nanotechnology so highly advanced that it resembled magic and resulted in human immortality. He also contributed a short story called The Errand Boy to the anthology Writers for Relief. (All the profits of this anthology are being donated to the victims of hurricanes Katrina and Rita.)
As a novelist, he specializes in hard science fiction (fiction with a high degree of scientific accuracy). All of his novels occur within the same fictional universe which has been nicknamed "Naked Space" in honor of a fictional cosmological theory put forth by a character in one of his novels. (His short story The Errand Boy is a timetravel story, and so does not seem to fit within his Naked Space universe.)
His essays generally deal with the future or with science. Both are incorporated in his essay entitled The Universal Diagram (published in the February 2007 episode of Jim Baen's Universe magazine). In it he proposed a method of charting, in three dimensions, all the celestial objects in the universe to make their relationships more obvious. (This can be considered vaguely analogous to the two dimensional Hertzsprung-Russell diagram of stars.)
He has invented a number of games, the most famous being Death Stacks, for which there is an annual tournament in Charlotte, North Carolina. He is also the inventor of the Ignorance Index, an empirical rating system for talk shows on radio and television.
His hobbies include: astronomy (he has a 10.1 inch Dobsonian style Newtonian telescope), handwriting analysis, and drawing in pencil, charcoal and pastels. He also collects fossils, artwork and autographed books.
Stephen is a member of the Beaver Creek Tribe of Native Americans in South Carolina. His mother, Jewel Caroline Cobb (maiden name: Hoover), served one term as a member of the Tribal Counsel. (His mother's sister Emaline Barr has also served one term.) For the tribe to achieve state recognition, complete genealogical records of several tribal members had to be produced and certified as accurate; his mother was one of this core group. Records authenticate that her ancestry is no less than 1/4 Native American (uncertified records indicate that she is probably 1/2 Native American). Because of this, Stephen Euin Cobb is somewhere between 1/8 and 1/4 Native American.
Stephen Euin Cobb was born in Orangeburg, South Carolina; spent his childhood in Forest Park, Illinois (a suburb of Chicago); and now lives in South Carolina.
[edit] External links
- Stephen Euin Cobb official website Includes photos, a biography and opening chapters for two of his novels. (Warning: Dial-up users may find it slow to load because it has many photos of the SF&F conventions he has attended.)
