Brian Hades, my good buddy and publisher of EDGE Science Fiction, points out that this headline, over at SFScope, is quite amusing: Robert J. Sawyer’s Wake to be Serialized in Analog Hopefully, there’ll be a brief obit in Locus, too … ;) The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
CBC Radio One’s Between the Covers will do a serialized reading of Robert J. Sawyer’s Hugo Award-nominated Rollback later this year. Between the Covers airs across Canada, and presents novels in 15-minute chunks each weekday over several weeks. Billed as “Story Time for Adults,” it has a huge positive impact on physical book sales in […]
Toronto’s annual SF con, Ad Astra, begins today. I’ll be there tonight and tomorrow (Saturday) and maybe on Sunday. As it happens, all my programming is tomorrow (Saturday): 10:00 a.m. Panel: Near Future vs. Far Future (Gallery Centre) 12:00 p.m. Reading: First ever public reading from Wake (Ballroom West) 1:00 p.m. Panel: Authors who Edit […]
You can download it here. Ballots should be mailed to: Prix Aurora Awards 20081432 Velvet RoadGibsons BC V0N 1V5 Online voting should be available soon. Postmark deadline is 7 May 2008. It costs $5 to vote. The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
In the last week, I received two seemingly unrelated emails. One was from a person whose book club is doing my Rollback, and wanted to locate the reference in the novel to the “Trolley Problem,” a standard poser in philosophy and ethics classes that Sarah Halifax mentions in the book. The other, from an academic, […]
On Thursday, March 20, 2008, Fiona Kelleghan of the University of Miami presented a paper entitled “The Intimately Human and the Grandly Cosmic: Humor and the Sublime in the Works of Robert J. Sawyer” at the 29th annual International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts in Orlando, Florida. I was in the audience, and […]
[Update: Robert J. Sawyer’s novel Wake is now out in book form — read all about it here.] Pssst! Wanna be among the very first to read Wake, the first volume of the WWW trilogy by Robert J. Sawyer? Subscribe to Analog Science Fiction and Fact, the world’s top-selling English-language SF magazine. I’m thrilled to […]
Quandaries, quandaries! Who to vote for? Here are the nominees for the Aurora Award for Best Short-Form Work in English this year: “Falling” by David Clink (On Spec) “Saturn in G Minor” by Stephen Kotowych (Writers of the Future XXIII) “Metamorphoses in Amber” by Tony Pi (Abyss & Apex) “The Dancer at the Red Door” […]
Hot on the heels of its nomination for the Hugo Award, my novel Rollback has just been nominated for the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Awards (“the Auroras”). Ian Randal Strock over at SFScope has the full list of nominees. The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
… my PowerPoint virginity, that is! ;) I give lots of keynote addresses about science and futurism topics, but I’ve never used PowerPoint before (nor have I ever had any complaints about its absence … oh, organizers sometimes stammer before my talks, “You … you don’t have PowerPoint?,” but after my talks they never mention […]
A letter I received today from a reader: I just finished reading Rollback, Mindscan, and Humans, and while I enjoyed the stories, one thing seriously annoyed me. WHY do you insist upon identifying every character who comes upon the scene by their race and/or skin color? “A black man entered the room.” “A white woman […]
But not by me! (Although I do appear in this YouTube video.) See why Robert J. Sawyer endorses Todd McGuinness for a Spacey Award. (The Spaceys are SF media awards given annually by Space: The Imagination Station, the Canadian counterpart of the SciFi Channel.) (Filmed in my office Wednesday, June 6, 2007; note the Master […]
I’m getting old! I remember when I used to be the youngest guy on the Hugo ballot — now I’m the oldest (or possibly the second oldest). Wikipedia doesn’t have a day and month for Ian McDonald’s birthday, but he was born in 1960, like me. This year’s best-novel Hugo finalists, in descending order of […]
These are terrific, courtesy of my Odyssey writing student Larry Hodges: Top 10 Reasons Why Rollback Will Win the Hugo. The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
I am thrilled, honoured, and delighted that my novel Rollback is one of five finalists for this year’s HUGO AWARD, the world’s top international honour for science fiction. The winner will be announced Saturday, August 9, 2008, in Denver at a gala awards ceremony concluding the 66th Annual World Science Fiction Convention. The 6,000 members […]
