Robert J. Sawyer

Back home in Mississauga

After two months away, it's good to finally be back home in Mississauga. Carolyn and I had a great time in Saskatoon, and already miss our new friends from there. Being the first-ever writer-in-residence at the Canadian Light Source synchrotron was an amazing experience.

Labels: CLS

Come to Con-Version in Calgary!

Con-Version 25, this year's edition of Calgary's annual science-fiction and fantasy convention, is fast approaching. Dates are August 21-23. Here's the description of the con from the website:

For more information, see here.

Labels: cons

Saskatchewan Writers Guild interview

... conducted by current Aurora Award nominee Edward Willett just went online here. It's a good, meaty interview about my residency at the Canadian Light Source and my new novel Wake.

Labels: CLS, Interviews, Wake

Wake back on the Saskatoon bestsellers' list

This week's hardcover bestsellers' list for McNally Robinson in Saskatoon:

1. Outliers: The Story of Success
By Malcolm Gladwell

2. Master Your Metabolism
By Jillian Michaels

3. Twenties Girl
By Sophie Kinsella

4. Unmasked the Final Years of Michael Jackson
By Ian Halperin

5. Best Friends Forever
By Jennifer Weiner

6. The Devil's Punchbowl
By Greg Iles

7. Wake
By Robert J. Sawyer

8. The Big Thaw: Travels in the Melting North
By Ed Struzik

9. The Host
By Stephenie Meyer

10. Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Deception
By Eric Van Lustbader

W00t!

Labels: Bestsellers Lists, Wake

Toronto's Tomorrows

An exhibition at The Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation and Fantasy in Toronto:

Toronto's Tomorrows

Celebrate the history of our city's vibrant science fiction community!

The current exhibition in the display cases of the Merril collection features examples of science fiction, fantasy and horror set in Toronto.

It spotlights Judith Merril's influential role in science fiction locally and worldwide, and remembers World Science Fiction Conventions held in Toronto.

The Merril Collection's SF Writers in Residence, past and future are also profiled.

On display until August 15, 2009 in the lobby of the Merril Collection.

Note: The Merril Collection Writers in residence:

1987: Judith Merril
2003: Robert J. Sawyer
2009: Karl Schroeder

Hangin' with Arthur Slade

Click photo for larger version
Arthur Slade, who won the Governor General's Award for Dust, and Robert J. Sawyer hanging out at the 20th anniversary celebration for the Sage Hill Writing Experience in Lumsden, Saskatchewan, on Saturday, July 25, 2009. Art is currently teaching at Sage Hill, and the organizers are courting Rob to teach there in the future.

Labels: CLS

Final week in Saskatoon is packed

Yesterday, we went to Lumsden, Saskatchewan, for the 20th anniversary of the Sage Hill Writing Experience.

Today: a barbecue at the home of bookseller and writer Kent Pollard, followed by dinner with Carolyn's Saskatoon cousins.

Monday: my final weekly writing lecture for the Canadian Light Source staff, plus my final three one-hour one-on-one critiquing/mentoring appointments at the Light Source.

Tuesday: I'm on the noon Saskatoon CTV news program for an interview, then, at 7:30, it's the launch for Distant Early Warnings: Canada's Best Science Fiction at McNally Robinson

Thursday: I'm giving a talk to a fantasy writing workshop for 9-to-13-year olds.

Friday: the flight home.

We're in Toronto for all of four days, then it's off to Montreal for the World Science Fiction Convention (and I have other trips in August to Calgary, Regina, and Los Angeles). Whew!

Labels: CLS

The introduction to Distant Early Warnings: Canada's Best Science Fiction

Click picture for a larger version

(Table of Contents)

INTRODUCTION
Thirty years ago, in 1979, John Robert Colombo published a massive anthology called Other Canadas in which he culled the best of four centuries of Canadian fantastic literature. That book was a watershed: it established definitively that Canada did have a tradition of science fiction and fantasy writing.

Thirty years ago, I was nineteen; I wasn't part of that book. Except for Spider Robinson, none of the authors collected here were. Colombo planted a seed with Other Canadas; what you hold in your hands is — if I may be so bold — the cream of the crop that grew from that seed.

Recently, Jane Urquhart came under attack for The Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories, which she edited. To her critics, some omissions seemed glaring, some inclusions dubious. So, given that I've subtitled this anthology Canada's Best Science Fiction, let me define my terms and explain my selection criteria.

By "Canada's," I mean authors who live in this country. I'm frankly tired of hearing Canadians trumpet that actors Pamela Anderson, Jim Carrey, and William Shatner are Canadians. No doubt they legally are, but they don't live or work here. Likewise, I've left out authors who have decided to call somewhere else their home — my point being that there's no need to reach beyond our borders to fill a book such as this.

"Best" is, I grant you, a subjective judgment — but let me point out an objective fact: every author in this book has either won or been nominated for the Hugo Award (the top international prize for science-fiction writing); or won or been nominated for the Nebula Award (the "Academy Award" of the science fiction field, given by the inaccurately named Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, which has members in 23 countries, and has had a Canadian Region since 1993); or has won Canada's top SF book award, the Aurora.

(Specifically, Robinson, Sawyer, and Wilson have won the Hugo, and Forde, Gardner, Hopkinson, and Watts have been nominated for it; Robinson and Sawyer have won the Nebula, and Gardner and Hopkinson have been nominated for it; Czerneda, Hopkinson, Sawyer, Schroeder, and Wilson have won the best-novel Aurora, and Gardner, Robinson, and Watts have been nominated for it.)

By "science fiction," I mean the real thing: stories that reasonably extrapolate from known science; stories that might plausibly happen. Thirty years ago, when Colombo pulled together his anthology, he needed to combine SF with fantasy, horror, magic realism, and folk tales to make a book. Today, we can easily fill a book not just with real science fiction authored by Canadians, but with real science fiction by world-class writers who just happen to be Canadian.

In addition to the words in the subtitle, I decided to add one more criterion for inclusion in the present volume: Colombo had scoured 400 years of history for his selections; my goal is to demonstrate that there's a vigorous, active SF writing community in Canada right now. Every one of the stories in this book was first published in the 21st century. (This decision did have one sad effect: William Gibson, winner of the Hugo, the Nebula, and the Aurora Awards for best novel of the year, simply hasn't written any short fiction this millennium.)

