Wilson discusses his latest book, Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America, which is the most fun novel you'll ever read about the collapse of Western civilization and the end of religious freedom and democracy in America.

It's an adventure story about the son of pious snake-handling parents in a small town, who leaves home in the company of the nephew of the President of the United States, and goes off to war and New York. The novel has adventure and romance and comedy and sea voyages and rooftop foot-chases and leaping from building to building. It's great fun.... read more

Next on Copper Robot: Scott Rosenberg, co-founder of Salon Magazine. I'll talk with Scott about the history and future of blogging, and his new book, Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, And Why It Matters.

When: Sunday, July 12, 6 pm.

Where: The lovely Seaside Theater, World2Worlds Island or watch the live video on the Web.

I spent all day Friday glued to Scott's book Say Everything, which traces the history of blogging from its earlier days in the faraway 90s, through the warbloggers immediately after 9/11, and through to the present, where bloggers have helped shape the... read more

Get it here.

The first version, which I uploaded Sunday, had bad volume problems. I sounded all right, as did guest Michael T. Rose of The Unofficial Apple Weblog. But Gina Trapani, of Smarterware and Lifehacker, sounded a bit distant. And Second Life's ArminasX Saiman, of the shop Electric Pixels and the blog Second Effects, sounded like he had a bad case of the mumbles.

I did the best I could to clean it up, which wasn't enough. After uploading the MP3 to this blog, I mentioned the problem to Mike, and he recommended The Levelator,... read more

We discussed his new novel, Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America, past novels Spin and Darwinia, Julian Comstock's origins in Roman history and 19th Century popular children's fiction, and why "wanker" is not, actually, an ethnic slur.

Wilson is the author of more than a dozen novels over more than 20 years. His work frequently features miraculous changes to the entire world: In Darwinia, it's the entire continent of Europe being replaced by an alien landscape in 1912. In Spin, set in the present day, the stars suddenly disappear one night as the Earth is completely encapsulated... read more

Listen to our talk about Apple's springtime announcements at its Worldwide Developers Conference. I talked with three of the best minds in the Apple universe: Gina Trapani, currently author of the blog Smarterware and founding editor of the blog Lifehacker; Michael T. Rose of The Unofficial Apple Weblog, and Second Life's own ArminasX Saiman, owner of the particle store Electric Pixels and author of the blog Second Effects.

We talked about the iPhone 3GS, of course, and how the upcoming Snow Leopard operating system is likely to prove to be bigger than the 3GS. We also discussed... read more

I'll be one of the featured guests on the Metanomics interview program tomorrow, that's Wednesday, June 24, talking about the so-called "Twitter revolution" in Iran and other things with host Robert Bloomfield (SL: Beyers Sellers).

But I feel like Charlie Brill and Mitzi McCall, a comedy team that had the good fortune to break through to the Ed Sullivan Show, which was, at the time, every comedian's dream -- but had the bad fortune to do it on the day the Beatles made their American TV debut.

The main act on Metanomics that day will be Kevin Werbach, a key... read more

Coming up next, the author of one of my all-time favorite novels, science-fiction writer Robert Charles Wilson, who'll talk about his latest novel, Julian Comstock: A Story of 22d Century America.

I'm reading Julian Comstock now, and it does a great job at one of my favorite things that science fiction books do: Letting you inhabit another world for a little while. In the case of Julian Comstock, the world is America, 175 or so years into the future. Forget about your flying cars and orbiting hotels -- this is a world where fossil fuels ran out, the population... read more

A few weeks ago, I interviewed Spencer Zuzulo of 3DSquared, aong with Rita J. King and Joshua Fouts of Dancing Ink Productions. We talked about how 3DSquared is running a program to teach Louisiana kids how to create games that teach about social issues. While the kids think they're learning to be game designers, they're also learning about social issues, as well as getting experience in teamwork, making presentations, and other so-called "soft skills" that keep disadvantaged kids from getting ahead.

Second Life's Zen Paine and Treet.tv compiled the interview into a 6-1/2 minute video for Dancing Ink, and I'm... read more

We had a great time talking with Gina "Lifehacker" "Smarterware" Trapani, Mike "The Unofficial Apple Weblog" Rose, and Second Life's own ArminasX Saiman about the new Snow Leopard operating system from Apple, the next-generation iPhone, the Safari 4 browser, the return of Steve Jobs, an whether the Mac spinning wait cursor -- a/ka/ the "spinning pinwheel of death" -- turns the other way in the southern hemisphere. Watch the video now -- as always, this is the raw, unedited video; actual discussion starts about 30 seconds in.

Next on Copper Robot, we'll take a look at the news out of Apple's biggest annual scheduled event, the World Wide Developers Conference, which starts Monday in San Francisco. Apple will almost certainly announce a new iPhone, and talk about updates to the Mac OS.

The WWDC runs all this week, and next Sunday we'll hash out what happened with three experts on Apple: Gina Trapani, founding editor of the blog Lifehacker, now blogging at Smarterware by Gina Trapani. She describes herself as a "software and self-improvement junkie" who blogs about "using your head (and great software) to... read more