Robert J. Sawyer

This is the ninth in a series of blog posts in which I'm going to discuss people and things that I think merit consideration for this year's Hugo and Aurora Awards; both sets of awards will be given at the Montreal Worldcon this year.

I've already mentioned that Neo-Opsis and On Spec deserve your consideration for the Aurora Award for Best Work in English (Other) this year. Here's another suggestion for that same category.

Back in 2005, there was a wonderful academic conference at Brock University entitled "The Uses of the Science Fiction Genre." I gave the keynote address.

Michael Berman, a philosophy professor at Brock, has collected papers inspired by that conference into a terrific book published in 2008: The Everyday Fantastic: Essays on Science Fiction and Human Being, from Cambridge Scholars Publishing. You can find out more about it here, and if you download this sample PDF, you can read the table of contents, Michael's introduction, and my essay.

From the publisher:

The Everyday Fantastic is an anthology born in love. The love is for science fiction, in all its myriad forms: novels, television, movies, music, art, etc. Many writers from a plurality of disciplines, professions and walks of life share this disposition. This attitude cuts across national boundaries and has even outlasted the vagaries of popular culture fads. This collection of essays draws upon these feelings in terms of the different ways science fiction is engaged in different disciplines, viewing the genre beyond mere entertainment.

The papers collected here engage the fundamental questions explored in science fiction. Many of the essays were originally presented at an interdisciplinary conference in October 2005 at Brock University, highlighted by Robert J. Sawyer’s engaging keynote address. Additional chapters were in part inspired by these presentations. These essays represent a wide array of voices from the humanities, social sciences and sciences, and address a comparable range of topics and the media that use the science fiction genre.

For the Aurora Award for Best Work in English (Other):