There is, of course, a separate literary tradition of French Canadian science fiction. I commend to your attention particularly the work of Joël Champetier, Yves Meynard, Esther Rochon, Daniel Sernine, Jean-Louis Trudel, and Élisabeth Vonarburg. Indeed, this book's official launch will be in August 2009 at Anticipation, the World Science Fiction Convention, which this year is being held in Montreal, and is featuring programming in both French and English. Élisabeth Vonarburg is the Invitée d'honneur, Julie E. Czerneda is the toastmaster, and John Robert Colombo — at last getting his due — is keynote speaker (the first one ever at a Worldcon) for the convention's academic track.

Distant Early Warnings isn't dedicated to John Colombo because my wife Carolyn Clink and I dedicated our earlier anthology Tesseracts 6, part of the long-running series of Canadian science-fiction anthologies founded by the late, great Judith Merril, to him. But without John standing up and saying to the Canadian publishing world, and to Canada's academics, that there was such a thing as domestic Canadian SF, the field would not be nearly as rich and varied as it is today, and my hat is off to him.

This book isn't just intended for Canadian readers: after all, every single one of the authors included here has a significant international following (Paddy Forde is the one name that might not immediately ring a bell, since, to date, he has published only short fiction; however he has twice won the Analytical Laboratory Award from New York-based Analog, the world's top-selling English-language SF magazine, for best novella of the year).

And since we are also catering to readers outside Canada, and since I've gone on at length about the subtitle, let me say a word about the title. The Distant Early Warning Line — or DEW Line — was a string of radar stations in Canada's far north designed to detect incoming Soviet bombers during the Cold War. But the phrase also evocatively sums up what good science fiction does, providing us with advance reports of the wonders — and the dangers — that await us in all the myriad futures that might yet come to pass.

— Robert J. Sawyer
Mississauga, Ontario
April 2009

The book concludes with a section I've dubbed the "Lightning Round," introduced thus:

Distant Early Warnings: Canada's Best Science Fiction

Edited by Robert J. Sawyer

Stories by Julie E. Czerneda, Paddy Forde, James Alan Gardner, Nalo Hopkinson, Spider Robinson, Robert J. Sawyer, Karl Schroeder, Peter Watts, and Robert Charles Wilson

Poetry by David Livingstone Clink and Carolyn Clink

Cover by James Beveridge

Published by Robert J. Sawyer Books, August 2009, an imprint of Red Deer Press (a Fitzhenry & Whiteside company)

Labels: DEW

Dominic Monaghan joins FlashForward cast

Okay, admittedly it was the worst-kept secret in television (as David S. Goyer quipped today at San Diego Comic-Con), but it can now be officially announced that Dominic Monaghan, late (literally) of Lost, has joined the cast of FlashForward.

See here.

Labels: Flash Forward, Flashforward

DEW Launch and RJS Farewell at McNally Saskatoon on Tuesday

This Tuesday, July 28, at 7:30 p.m., there will be a launch for my new anthology Distant Early Warnings: Canada's Best Science Fiction at McNally Robinson in Saskatoon; this will also serve as the farewell event for my two months here in Saskatoon as writer-in-residence at the Canadian Light Source.

(Note: this event was orginally announced for this Saturday afternoon but has been changed to Tuesday evening so that I can attend the 20th anniversary event for the Sage Hill Writing Experience.)

I'll be reading from my Hugo Award-nominated short story "Shed Skin," which is included in the anthology.

Labels: CLS, DEW

My final week at the Canadian Light Source

I've been having a great time serving as writer-in-residence at the Canadian Light Source, Canada's national synchrotron research facility. My final week begins today.

Here's a sign that someone recently put up on my office door at the synchrotron:

And yesterday, I was helping archaeologist Elizabeth Robertson with an experiment down on one of the beam lines, and got to re-start the process after the 4:30 p.m. injection of fresh electrons into the storage ring (that's my personal dosimeter badge on my chest):

Labels: CLS

Updated keynote information

I've updated my page about my services as a keynote speaker; I give talks on all sorts of futurism topics. You can see the new page at:

FuturismKeynotes.com
A couple of upcoming Robert J. Sawyer keynotes:

Hansard Association of Canada
Regina, Saskatchewan
(on the floor of the Saskatchewan Legislature!)
Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Manitoba
Winnipeg, Manitoba

Labels: Keynotes

WatchMojo.com video interview with RJS

A nice three-minute video interview with Robert J. Sawyer conducted by Leila Lemghalef is online right here.

Labels: Interviews

Nice fan letter

Always nice to hear from a satisfied customer:

New Apes novels coming!

Rich Handley, who created the magnificent Timeline of the Planet of the Apes, is editing two new officially licensed Planet of the Apes novels -- w00t! Can't wait!

Labels: Planet of the Apes

Yann Martel: The Three Million Dollar Man

Yann Martel, the Mann Booker Prize-winning author of Life of Pi, and his wife Ali Kuipers very kindly had Carolyn and I over to dinner shortly after our arrival here in Saskatoon last month. The New York Times is reporting he just sold US rights to his next novel for US$3,000,000. Way to go, Yann!

Take that, you filthy Barast!

My friend Melody Friedenthal sent me a link to this story about new evidence that a Homo sapiens speared a Homo neanderthalensis.

In my novel Hominids and its sequels, I argue that our kind of humanity (referred to as Gliksins by the Neanderthals in those books) were responsible for the demise of the Neanderthals (which call themselves Barasts in my books).

Labels: Hominids, Neanderthal Parallax

Phyllis Gotlieb obituary in Globe and Mail

The obituary of Phyllis Gotlieb entitled "Canadian sci-fi novelist braved unknown in American market," by Anthony Furey, is here.

Photo: Phyllis Gotlieb and her husband Kelly Gotlieb.

Free story in honor of Apollo 11: "The Eagle Has Landed"

In honor of the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing, I'm uploading for free my short story "The Eagle Has Landed," first published in the 2005 DAW anthology I, Alien, edited by Mike Resnick and Martin H. Greenberg. You can read the full text for free right here.

"The Eagle Has Landed" by Robert J. Sawyer.

Labels: Short Fiction

Onward to Mars

My fellow Americans — and all other human beings on this version of Earth — it gives me great pleasure to address you this evening, my first major speech as your new president. I wish to talk about the future of our kind of hominid, of the species known as Homo sapiens: people of wisdom.

And, as you will see, it is only our future — the future of Homo sapiens — that I will be addressing tonight. And not just because I can only speak as the American president. No, there is more to it than that. For, in this matter, our future and that of the Neanderthals are not intertwined.

