I am thrilled to be hosting a spot
on the OBSERVER by Robert Lanza & Nancy Kress Blog Tour hosted by Rockstar Book Tours. Check out
my post and make sure to enter the giveaway!
Author: Robert Lanza & Nancy Kress
Release Date: January 10, 2023
Publisher: The Story Plant
Formats: Hardcover, eBook, Audiobook
Pages: 368
Find it: Goodreads, https://books2read.com/OBSERVER
A
mind-expanding journey to the very edge of science.
Caro Soames-Watkins, a talented neurosurgeon whose career has been upended by
controversy, is jobless, broke, and the sole supporter of her sister, a single
mother with a severely disabled child.
When she receives a strange job offer from Nobel Prize-winning scientist Sam Watkins, a great uncle she barely knows, desperation forces her to take it in
spite of serious suspicions.
Watkins has built a mysterious medical facility in the Caribbean to conduct
research into the nature of consciousness, reality, and life after death.
Helped in his mission by his old friend, eminent physicist George Weigert, and
young tech entrepreneur Julian Dey, Sam has gone far beyond curing the body to
develop a technology that could solve the riddle of mortality.
Two obstacles stand in their way: someone on the inside is leaking intel and Watkins' failing body must last long enough for the technology to be ready.
As danger mounts, Caro finds more than she bargained for, including murder, love, and a deeper understanding into the nature of reality.
A mind-expanding journey to the very edges of science, Observer will thrill you, inspire you, and lead you to think about life and the power of the
imagination in startling new ways.
TEACHING A WRITING CLASS
By Nancy Kress
Writing is a risky business. Sometimes your work succeeds in your mind but not in editors’ minds. Sometimes (rarely) you have doubts about something you wrote but it sells right away. Sometimes an editor loves it but the marketing committee says no (“Werewolves are over.”) Whatever you can do to improve your chances of selling a story or novel, you should do. This may include taking a writing class.
Every year, I teach a two-week intensive seminar in writing science fiction, called Taos Toolbox, with fellow author Walter Jon Williams. Writers are divided on whether or not writing can be taught. Some say yes, some no. I land in the middle.
There are two parts to writing: imagination and craft. Even the most skilled teacher cannot give you more imagination, more insight into human character, more creative vision to guide your story. Such a teacher can, however, help with transferring the vision in your head to the pixels on your screen. Could you learn this by yourself? Of course. Nearly all of the world’s writers learned to write by trial and error. What a good writing class can do is explain, demonstrate, and point out in your draft useful guidelines for structuring a plot, writing effective description, and the dozens of other elements that make up a story. Note: “useful” is a slippery term. What works for one aspiring writer may strike another as baseless conformity, or not suited to their voice. That’s fine. Take what you need from a class and discard the rest. We’re at Taos Toolbox for two weeks; something that I, Walter, or another attendee says will be helpful to you.
I say all this to our new workshop, which on Sunday has trickled into New Mexico from all over the United States and, this year, two foreign countries. Sunday night is orientation and pizza. As I mingle with the attendees, trying to learn eighteen names and match them with the submission stories that got them accepted to the class, a part of my mind is aware that sometime during the next two weeks, there is a high probability that one writer will be furious at the critique they received, one will be in tears, and one will assume that since everybody loved their submission, they have nothing more to learn.
The second part of my orientation lecture is concerned with critiquing: what to focus on; how to respond to what the writer, not the critiquer, wants their story to do; how to handle the stress. Because getting feedback on a story is stressful. I have been writing for forty years, and I still get negative feedback from beta readers, my agent, and editors, and it still stresses me. But it also helps me make the work better.
Everybody is told which of the stories they’ve been emailed three weeks ago we will discuss in class tomorrow. Then we all go to reread them so they are fresh in mind for tomorrow. Or perhaps some of them go to their rooms to write. Or to check their email, or get a good night’s sleep, or roister wildly with their new friends. I don’t know.
But I do know they will all be in the conference room tomorrow morning, carrying laptops, notebooks, and coffee, and we will begin the wonderful work of considering fiction.
