Regular Dragon Con attendees may know Dr. Stephen Granade primarily as the director of the Science Track or the co-host of the daily morning The Late Show. He’s also an award-winning game designer, a short story author, and a physicist who has worked with NASA and the Discovery Channel.

Daily Dragon (DD): Welcome! Your bio says you specialize in robotics and machine learning. What drew you to these fields?

Stephen Granade (SG): I evolved into it. My graduate research required me to get good at setting up then-cutting-edge digital cameras to capture very fast events. That led me to a company building light-based computers, which required more camera work. Pretty soon I was doing image processing for robotic space missions. When AI and machine learning revolutionized computer vision, suddenly I was a person spending their time on AI and machine learning. It’s been an exciting field, especially these past few years!

DD: How did you come to work with NASA, and what did that work entail?

SG: I got a job helping build a laser-based sensor for a mission where one satellite was automatically going to dock with another, like Tesla’s Autopilot. And like Tesla’s Autopilot, it led to a crash. After that, I worked on fancy mirrors that NASA put on Hubble’s butt so future robotic missions would be easier.

I’ve bounced around since then. Most recently, I was helping review the sensors that are part of the Lunar Surface Instrument and Technology Payloads project.

DD: What has been your involvement with the Discovery Channel?

SG: Some years ago, they had a series called NASA’s Unexplained Files. They’d have scientists and science communicators present a mystery, like, “What was this weird banging Soviet astronauts heard as they re-entered the atmosphere?” We’d play up the mystery aspect, then talk about the more boring likely explanation behind the mystery.

I can thank Dragon Con and DCTV for getting to be part of the series! Producers were looking for scientists who were comfortable being on camera, and they came across my old DCTV work.

DD: Your website says your presentations to mainstream audiences focus on the intersection of science and popular culture. What are some of the topics you’ve addressed with this focus?

SG: How close are we to building giant mechs or finding kaiju like in Pacific Rim? Could we build Elon Musk’s Hyperloop? How do movies and TV show artificial intelligence, and what’s the gap between fictional AI and what we’ve got now?

DD: When did you start designing games, and how did that come about?

SG: I started writing text adventures in grad school because I needed a hobby that wasn’t physics but also didn’t make me have to go outside. I got my start as the Internet was becoming a thing, so I was able to find communities of other video game creators to learn from.

DD: Please tell us a little about the games you’ve designed.

SG: They’re all-text videogames, because I’m decent with words and terrible at visual art. A lot of them have been art games, like Will Not Let Me Go, an award-winning fun-time game about a man experiencing dementia. My latest is way lighter, though. Professor of Magical Studies is set in a New England university’s secret magic school, only you’re one of the teachers and have to fight off horrors from beyond time while teaching and serving on college committees. It’s available now from Choice of Games on Steam and your phone.

DD: What was your first involvement with Dragon Con?

SG: One of my undergraduate degrees is in theatre arts. Some of my friends were volunteering for TechOps and said, “Hey, you know how sound boards work and how to run cables. Come volunteer with us!” I joined TechOps and never looked back.

DD: How did you become director of the Science Track?

SG: The previous Science Track director heard TechOps had a pet physicist. He tracked me down and asked me to give some talks on the track. I loved getting to talk science at con. When Dragon Con needed a new Science Track director, they turned to me since I already had volunteer experience and knew the track.

DD: What’s the most challenging part of assembling the track schedule each year?

SG: We’re lucky enough to have a big roster of people who both know the science and can make it interesting. It forces us to have a wide range of topics, given their different areas of expertise.

DD: What’s the most fun part of that?

SG: Two big things. One, I and my volunteer team get to pick topics that we’re interested in but don’t know much about. Two, we get to come up with events that make us giggle, like this year’s “Mating Rituals of Kaiju and Other Fantasy Creatures.”

DD: For those who don’t roll out early enough to catch The Late Show, please tell us a little about it.

SG: It started as a way to let folks know about schedule changes but quickly turned into a chance for us to highlight guests and events that viewers might not know about. Dragon Con’s a huge beast. The Late Show lets us help people find new things at Dragon Con to do.

DD: What inspired you to write fiction, and what was your first published story?

SG: I’ve always loved reading, and that led me to want to write. When I was a teenager, I wrote terrible short stories that you’ll never see. For a while my fiction impulses went into creating video games, but a few years ago I got the fiction bug again.

My first published short story was “Physics by the Numbers” in the SF magazine Escape Pod, about physicists dealing with AI algorithms that dictate whether they can stay at a university. Since then, I’ve published a mix of science fiction and fantasy stories.

DD: What’s next for you?

SG: I co-founded and co-edit a science fiction and fantasy magazine, Small Wonders, that publishes very short stories and poetry. It gives me something to do when I’m not doing my day job, or Dragon Con, or writing. (I fail at having free time, if you can’t tell.)

DD: Thank you for your time.

SG: Thank you!

For more information about Stephen Granade and his work, visit his website, https://stephen.granades.com, or check out his social media: @granades.com on Bluesky, @sargent on X