I said it during my campaign, and I say it again now: a president should be forward-thinking, looking not just to the next election but to decades and generations to come. It is with that longer view in mind that I speak to you tonight.

Let me begin by noting this isn't about us versus them. It isn't about who is better, Homo sapiens or Homo neanderthalensis. It isn't about who is brighter, Gliksin or Barast. Rather, it's about finding our own strengths and our own best natures, and doing those things of which we can be most proud.

Four decades ago, my predecessor in the Oval Office, John F. Kennedy, said, `Now is the time to take longer strides — time for a great new American enterprise.' I was just a kid in a Montgomery ghetto then, but I remember vividly how those words made my spine tingle.

Jack Kennedy was right: it was time then for us to take longer strides. And it's that time again. For the greatest strength we Homo sapiens have always had, since the dawn of our consciousness 40,000 years ago, is our desire to go places, to make journeys, to see what's beyond the next hill, to expand our territories, and — if I may borrow a phrase coined just four years after JFK's speech — to boldly go where no man has gone before.

Our strength is our wanderlust; our curiosity; our exploring, searching, soaring spirit.

It was that questing spirit that led our ancient ancestors to spread throughout the Old World.

It was that questing spirit that moved some of us to march thousands of miles across the Bering Land Bridge, which linked Siberia and Alaska during the Ice Age.

It was that questing spirit that caused others to bravely sail boats over the horizon, finding new lands in Australia and Polynesia.

It was that questing spirit that led Vikings to come to North America a thousand years ago, that drove the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria to cross the Atlantic five hundred years ago.

It was that questing spirit that lifted the wings of Orville and Wilbur Wright, of Amelia Earhart, of Chuck Yeager.

It was that questing spirit that made brave men and women like Yuri Gagarin and Valentina Tereshkova and John Glenn ride on pillars of flame into Earth orbit.

And it was that questing spirit that let Columbia and Eagle, Yankee Clipper and Intrepid, Odyssey and Aquarius, Kitty Hawk and Antares, Endeavour and Falcon, Casper and Orion, and America and Challenger fly to the moon.

There are human footprints preserved in volcanic ash at Laetoli, made by a male and a female australopithecine, the ancestors to both Gliksins and Barasts, just wandering, walking slowly, side by side, exploring: the original small hominids steps. And there are human footprints at Tranquility Base and the Ocean of Storms and Fra Mauro and Hadley Rille and Descartes and Taurus-Littrow on the moon — truly giant leaps.

But it has been more than three decades since Eugene Cernan became the last person to walk on the moon. The last person! Who would have thought that whole generations would be born after 1972 for whom the notion of humans on other worlds would be nothing but a lesson in history class?

How could that have possibly happened? How could we have given up that most noble of drives that had taken us from Olduvai Gorge to the lunar craters? The answer, of course, is that we'd grown content. The century we recently left saw greater advances in human wealth and prosperity, in human health and longevity, in human technology and material comfort, than all of the forty millennia that preceded it.

Here in North America, and in India and Japan and Europe and Russia and all across this whole wide wonderful world of ours, things are mostly better than they have ever been — and they're getting even better all the time.

So: it's perfectly reasonable that we took a hiatus, that we enjoyed the first few decades of post-Cold War prosperity, that we indulged in one of the other things that makes our kind of humanity great: we stopped and smelled the roses.

But now it's time to resume our journey, for it is our love of the journey that makes us great.

Scientists tell us that our kind of humans moved up to the northern tip of Africa, looked north across the Strait of Gibraltar, and saw new land there — and, of course, as seems natural to us, we risked crossing that treacherous channel, moving into Europe.

Likewise, some of our Barast cousins, natives of Europe, came south to Gibraltar, with its famous rock, that wonderful symbol of permanence and stability. And from their vantage point, the Neanderthals could see south to the unknown lands of Africa.

But the Neanderthals didn't cross the Strait of Gibraltar. There, at Gibraltar, we saw the difference between us and them. For, when we saw a new world, just a short distance away, we took it.

If the dangers posed by the collapsing of this Earth's magnetic field teaches us anything, it is that humanity is too precious to have but a single home — that keeping all our eggs in one basket is folly.

So, yes, indeed, now is the time to take longer strides. But it's not just time for a great new American enterprise. Rather, it's time, if I may echo another speech, for black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics — and Hindus and Muslims and Buddhists, and men and women of all faiths, and men and women of none — for individuals from every one of our 191 united nations, for members of every race and religion that make up our unique, varied brand of humanity — to go forward together, in peace and harmony, with mutual respect and friendship, continuing the journey we Homo sapiens had briefly interrupted.

And so I stand here today to usher in the next phase. It is time, my friends, for at least some of us to move on, to leave our version of Earth and take the next giant leap.

It is time, my fellow Homo sapiens, that we go to Mars.

I believe we, the humans of this Earth, should commit ourselves, before another decade has gone by, to launching an international team of women and men to the red planet.

And although our Neanderthal cousins will be welcome to join us in this grand Mars adventure, should they so choose, it is something it seems few of them will desire.

But whether the Neanderthals come with us or not to the red planet, we should adopt their view of that world's color. Mars is not a symbol of war; it is the color of health, of life — and if it is, perhaps, barren of life now, we should not let it remain so any longer.

Of course, once we're there, once we have planted flowers in the rusty sand of the fourth planet from our sun, once we've nurtured them with water taken from Mars' polar caps, we Homo sapiens might again briefly pause to smell those roses.

But smelling Martian roses will be only a pause, only a brief catching of breath, a moment of reflection, before we will again take up the journey, driving ever outward, farther and farther, learning, discovering, growing, expanding not only our borders but our minds.

We — the kind of humanity called Homo sapiens, the kind our Neanderthal cousins call Gliksins — have a drive unique among all primates, a drive singular in the realm of conscious beings. And that drive will compel us onward and outward.

And yet, some of us will stay permanently on Mars. Now, in the pages of science and science fiction there have long been notions of terraforming Mars — making it more Earth-like, by enhancing its atmosphere and liberating its frozen water, thus creating a world better suited for human habitation.

But there have been objections to terraforming Mars from those who feel that, even if it has no indigenous life, we should leave its stark natural beauty pristine and unspoiled — that if we visit it, we should treat it as we do our Earthly parks, taking nothing but memories and leaving behind nothing but footprints.

