I say this in gentle good humour — I am extraordinarily grateful to my beta readers — but I always find it amusing that, without fail, some will say, “I get this joke, but will your readers?,” or “I know this word, but will your readers?” Now, of course, I have jokes that fall flat […]
Over on my Facebook wall, Matthew B. Tepper of the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society asked me, “Do you also create life histories for your characters (at least the principal ones) that contain details that might not make it into the final text of the novel?” My reply: I do not. I know others do, […]
Happy 20th birthday to my World Wide Web site! I freely admit it shows its age — but it also has grown to over a million words of text and over 800 documents — and it’s been online since June 28, 1995. Give it a visit at sfwriter.com. Robert J. Sawyer online:Website • Facebook • […]
A good day for Shoshana and Max, two characters from my 2010 novel Watch. Sho is a primatologist, working with a chimpanzee-bonobo hybrid named Hobo who paints representational art. This scene about marriage equality is from Chapter 30: Shoshana spent the next couple of hours with Hobo; he did seem to be back to his […]
A parable for today. I went to what was then called Ryerson Polytechnical Institute, an unusual institution. Although granting bachelor’s degrees in many programs via the authority of the Ontario government, it was not a traditional university, and most of its instructors were recruited from industry. Very few of the instructors back then held doctorates […]