Robert Lanza is an American scientist
and author whose research spans the range of natural science, from biology to
theoretical physics. TIME magazine recognized him as one of the “100 Most
Influential People in the World,” and Prospect magazine named him one of the
"Top 50 World Thinkers.”
He has hundreds of scientific
publications and over 30 books, including definitive references in the fields
of stem cells, tissue engineering, and regenerative medicine. He is a former
Fulbright Scholar, and studied with polio-pioneer Jonas Salk and Nobel
laureates Gerald Edelman (known for his work on the biological basis of
consciousness) and Rodney Porter. He also worked closely (and co-authored
papers in Science on self-awareness and symbolic communication) with noted
Harvard psychologist BF Skinner. Dr. Lanza received his undergraduate and
medical degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, where he was both a
University Scholar and Benjamin Franklin Scholar.
Lanza was part of the team that
cloned the world’s first human embryo, the first endangered species, and
published the first-ever reports of pluripotent stem cell use in humans.
Lanza and his colleagues were also
the first to demonstrate that nuclear transplantation could be used to reverse
the aging process and to generate immune-compatible tissues, including the
first organ tissue-engineered from cloned cells. One of his early achievements
was his demonstration that techniques used in preimplantation genetic diagnosis
could be used to generate human embryonic stem cells without embryonic
destruction.
He and colleagues have also succeeded
in differentiating human pluripotent stem cells into retinal cells, and has
shown that they provide long-term benefit in animal models of vision loss.
Using this technology some forms of blindness may be curable, including macular
degeneration and Stargardt disease, a currently untreatable form eye disease
that causes blindness in teenagers and young adults. Lanza's company received
FDA approval to carry out clinical trials in the US using them to treat
degenerative eye diseases, as well approval for the first human pluripotent stem
cell trial in Europe. The first patients reported improved vision in the eyes
treated with the cells, which The Guardian said "represents a huge
scientific achievement."
Dr. Lanza and his colleagues
published the first-ever report of human pluripotent stem cells transplanted
into human patients. The patients who received the stem cell transplants say
their lives have been transformed by the experimental procedure--they report
that they can use their computers, thread a needle, or even go to the mall or airport
on their own.
Lanza has also been a major player in
the scientific revolution that has led to the documentation that nuclear
transfer/transcription factors can restore developmental potential in a
differentiated cell. One of his successes was showing that it is feasible to
generate functional oxygen-carrying red blood cells from human pluripotent stem
cells. The blood cells were comparable to normal transfusable blood and could
serve as a potentially inexhaustible source of "universal" blood. His
team also discovered how to generate functional hemangioblasts - a population
of "ambulance" cells - from hES cells. In animals, these cells
quickly repaired vascular damage, cutting the death rate after a heart attack
in half and restoring the blood flow to ischemic limbs that might otherwise
have to be amputated.
Lanza and a team lead by Kwang-Soo
Kim at Harvard University have also reported a safe method for generating
induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. Human iPS cells were created from skin
cells by direct delivery of proteins, thus eliminating the harmful risks
associated with genetic manipulation. The Editors of the prestigious journal
Nature selected Lanza and Kim's paper on protein reprogramming as one of five
"Research Highlights." Discover magazine stated, "Lanza's
single-minded quest to usher in this new age has paid dividends in scientific
insights and groundbreaking discoveries." Fortune magazine called him
"the standard-bearer for stem cell research.”
Dr. Lanza has received numerous
awards, including being named one of TIME Magazine's "100 Most Influential
People in the World"; the 2013 Il Leone di San Marco award in Medicine
(The Italian Heritage and Culture Committee, along with Regis Philbin [in
Entertainment]); including an NIH Director's Award (2010) for "Translating
Basic Science Discoveries into New and Better Treatments"; the 2010
'Movers and Shakers' Who Will Shape Biotech Over the Next 20 Years
(BioWorld)(along with Craig Venter and President Barack Obama); the 2007 100
Most Inspiring People in the Life-Sciences Industry (PharmaVOICE, "For his
discoveries 'behind the medicines making a significant impact on the pipelines
of today and of the future'"; the 2007 Outstanding Contribution in
Contemporary Biology Award (Brown University, "For his groundbreaking
research and contributions in stem cell science and biology"; the 2006
All-Star Award for Biotechnology (MA High Tech, for "pushing stem cells'
future"); the 2005 Rave Award for Medicine (Wired magazine, "For
eye-opening work on embryonic stem cells"); and Lanza is listed in Who's
Who in America, Who's Who in the World, Who's Who in Medicine and Healthcare,
Who's Who in Science and Engineering; Who's Who in American Education, and
Who's Who in Technology, among others.