… and I’m in mourning. I’ve done three radio interviews so far, one for the CBC, and two for the BBC, but it’s hard to do justice to such a great man in sound bites. R.I.P., Sir Arthur. You were, and always will be, my favourite science-fiction writer. The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
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 now collected papers inspired by that conference into a terrific new book: The Everyday Fantastic: Essays on Science Fiction and Human Being. […]
I’m on the road for nine days, starting tomorrow, and so swung by Fictionwise.com and grabbed some ebooks for the trip: The novel (marketed as “mainstream,” but clearly SF from the description) The Philosopher’s Apprentice by James Morrow (whose birthday it is today — happy birthday, Jim!) And these nonfiction books: Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp […]
I am probably way happier than I should be to have installed two new bookcases in my office. Carolyn and I built two 80 cm wide Ikea Billy bookcases, and put risers (height extensions on them), and added an extra shelf to each one. Total new bookshelf space in our home: 8*76 cm, or 600 […]
Carolyn and I had a good time Friday and Saturday at SciBarCamp at the University of Toronto, but we blew off going today. Yesterday, I attended a nice session on John Searle’s classic “Chinese room paradox.” I also led a session on the World Wide Web gaining consciousness. One fellow, thinking he was above the […]
To get Carolyn up to speed for SciBarCamp, we watched the Brian Greene documentary series The Elegant Universe. Greene is a very engaging presenter, and the series was excellent. Beware, though: don’t buy The Elegant Universe and Beyond — that’s a repackaged DVD set at double the cost with two unrelated Einstein documentaries thrown in. […]
I normally watch sitcoms while doing my half-hour on the treadmill most mornings, but I decided to take a break this week and watch the BBC science-documentary series Hyperspace with Sam Neill (also known, apparently in its original UK run, as just Space). This one is worth watching. The information content is not high, but […]
The great downtown Calgary bookstore McNally Robinson, on the open-air mall Stephen Avenue Walk, is closing on August 1, 2008. Calgary’s economy is booming — wages are high, rents are higher — and a small-margins business like bookselling can’t make a go of it in such a prime downtown location. I’m really sad about this. […]
On Tuesday, and again today, people have asked me about film options; the implicit assumption was that these are common occurences and lucrative, and that they as often as not lead to the film actually being made. I addressed these issues in a magazine column in 2001, but I thought it was worth resurrecting that […]
Got asked some interesting questions about Mindscan this morning by a university student studying the book in a fourth-year honours seminar on “The Rhetoric of the Posthuman.” 1. What do you mean by “uploading” (uploading consciousness? feelings? factor x?) and what do you believe are the consequences of this? That’s the crux of the whole […]
This time it’s on The Library Link, the quarterly magazine of the Mississauga Public Library. This is the cover of the January-March 2008 edition (Volume 5, Number 1). The photo is by Stephen Uhraney, and was taken October 4, 2007. I live in Mississauga, which is a city of 700,000 just west of Toronto. The […]
If you haven’t yet seen the sorts of things that have been done in remastering classic Star Trek, check out this nice YouTube compilation of stills. The remastered episodes — with all-new effects sequences — are in syndication now, and are forthcoming on BluRay DVD. The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
For the rest of this week, the episode of CBC Toronto’s Living in Toronto featuring Robert J. Sawyer is online right here. The segment with me is the first one in the show. The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
My friend Vera Nazarian is up for the Nebula Award for Best Short Story, and the good folks at Fictionwise are giving away her story during the nomination period. You can get it for free right here. Expect to see more Nebula nominees show up for free at Fictionwise over the next few weeks … […]
Don’t forget I’m on CBC TV Toronto’s Living in Toronto today at 1:00 p.m. :) The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