Who would have thought that both destinies for Mars could be fulfilled? But, of course, now they can. We will travel to the Mars of this universe, the one that graces the night skies of the Americas, Africa, Europe, Asia, and Oceania, and, as has ever been our way, we will conquer this new frontier, making an additional home for Homo sapiens there.

And although someday we may also travel to Dargal — for that is what the Neanderthals named the red planet of their universe, the crimson beacon that beams down upon the continents of Durkanu, Podlar, Ranilass, Evsoy, Galasoy, and Nalkanu — we will leave that version of Mars as we find it. Truly, like so much in this new era we are now entering, we will have our cake and eat it, too.

And it is a new era we are entering. The Cenozoic — the era of recent life — is indeed all but over. The Novozoic — the era of new life — is about to begin.

The dawn of the Cenozoic, the famed Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary when the dinosaurs died out, was marked by a layer of clay, found on both versions of Earth. The beginning of the Novozoic in this universe, our universe, the universe of Homo sapiens, will be marked by the footsteps of the first colonist on Mars, the first member of our species to leave the cradle that is this Earth, never to return.

It has been suggested by some scientists that since there was, apparently, only one universe until 40,000 years ago when consciousness arose on Earth, then there is no other consciousness anywhere in this vast universe of ours — or, at least, none older than our own. If that is true, then exploring the rest of space isn't just our destiny, it is our obligation, for there is no one but we Homo sapiens with the desire and means to do it.

And if that notion isn't correct — if this and other universes are, as some scientists and philosophers believe, teeming with intelligent life — then we have another duty when we take our next small steps, and that is to put our best foot forward: to show all the other forms of life the greatness that is Homo sapiens, in all our wonderful and myriad diversity.

And we are just that: a great and wonderful people. Yes, we have made missteps — but we made them because we are always walking forward, always marching toward our destiny.

My fellow human beings, my fellow Homo sapiens, we will continue our great journey, continue our wondrous quest, continue ever outward. That is our history, and it is our future. And we will not stop, not falter, not give up until we have reached the farthest stars.

Labels: Hybrids

Forty years after that one small step

My reminiscences of July 20, 1969, are on Tor.com. Check it out!

Labels: Milestones

Entertainment Weekly on FlashForward

The July 24, 2009, edition of Entertainment Weekly devotes half a page to the FlashForward TV series. The article, entitled simply "FLASHFORWARD", begins:

The article includes the picture below of series stars John Cho and Joseph Fiennes.

FlashForward was previously featured in the February 20, 2009, issue of Entertainment Weekly.

More about the FlashForward novel by Robert J. Sawyer

Labels: Flash Forward, Flashforward

That crazy Amazon.com notice about FlashForward

I can't be the only one who received this from Amazon.com this morning:

Who in the what now? Almost sixty bucks for FlashForward?

Although it doesn't say it anywhere in the Amazon.com email, the link above is for an unabridged audio version of FlashForward. The paperback is still US$7.99, folks!

Alessandro Juliani narrates Rollback for CBC

Montreal-born actor Alessandro Juliani, who played Mr. Gaeta on the new Battlestar Galactica, will be narrating CBC Radio One's twenty-five part serialization of my Hugo Award-nominated novel Rollback.

The serialization will air in fifteen-minute installments weekdays at 1:30 p.m. Eastern time (10:30 a.m. Pacific Time) on CBC Radio One (and Sirius Satellite Radio channel 137) from Monday, September 7, to Friday, October 9, 2009, as part of CBC's Between the Covers series.

Using Alessandro Juliani was one of my suggestions; I'm delighted CBC agreed!

Labels: CBC, Rollback

Launch Pad coverage in Mike Brotherton's blog

Mike Brotherton is the leader of the Launch Pad astronomy workshop in Laramie, Wyoming; Carolyn and I are attending this year, and Mike has links to more videos from the conference in his blog.

Labels: Launch Pad

Phyllis Gotlieb and Kelly Gotlieb

Phyllis Gotlieb, the mother of Canadian science fiction, as I remember her, with her husband C.C. "Kelly" Gotlieb, the great Canadian computer scientist, at my home on December 18, 2006. Photo by Carolyn Clink.

Phyllis passed away on Tuesday, July 14, 2009, at the age of 83.

Wake #2 Locus Bestseller

W00t! My novel Wake is #2 on the Locus Hardcover Bestsellers' List. And #1 is a fantasy novel, which makes mine the top-selling SF novel in the stores Locus surveys.

Locus is the trade journal of the science-fiction field. Here's the list, published in the July 2009 issue (for the data period April 2009); the numbers at the end of each line are "months on list" and "position last month."

1) Turn Coat, Jim Butcher (Roc) [1,-]
2) WWW: Wake, Robert J. Sawyer (Ace) [1,-]
3) Rides a Dread Legion, Raymond E. Feist (Eos) [1,-]
4) The Host, Stephenie Meyer (Little, Brown) [12,3]
5) The Mystery of Grace, Charles de Lint (Tor) [2,7]
*) The Revolution Business, Charles Stross (Tor) [1,-]
7) The Temporal Void, Peter F. Hamilton (Ballantine Del Rey) [1,-]
8) Bone Crossed, Patricia Briggs (Ace) [3,5]
9) Imager, L.E. Modesitt, Jr. (Tor) [2,8]
*) Storm from the Shadows, David Weber (Baen) [2,1]

The full list is at Locus Online.

Wake hit #1 on the Amazon.com Technothrillers Bestsellers List, #1 on the Winnipeg Free Press Bestsellers List, #2 on the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix Bestsellers List, and now #2 on the Locus Bestsellers List. Not too shabby!

Labels: Bestsellers Lists, Wake

Wake press release

Here's a press release I wrote for my new novel Wake; this press release was aimed mostly at techie publications.

Labels: Wake

Launch Pad workshop on YouTube

Up on YouTube: video of the Wednesday, July 15, 2009, session of the Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop at the University of Wyoming in Laramie. Carolyn and I are having a blast here. Check it out!

Labels: Launch Pad

Jawing with Jawbone.tv

The fine folks at Jawbone.tv phoned me a while ago, and we did a long, discursive telephone interview -- and they've very kindly transcribed it and put it online. You can read the whole thing here. The interviewer was Todd Denis.

Labels: Interviews

Phyllis Gotlieb, R.I.P.

My friend and inspiration Phyllis Gotlieb, the only Canadian to be in SFWA at its founding, the mother of Canadian science fiction, passed away yesterday at the age of 83 from complications related to a ruptured appendix.

