Stephen Euin Cobb (your host) is today's featured guest.

Topics: The debut of the first ever Robot Girlfriend. (In this case a sex doll that is only slightly robotic.) Why sex robots (as they become more numerous and more human-like over the next few years) will produce an emotional firestorm of outrage from both the far left and far right which will fill every corner of the media. Also: news that the ebook market is about to turn into a fight between three giants: Amazon, Apple and beginning this summer Google; the closing, after four years, of Jim Baen's Universe Magazine; and the huge increase in online SF&F magazines which pay their writers professional rates as defined by SF&FA (the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America).

Note: Here are a some submission pages of online fiction magazines which pay for stories. Many of these pay SFWA professional rates (five cents per word or better): Clarksworld, Abys & Apex, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Brain Harvest, Futurismic, Heliotrope, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, Fantasy Magazine, and ThePedestalMagazine.) (Heliotrope pays 10 cents per word.)

Hosted by Stephen Euin Cobb, this is the May 5, 2010 episode of The Future And You. [Running time: 21 minutes]

Stephen Euin Cobb is (to quote Wikipedia) a U.S. author, magazine writer, interviewer and host of the award-winning podcast The Future and You. He's also a columnist and contributing editor for Jim Baen's Universe Magazine; a contributing editor for Robot Magazine; and has written for Space and Time Magazine, H+ Magazine, and Grim Couture Magazine. He is also a game designer, artist, essayist, futurist, transhumanist, and is on the Advisory Board of The Lifeboat Foundation.