Dr. Lanza and his research have been
featured in almost every media outlet in the world, including CNN, TIME,
Newsweek, People, as well as the front pages of the New York Times, Wall Street
Journal, Washington Post, among others (his work has also been the cover story
of US News & World Report, Wired magazine, and Scientific American).
In 2007, Lanza published a feature
article, "A New Theory of the Universe" in The American Scholar, a
leading intellectual journal which has previously published works by Albert
Einstein, Margaret Mead, and Carl Sagan, among others. His theory places
biology above the other sciences in an attempt to solve one of nature's biggest
puzzles, the theory of everything that other disciplines have been pursuing for
the last century. This new view has become known as Biocentrism. In
biocentrism, space and time are forms of animal sense perception, rather than
external physical objects. Understanding this more fully yields answers to
several major puzzles of mainstream science, and offers a new way of understanding
everything from the microworld (for instance, the reason for Heisenberg's
uncertainty principle and the double-slit experiment) to the forces, constants,
and laws that shape the universe. Nobel laureate E. Donnall Thomas stated
"Any short statement does not do justice to such a scholarly work. The
work is a scholarly consideration of science and philosophy that brings biology
into the central role in unifying the whole."
You can read more about Dr. Robert
Lanza's work at:
Website | Twitter | Facebook | Goodreads | Amazon | BookBub
Nancy Kress
is the author of thirty-four books, including twenty-six novels, four
collections of short stories, and three books on writing. Her work has won six
Nebulas, two Hugos, a Sturgeon, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. She
writes frequently about genetic engineering; including the acclaimed
science-fiction novel Beggars in Spain. Kress’s fiction has been translated
into Swedish, Danish, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Polish, Croatian,
Chinese, Lithuanian, Romanian, Japanese, Korean, Hebrew, Russian, and Klingon,
none of which she can read. In addition to writing, Kress often teaches at
various venues around the country and abroad, including a visiting lectureship
at the University of Leipzig, a 2017 writing class in Beijing, and the annual intensive
workshop TaosToolbox. Kress lives in Seattle with her husband, writer Jack
Skillingstead, and Pippin, the world’s most spoiled Chihuahua.
Website | Goodreads | Amazon | BookBub
(1) winner will receive a $10 Amazon Gift Card - International.
Ends January 24th, midnight EST.
Tour Schedule:
Week One:
1/9/2023 |
Guest Post/IG Post | |
|
1/9/2023 |
Guest Post | |
|
1/10/2023 |
Excerpt/IG Post | |
|
1/10/2023 |
Guest Post | |
|
1/11/2023 |
Review | |
|
1/11/2023 |
#BRVL Book
Review Virginia Lee Blog |
Excerpt |
|
1/12/2023 |
TikTok Review/IG Post | |
|
1/12/2023 |
Review | |
|
1/13/2023 |
IG Review/LFL Drop Pic | |
|
1/13/2023 |
Review/IG Post |
Week Two:
|
1/16/2023 |
Facebook Review/IG Review | |
|
1/16/2023 |
Guest Post/IG Post | |
|
1/17/2023 |
IG Review | |
|
1/17/2023 |
IG Review/TikTok Post | |
|
1/18/2023 |
Excerpt/IG Post | |
|
1/18/2023 |
Review/IG Post | |
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1/19/2023 |
Review/IG Post | |
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1/19/2023 |
Excerpt/IG Post | |
|
1/20/2023 |
Nagma
| TakeALookAtMyBookshelf |
IG Review |
|
1/20/2023 |
Review |
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