Phyllis was proof of concept that you could live in Toronto and still be a science-fiction writer for major American publishing houses; if I hadn't had her as a role model, I'm not sure I ever would have embarked on the career path I took.

We'd been friends for 30 years -- I met her in 1979 when my high-school science-fiction club had her as guest of honour at a little convention we put on at Northview Heights Secondary School. She was feisty and opinionated and passionate then, and she was still all those things the last time I saw her, not that long ago. One of my greatest professional thrills was getting to publish her final novel, Birthstones, in 2007, under my Robert J. Sawyer Books imprint for Markham's Fitzhenry & Whiteside.

From a profile of Phyllis by Brian Bethune in Maclean's in 2002:

The Adolescence of P-1

In the summer of 1980, Carolyn and I moved to Waterloo, Ontario, for four months, to share an apartment with our great friends Lynn Conway and Fraser Gunn. (Their previous roommates, students at the University of Waterloo, had moved out at the end of the academic year.)

That summer, I did a few things that had a profound impact on my career.

First, I outlined my very first novel, End of an Era.

Second, because he was to be Guest of Honour that summer at the very first Ad Astra -- Toronto's now-venerable science-fiction convention -- I read James P. Hogan's Inherit the Stars, which, to this day, is still one of my favourite science-fiction novels (and doubtless an influence on the watch-the-science-puzzles-go-snick-snick-snick aspects of End of an Era).

And third, at Fraser's suggestion, I read The Adolescence of P-1, by Thomas J. Ryan -- because it was a science-fiction novel set in part in Waterloo.

Flashforward (heh heh) 29 years, and I find myself in Boston at Readercon 20, and my friend Judith Klein-Dial has a mass-market paperback of The Adolescence of P-1 for sale for a buck at her table. I own a hardcover of P-1, but it's up in Toronto, and I need something to read on the flight home, so I make peace with my usual compunctions about buying used books, purchase the copy, and start reading it.

Like my current novel WWW: Wake, Ryan's The Adolescence of P-1 could easily pass for mainstream: it's set in the then-present of 1977 (the book was first published that year).

And, like my Wake, it was published (in mass-market at least) by Ace (the hardcover had been from Macmillan, and the most-recent reprint is from Baen).

And, like my Wake, as I said, it's set in part in Waterloo, Ontario.

And, most of all, like my Wake, it deals with the emergence of consciousness in networked computers (in P-1, networked by phone lines; in Wake, of course, via the Internet and the supervening World Wide Web).

Now, let me say this: I loved The Adolescence of P-1 as a 20-year-old, and I still find a lot to like about it as a 49-year-old. But it is a classic example of what actually compelled me to write Wake in the first place. As I've said in interviews about my book, previous SF treatments of the ramping up of intelligence by computers either have the big event happening off stage (as in Neuromancer) or simply skip over the hard bits, as in, well, The Adolescence of P-1:

Hello? How does this AI read anything? How does it comprehend even a single word of English?

As SF Site observed in its very kind review of Wake:

So, as my character of Caitlin would say, "Go me!" :)

Or, if I may be so bold, as Stanley Schmidt, the editor of Analog Science Fiction and Fact (where Wake first appeared as a four-part serial), observed:

It's often said that science fiction is a literature in dialogue with itself (the classic example is Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers as opening remark and Joe Haldeman's The Forever War as response).

A number of reviewers have mentioned that Wake is clearly in dialogue with William Gibson's Neuromancer ("If books were movies, I'd suggest this [Wake] on a double bill with Neuromancer" -- SFRevu), but it should be noted that it's also a response to Arthur C. Clarke's "Dial F for Frankenstein", D.F. Jones's Colossus (filmed as The Forbin Project), David Gerrold's When HARLIE was One, and, most certainly, to Thomas J. Ryan's seminal The Adolescence of P-1.

And if I have, in any way, seen a little further than those who went before me, it is, as always, because I stand on the shoulders of giants.

Labels: Wake

Taking off for Launch Pad

Carolyn and I are leaving Saskatoon today for a week (then return to finish off my residency at the Canadian Light Source synchrotron).

We're both attending the NASA-sponsored Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop for Writers in Laramie, Wyoming, 14-21 July 2009.

I was given early acceptance to the workshop (along with my friend Andy Duncan, a World Fantasy Award winner), but I'm very proud of Carolyn, who applied on her own, and was accepted on her own merits, based on her poetry in such places as Analog.

The particpants this year are:

Pat Cadigan
Carolyn Clink
Andy Duncan
Tara Fredette
Owl Goingback
N.K. Jemisin
Julie V. Jones
Marc Laidlaw
Ed Lerner
Brian Malow
Robert J. Sawyer
Gord Sellar
Scott Sigler

Workshop leader: Mike Brotherton

Guest instructors: Joe Haldeman and Phil Plait (of Bad Astronomy fame).

And, why, yes, thank you, I do have the coolest job in the universe. :)

Labels: Launch Pad

Charles N. Brown, R.I.P.

I've been subscribing to Locus, the trade journal of the science-fiction field, since 1982. Its editor in chief, Charles N. Brown, passed away yesterday, on his way home from Readercon 20. He was 72. We ran into each other for the final time on Saturday afternoon, I think, in the Green Room.

He was on his scooter, and called out, "Hi, Rob." I replied, "Hi, Charles," then added, "You look well." He replied with a cheery, "As well as can be expected," or words to that effect, and was off.

I'm sorry to see him go.

Labels: Milestones

FlashForward and Kant's Third Conundrum

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant claimed that the three fundamental problems of metaphysics are "Is there life after death?," "Does God exist?," and "Do we have free will?"

Without it really being a conscious plan, I've ended up writing novels on each of those themes. My 1995 book The Terminal Experiment (for which I was fortunate enough to win the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America's Nebula Award) dealt with a biomedical engineer who discovered scientific proof for the existence of the human soul. And my 2000 novel Calculating God attempts to use science to answer the question of whether or not God exists.

As for Kant's third conundrum, that's the province of FlashForward. There's no doubt that here in the western world most people do believe they have free will ... and yet many of us, myself included, are familiar with the experience of making a commitment, for example, to lose weight, only to find ourselves falling off our diets a few days or weeks later. Despite our best conscious intentions, our fate turns out differently than we intended, almost as if we really didn't have free will after all.

