Abby interviews her father, a pioneer in the development of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). He talks about his thesis in bioelectrochemistry, publication in scientific journals, the Nobel Prize, cancer research, and the early days of Fonar Corporation.
Science Fiction has changed since the "Golden Age" dominated by American 1950s and 1960s authors, such as Heinlein and Asimov. Abby chats with her father, a scientist and inventor, about why he stopped reading SciFi.
Abby discusses creativity and her early novel writing experiences with her mother, who also has a creative background in arts, cartooning, and writing.
Abby Goldsmith describes her series of epic science fiction novels. The first novel will be available in late 2015 or early 2016. Five Torth novels are complete, and she's working on the final book.
AG Vlog Ep02 Transcript
Hi, my name is Abby Goldsmith. I'm going to talk about my series of novels. I've completed five, and I'm going to complete the 6th one this coming year. It's science fiction. Epic science fiction with telepaths versus slaves.
The telepaths are all networked together in a ... something like the internet on steroids, where popular opinion gets up-voted or voted on by the majority. And, uh, the majority rules.
They do have individual personalities, so it's not quite a hive mind. But the more popular, the more celebrity type people among them, are the ones in charge.
And they've conquered the galaxy. They've taken over hundreds of planets and alien civilizations. They have all the technology in the galaxy, all the resources. They own everything. They have just countless slaves. And they consider themselves a superior master race. Earth is their next target. So ...
My first novel in the series starts on Earth, with unsuspecting humans, and, um, one of them happens to be a telepath who, indeed, was left on Earth by these people by accident. Well, not by accident, but I don't want to get into that backstory.
Basically, he's one of them. He was raised among humans. He has human sympathies. He was raised by a foster family that he cares about.
And the telepaths come and abduct them all. They're considering enslaving Earth. They're definitely enslaving his friends and foster family, and they're going to execute one of his friends. And so he thinks he's gotta save them. And the only way to do that is to become--join--the telepaths and learn their ways, become one of them, and figure out some way to persuade them. Or if he can't persuade them, use his new authority as a telepath to save his friends.
What he doesn't ... what he realizes, or learns very quickly in Book 1, is that there's no privacy among telepaths. They are all networked together. Every thought he has is known, and the telepaths are very interested in him because he's something like a feral child, raised among these primitive humans. So he's under intense scrutiny all the time. He's got tens of thousands of people in this mental audience, in the back of his mind. He can't escape their attention. So he's got to figure out a way to subconsciously, or in some some way that the Torth (telepaths) aren't gonna notice, help his friends. But the problem looks insurmountable because they own everything. The telepaths own everything. They're called the Torth.
Meanwhile, his friends may have a trick or two up their sleeves that the Torth weren't expecting. I'm not going to get into it any more than that. Pitching is hard to do. The technology the Torth have is like, they've got cloaking devices and the Torth themselves, as telepaths, can, if you come with a range of them, they know what you're thinking. They can see through the eyes of other telepaths, and hear through their ears. They have instant communication.
So, hurt one telepath, and an army will descend upon you very quickly. That's how they operate.
Until now, in the present time in my series, slaves have not been able to rebel. They haven't been able to plan anything because the minute they do, they're sentenced to death. The few that do live in the wild, so to speak, are just terrified of telepaths. They know that if they're caught ... if a runaway slave is ever caught ... they're executed.
So anyway, then my heroes come along and start changing all of that. I do not want to give away much. But it's very much a series that's about what it means to be human, good versus evil, and a lot about privacy. A lot about group-think. Not group-think, but crowd-think. What happens when you have a society where there's no privacy and everything is ruled by a majority. Where popular opinion becomes law. The Torth are not evil. They are just in a society where individual thought is dangerous.
So yes, there are good Torth, there are bad Torth, and later in the series, some start switching sides, and I'm not going to get into that. But, ooh, I hope I'll be able to give a better pitch next time. Anyway.
