Marti Ward is a multi-award-winning author, teacher, researcher and entrepreneur known for his serial startups and his interdisciplinary work from the behavioural, cognitive, health and information sciences to environmental, biomedical and robotic engineering - but he writes under several variants of his name. Marti Ward is the pseudonym he uses for his fiction, which is intended to explore the implications and directions of current science and technology is taking, as well as to inspire a new generation of explores in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathmatics (STEM).
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. He has around 300 publications relating to AI, Cognitive Science, Computational Linguistics and Robotics, including several non-fiction books under his own name.
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.
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.
Marti is tickled when people see these influences... What's critical about the stories of Clarke, Asimov and McCaffrey, and Marti Ward's books and stories, about Real/Firm/Hard Science Fiction, is that they seek to explore the scientific and sociological implications of new, interesting or plausible developments and the measures that are put in place to control them.