I've long been interested in classical Greek drama; Sophocles's Oedipus Rex is one of my favorite plays, and I had the privilege in 1977 of standing on the stage at Epidaurus and shouting Agamemnon's name toward the heavens. But Greek tragedy takes exactly the opposite underlying assumption: it believes that our futures are foreordained, that our destiny is unavoidable. My experience with dieting seems, on a smaller scale, like Oedipus's utter failure, despite his devout wish, to avoid fulfilling the prophecy that he would murder his father and marry his mother: regardless of either his or my best intentions, we ended up doing exactly what we'd vowed not to do.

Which worldview is correct? That of the Greeks, who believed our destinies were inescapable, or that of people today who insist that we are the masters of our own futures? I certainly find the modern idea more appealing, but mere appeal is hardly sufficient enough reason for a rational person to believe it to be true. Is there really any valid reason to accept our belief in free will as more valid than the Greek belief in predetermination?

As a science-fiction writer, I began to wonder what physics and quantum mechanics had to tell us about this age-old question. And, to my surprise, the answer is a great deal, and most of it, building on the work of Hermann Minkowski, points to the unsettling notion that the future is just as fixed as the past.

You're about to begin reading my novel ... but the ending of that novel is already fixed, typeset immutably on the last page of this book. You don't yet know how it's going to end, and, hopefully, the journey will surprise you along the way, but the conclusion is inevitable. Are our lives like that — a book that's already been written, with a happy or tragic ending already set in stone? Is "now" simply the page all of our minds happen to be contemplating? If so, what would happen if suddenly our minds jumped ahead a hundred pages or so, looking at a scene out of sequence, a chapter yet to come?

That's the premise of FlashForward — and I hope you enjoy reading it. Just do me a favor and don't peek ahead at the ending . . .

Labels: Flash Forward, Flashforward

Thirteen hours, forty-five minutes

Door-to-door from Readercon in Boston to the house I'm renting in Saskatoon.

Ugh.

Labels: cons, Conventions

Oh, joy

Flaps failed on my plane from Toronto to Saskatoon; had to return to Pearson, and will board a new aircraft shortly.

Frustrating: I'll have spent a total five hours here at Pearson, 15 minutes from the home I haven't been to since June 1st. Sigh.

Readercon reflections

Random thoughts on Readercon 20:

I'm at Pearson -- Toronto's airport -- changing planes on my way back to Saskatoon from Readercon 20 in Boston.

It was a great, great convention -- and I made a point of telling both Eric Van (this year's programming chair) and Bob Colby (who founded Readercon 20 years ago) that.

It was startling to see myself referred to as a "Readercon stalwart" in the program book -- but, according to the chart in the book, I'd been to 10 of the 20 Readercons, and most of them in the past decade, so I guess I am.

I seemed to be the only person from Toronto present; highly unusual for Readercon.

Great catching up with old friends Michael and Nomi Burstein, Ian Randal Strock, Warren Lapine, Nick DiChario, Rick Wilber, Paolo Bacigalupi, Jacob Weisman, and Bernie Goodman.

The Senior Editor of the journal Neuron came to my kaffeeklatsch -- how cool is that?

Catherine Asaro is looking amazingly hot. Just sayin'.

At the request of Cary Meriwether, who came all the way to Boston from San Diego, I read from Watch, the second WWW book, instead of Wake, the first one; it went over well.

Fitzhenry & Whiteside shipped down 10 copies of Distant Early Warnings: Canada's Best Science Fiction, edited by me; it was the first I'd seen of the book. I gave a copy to Tor editor David G. Hartwell and to Pulitzer-Prize winning critic Michael Dirda, and sold the rest like that -- boom! The book looks fabulous.

Also sold out our stock of The Savage Humanists, despite the absence of editor Fiona Kelleghan, and of our two Nick DiChario titles (thanks, I'm sure, to Nick's smiling presence).

Bernie Goodman and Jacob Weisman from Tachyon Books made the con for me: I had more than half my meals with them. Despite them being much more experienced small-press publishers than I am, they treat me like a colleague, and we had a blast.

Friday's dinner party included Nick DiChario, Allen Steele, and Rick Wilber -- what a great time! We went, at Rick's suggestion, to the Capital Grill (and a Nick's suggestion, we walked there).

Saturday's dinner party included Michael Bishop and Geri Bishop (two of the nicest people in the world) and SFScope editor Ian Randall Strock.

Tor editor Stacy Hague-Hill -- who has been working very hard on my behalf at Tor -- and her husband took my out for lunch on Saturday -- w00t! Her husband is South African, and so I talked with him a bit about my work on Charlie Jade, a Canada-South Africa co-produced TV series.

I'm one of four judges for the Cordwainer Smith Rediscover Award, which is presented at Readercon. I introduced fellow judge Barry Malzberg to the crowd on Friday night, and he gave the award to A. Merritt (1884-1943). The other judges are Mike Resnick and Martin H. Greenberg.

I bought a paperback copy of Thomas J. Ryan's The Adolescence of P-1 from Judith Klein-Dial in the dealers' room, one of the seminal novels about computers gaining intelligence, and certainly an influence on me and my Wake. I own it in hardcover, and had read it back in the summer of 1980, but re-read a bunch of it on the long trip back to Saskatoon. Fun.

Labels: cons, Conventions

Come to my Readercon Kaffeeklatsch

Tomorrow (Friday, July 10, 2009), at 5:00 p.m. in Room 458 (but you have to sign up in advance at the con, and space is quite limited): an opportunity to spend an intimate hour over coffee (or whatever) with me. Always one of my favourite parts of any convention that has them.

Labels: cons, Conventions

Star Trek Viewmaster

Click picture for larger version
Over at TrekMovie.com, someone asked, about the Star Trek Viewmaster reels from the 1960s: "Always wondered why there was not a real shot of the Enterprise and the Exeter in the set ... instead of a shot of two of the model kits in space. Anyone know?"

Yes, indeed. I do. :)

Only the Exeter in the background was the AMT model kit; the Enterprise in the foreground was the 33" ("the three-footer") model of the ship created for the TV series; the Viewmaster shot of it (above) is gorgeous.

And the reason it was done that way is simple: to get the Viewmaster 3D effect, they had to shoot with special stereo cameras. That was back when Sawyers (no relation) or GAF actually sent their own camerapeople onto the sets of TV shows they were making Viewmaster reels for (which is why it was "The Omega Glory" -- not because it was the best episode, but because it was the one that happened to be filming the week the Viewmaster cameraman was in the studio).

