Marti Ward

Marti Ward is an award-winning writer, teacher, researcher and entrepreneur known for his serial startups and his interdisciplinary work from the behavioural, cognitive, health and information sciences to environmental and robotic engineering - but he writes under several variants of his name. Marti hasn't been into space yet, but has travelled extensively on this planet - living in half a dozen countries and speaking and reading a variety of languages with varying degrees of fluency. He hasn't yet built an AI as sophisticated as Al - but is working on it, and has around 300 publications relating to AI, Cognitive Science, Computational Linguistics and Robotics. Marti was brought up reading a wide range of books, fiction and non-fiction — exploring Encyclopaedia Britannica at the age of four when his parents wouldn't answer his persistent "How?" and "Why?" questions. His first fantasy story, "Ghostie" was published in print and audio form when he was seven years old — being used in teacher training. In his preteens, Marti particularly enjoyed the Robot stories of Isaac Asimov. Intelligent AIs from his childhood, Astroboy and HAL, featured in his PhD thesis — and these stories and characters might just get mentioned in his Paradisi writing too. But he really fell in love with Anne McCaffrey's PERN stories — so don't be surprised to see influences from that source either, particularly in his PsyQ stories. Marti is tickled when people see these influences... In particular, like McCaffrey, he likes to write developmental 'firm' science fiction that is for adults (from 9-99) but meets the protagonist in their teens or pre-teens. Firm SF is based on real hard science and engineering, but has a major aim in addressing the so-called soft psychological and sociological implications. Like Asimov, in his Daneel robot detective stories, he likes the reader to be engaged with the protagonist in solving problems and mysteries. What's critical about the stories of Clarke, Asimov and McCaffrey, about Firm SF, is that they are optimistic and seek to explore the scientific and socialogical implications of new interesting or plausible elements and the measures that are put in place to control them. Marti's fiction all fits within his 'Appearance of Magic' multiverse in which the distinction between science, technology and magic is a matter of perspective, as all sufficiently advanced science/tech has the appearance of magic (to misquote Arthur C Clarke). So while the stories may involve psychic gifts or advanced technologies, they are built on the basis of science not magic — and as a kid, and still now as an adult, I really hated the indulgent fantasy elements of the Kubrick/Clarke film that SF diehards like me nicknamed "2001: A Space Idiocy", notwithstanding the excellent characterization (and science) of HAL and the insightful main plot (it lost the plot in the second half, though the book and its sequels are better). Personal Note I don't much like reading authors whose eyes, like their characters', glaze over at the first mention of some overly simplistic pseudoscientific explanation. I don't think they are being faithful to the genre. I'm also not really interested in yet another postapocaltypic dystopia. Personally, I like to write in character and try not explain to the reader what the character knows, or words/terms that the reader can learn by osmosis - you don't need a dictionary to do it and the reader doesn't need EEG or MRI, CD or DVD, LASER, or MODEM spelled out as acronyms or letterisms; nor does your doctor or technician expand them and explain them when you get one (although the Educatonal Edition of Time for PsyQ does include glossaries at the end that spell it all out, and these are also available on my martiward blogspot). I learned most of my vocabulary (in multiple languages) by reading — without recourse to a dictionary. A dictionary will tend to mislead, missing the finer nuances that you can pick up from context. However, in my preteens (and pretweens) I did use an encyclopaedia to explore interesting concepts I found in my hard SF reading — like relativity, quantum mechanics, orbital dynamics, hypnosis, telepathy... Good SF doesn't break the laws of physics but bends them through the loopholes and lacunae in our present theories and understanding, often extrapolating with theories and hypotheses of its own. So I'm not writing for "middlegraders" or "teens" or "young adults", as lumping "children" into such categories does them a disservice, dragging them down to the lowest laziest demoninator of their age-group, denying eager bright students the chance to learn — and indeed promoting bullying of those that show a desire to learn, to go further, beyond these limited expectations. Rather I am writing for anyone who likes to explore the knowledge, mysteries and possibilities that this world holds. It's not so much about IQ as willingness to explore. Indeeed doing well in IQ tests is mostly about exploring widely and being motivated to solve puzzles (although you also need some psychological understanding to be able to second guess the lower-IQ author of the test who sees some patterns but not others). I don't believe in talking down to children, but believe rather in trusting them and treating them as nascent adults. If you are interested in what it's like to be a scientist, engineer, astronaut or cyborg, then we are doing you no favours if we gloss over the science and technology as 'boring' or 'complicated'. That's what I read SF for! And without that detail, as a scientist, technologist, ethicist and author, I don't get to achieve my goal of understanding more about the science and technology, and its ramifications for us and our society. The true art of science fiction is the blending of the real science and the actual fiction so deftly that the reader can't tell where one ends and the other starts.