The shots of the Enterprise and Exeter used in the actual episode weren't new miniature footage, but rather recombinations of existing footage, and so there was no way to get the 3D effect from the existing opticals; Viewmaster redid the shot from scratch, and it actually is quite gorgeous. Think of it as the very first example of Star Trek Remastered. ;)

Later, Viewmaster reels were done on the cheap; the Star Trek: The Motion Picture set is an example. They'd use stills from the movie -- two or three split-screened, so that the stills were at different focal depths, but weren't themselves three-dimensional.

Googling around, I find that the blog My Star Trek Scrapbook has a great page devoted to the Classic Trek Viewmaster set.

Labels: Star Trek

Aurora Voting deadline crunch

If you're voting by mail, tomorrow -- Wednesday, July 8, 2009 -- is the postmarked-by deadline.

If you're voting online, you have until Wednesday, July 15.

If you're a member of this year's Worldcon in Montreal (and a Canadian) you can vote for free; otherwise, there's a $5 charge to help defray the cost of manufacturing trophies.

The online and paper ballots are here.

Many fine nominees this year, including -- cough, cough -- my own Identity Theft and Other Stories.

Labels: Awards 2009

Hangin' with Saskatoon writers

Last night, Carolyn and I had dinner with some of the great writers here in Saskatoon.

Back row: Saskatchewan Book Award winner Brenda Barker, Governor-General's Award winner Arthur Slade.

Front row: Books in Canada First Novel Award winner Geoffrey Ursell, Hugo Award winner Robert J. Sawyer, John W. Campbell Memorial Award finalist Barbara Sapergia.

Dean Wesley Smith on "Life After Copyright"

Well said, and well worth reading. "Life After Copyright" by Dean Wesley Smith.

Another thread at the Borders Science Fiction blog

I'm the guest blogger at Borders.com's science-fiction blog Babel Clash right now. Here's my latest post -- but, as before, I've turned off comments here; come join the fun at Babel Clash, and share your views:

Join the conversation at Babel Clash.

It's a different world

From TCON-News, the email newsletter of Toronto's Polaris, a science-fiction media convention coming up this weekend (I won't be there this year, but it is a very good convention):

Authors, of course, sign books (or anything else) for free; it's just part of what we do. We even sign used copies (for which we received no royalty from the bearer) for free. An author gets around $2.50 in royalties for a new hardcover and maybe 60 cents for a paperback, so a typical actor's signature (which -- ahem, is paid for in cash: wonder how many of these transactions are reported to the IRS?) is worth what an author earns for ten hardcovers or 40 paperbacks.

Above: the one and only autograph I ever bought -- US$20 in 2007, including the photo -- from Bob May, the man who was inside the Robot suit on Lost in Space.

Penguin Canada appoints new genre-fiction editor

My new editor at Penguin Canada is Adrienne Kerr. Formerly a Penguin Canada sales representative for Southwestern Ontario, Adrienne won this year's Libris Award from the Canadian Booksellers Association as Sales Rep of the Year.

Prior to joining Penguin in May 2006, she was a book buyer with HDS Retail (which operates airport bookstores in Canada). Before that, she was assistant manager at Nicholas Hoare Books in Toronto and marketing assistant with Groundwood Books.

Adrienne assumes her new editorial duties starting a week today, on Monday, July 13, 2009. Besides me, she will be the Canadian editor for such writers as John le Carré, Ariana Franklin, Pauline Gedge, and Rennie Airth.

Quill & Quire has a nice photo of Executive Editor Nicole Winstanley and Adrienne Kerr from 2007 here (3rd photo down).

Welcome aboard, Adrienne!

RJS guest blogs in Boders SF blog

I'm the guest blogger for July 2009 in Borders Books's science-fiction blog "Babel Clash," co-sponsored by i09. My first post -- my opening salvo, if you will -- is over there, and also posted below, but I'm turning off comments on this topic here; come on over to Borders.com and chime in there!

Join the conversation at Borders.com!

CompuServe Classic: R.I.P.

I joined CompuServe sometime in 1987.

I used to be a sysop (system operator) of the WordStar Forum there, and I hung out a lot in the Science Fiction and Fantasy Forum (so much so that the command GO SAWYER at the CompuServe prompt would take people there).

On October 10, 1989 -- almost 20 years ago -- I was given a "sponsored account," meaning I didn't have to pay for my connect time (I remember one year prior to that my bill for CompuServe connect time was $700). It was a joy to be able to go anywhere and do anything on that service without getting charged -- such was the online world back in the day.

I made my first online friends on CompuServe -- including SF writers John E. Stith, Mike Resnick, Barbara Delaplace, and Roger MacBride Allen, and all sorts of WordStar users; many of them are still good friends to this day.

And now, it's over: AOL, which acquired CompuServe some years ago, has finally shut down CompuServe Classic.

CompuServe was a very important part of my life from 1988 until the early 2000s. I made friends there, I learned things there, I did tons of online research there (using a service called Magazine Database Plus), I won awards there (the CompuServer Science Fiction and Fantasy Forum's HOMer Award), I sold the one and only bit of shareware I ever wrote there (MICKEE: The Mouse Interface for the Control-Key Editing Environment, which gave mouse support to WordStar), I got my email there, I even hosted my webpage there for a while (with the ungainly address of ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/sawyer, and (long before anyone had heard of blogging) I began this online journal there (with entries starting back in 1999 salvaged here).

R.I.P., CompuServe. You were good to me, and you mattered, and I will always remember you.

Labels: Milestones

My Readercon programming

I'll be attending Readercon 20, July 9-12, 2009, near Boston. Here's the programming I'll be on:

Friday 11:00 AM, Vineyard: Reading (60 min.) from his recently published novel WWW: Wake.

Friday 5:00 PM, Room 458: Kaffeeklatsch.

Saturday 10:00 AM, Salon F: Autographing.

Saturday 12:00 Noon, VT: Federations Group Reading (60 min.) John Joseph Adams (host) with K. Tempest Bradford, Robert J. Sawyer, Allen Steele, Catherynne M. Valente, Genevieve Valentine: Readings from the original and reprint anthology (cover blurb: "Vast. Epic. Interstellar.") edited by Adams and published by Prime Books in January.

Saturday 1:00 PM, Salon E: Panel: Novels of Advocacy vs. Novels of Recognition. Paolo Bacigalupi, John Clute, Ken Houghton, Barry N. Malzberg, Robert J. Sawyer (Leader), Graham Sleight: At the keynote Thursday night panel at Readercon 18, our panelists stumbled upon a useful taxonomic distinction: novels that advocate for a particular future (a la Heinlein) versus novels that merely attempt to recognize and describe a possible one (a la Gibson). There was some debate as to just how strongly the field was moving from the former to the latter, and if there was such a trend, its relationship to others (optimism vs. pessimism, far futures vs. near futures, etc.) One of the panelists, Graham Sleight, has recently renewed the discussion online. We'll explore the numerous possible directions raised by Sleight and others.

Saturday 3:00 PM, Salon E: Panel: Is Darwinism Too Good For SF? Jeff Hecht (Leader), Caitlin R. Kiernan, Anil Menon, James Morrow, Steven Popkes, Robert J. Sawyer: This year marks the sesquicentennial of the publication of The Origin of Species and the bicentennial of Charles Darwin's birth. Considering the importance of the scientific idea, there has been surprisingly little great sf inspired by it. We wonder whether, in fact, if the theory has been too good, too unassailable and too full of explanatory power, to leave the wiggle room where speculative minds can play in. After all, physics not only has FTL and time travel, but mechanisms like wormholes that might conceivably make them possible. What are their equivalents in evolutionary theory, if any?

Labels: cons, Conventions

Aurora Award banquet tickets can now be purchased online

... using PayPal. See here. Carolyn and I just bought ours.

Labels: Awards 2009

Cool YouTube promo for Calgary's Con-Version

Con-Version is Calgary's annual SF&F convention. Author Guests of Honour this year are Terry Brooks, Tanya Huff, and Robert J. Sawyer -- and now there's a nifty promo for the con on YouTube. Check it out.

See you in August!

Labels: cons, Conventions

Book Banter podcasts Rob

Book Banter, a podcast produced by Alex C. Telander of Sacramento, interviews Robert J. Sawyer, talking about his novel Wake.

Labels: Interviews, Podcasts

Bringing some sense to ebook pricing

My favorite ebook format is eReader (now ultimately owned by Barnes & Noble), and they've announced some nice pricing initiatives over at eReader.com, which should help to bring some sanity to ebook pricing:

And, yup, my Wake, which is a $25 hardcover, is just $12.95 there, and my Hugo Award-winning Hominids is just $5.99.

Labels: ebooks

It's official: you're in the right place!

Yep, according to Speculative Fiction Examiner, this here blog is one of "10 author blogs to follow."

If that ain't cool enough, SciFi Wire just included my Twitter feed on its list of "40 more sci-fi Twitter feeds you should be following" -- one of only two author feeds to make the list (the other is William Gibson's).

Like MasterCard, I'm everywhere you want to be -- including Facebook (where I'm RobertJSawyer). :)

As Kor once said, "Pity. It would have been glorious."

From Ansible 264, a news note from Farah Mendlesohn:

Well, I know who the unamed appointee was, but I'm not saying -- except to say it wasn't me.

I was, however, solicited to apply by UC Riverside back in October, 2008. This is the solicitation; it would have been an amazing job:

It would have been a great job, and, as many commentators had said, a great signal to the world of science fiction's respectability and stature. Too bad it isn't going to happen.

Edward Willett on the science of Wake

You gotta love Edward Willett. Here it is, in the thick of Aurora Award voting, where his absolutely first-rate Marseguro is competing against Hayden Trenholm's wonderful Defining Diana and my own Identity Theft and Other Stories, and what does Ed do? Why, he writes a glowing review of Hayden's book, and then follows that up by devoting his latest science column to issues in my new novel Wake.

Ed's column ("Willett's World of Science") is available both as text and with Ed himself reading it aloud (and Ed has an amazing voice). Check it out! And -- thanks, Ed!

Labels: Wake, Willett

Robert J. Sawyer

Friday, July 31, 2009

Back home in Mississauga

Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Come to Con-Version in Calgary!

Saskatchewan Writers Guild interview

Wake back on the Saskatoon bestsellers' list

Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Toronto's Tomorrows

Monday, July 27, 2009

Hangin' with Arthur Slade

Sunday, July 26, 2009

Final week in Saskatoon is packed

The introduction to Distant Early Warnings: Canada's Best Science Fiction

Friday, July 24, 2009

Dominic Monaghan joins FlashForward cast

DEW Launch and RJS Farewell at McNally Saskatoon on Tuesday

My final week at the Canadian Light Source

Updated keynote information

WatchMojo.com video interview with RJS

Nice fan letter

Wednesday, July 22, 2009

New Apes novels coming!

Yann Martel: The Three Million Dollar Man

Take that, you filthy Barast!

Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Phyllis Gotlieb obituary in Globe and Mail

Monday, July 20, 2009

Free story in honor of Apollo 11: "The Eagle Has Landed"

Onward to Mars

Forty years after that one small step

Sunday, July 19, 2009

Entertainment Weekly on FlashForward

Saturday, July 18, 2009

That crazy Amazon.com notice about FlashForward

Friday, July 17, 2009

Alessandro Juliani narrates Rollback for CBC

Launch Pad coverage in Mike Brotherton's blog

Phyllis Gotlieb and Kelly Gotlieb

Wake #2 Locus Bestseller

Thursday, July 16, 2009

Wake press release

Launch Pad workshop on YouTube

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Jawing with Jawbone.tv

Phyllis Gotlieb, R.I.P.

The Adolescence of P-1

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Taking off for Launch Pad

Monday, July 13, 2009

Charles N. Brown, R.I.P.

FlashForward and Kant's Third Conundrum

Thirteen hours, forty-five minutes

Sunday, July 12, 2009

Oh, joy

Readercon reflections

Thursday, July 9, 2009

Come to my Readercon Kaffeeklatsch

Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Star Trek Viewmaster

Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Aurora Voting deadline crunch

Hangin' with Saskatoon writers

Dean Wesley Smith on "Life After Copyright"

Another thread at the Borders Science Fiction blog

It's a different world

Monday, July 6, 2009

Penguin Canada appoints new genre-fiction editor

RJS guest blogs in Boders SF blog

CompuServe Classic: R.I.P.

Sunday, July 5, 2009

My Readercon programming

Aurora Award banquet tickets can now be purchased online

Cool YouTube promo for Calgary's Con-Version

Saturday, July 4, 2009

Book Banter podcasts Rob

Thursday, July 2, 2009

Bringing some sense to ebook pricing

It's official: you're in the right place!

As Kor once said, "Pity. It would have been glorious."