29,000 counts of accessory to murder

My 1997 Hugo Award-nominated and Seiun Award-winning novel Frameshift deals, in large part, with the hunt for Ivan the Terrible, a real-life Treblinka death-camp guard whose whereabouts have been unknown since the end of the war.

John Demjanjuk, a Cleveland autoworker, has spent the last few decades under a cloud of suspicion: he bears a passing resemblance to Ivan.

Based on all the research I did when writing Frameshift, I'm sure to a moral certainty that Demjanjuk is not, in fact, Ivan, but people continue to go after him figuring even though they were wrong about that, he must be guilty of something.

Today, German prosecutors charged him with 29,000 counts of accessory to murder.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

Frameshift trade paperback 2nd printing

Woot! Just received from Tor a copy of the 2nd trade-paperback edition of my novel Frameshift.

Frameshift was originally published in hardcover in 1997. It was (a) my first-ever bookstore hardcover, and (b) my first title for Tor Books. It is also one of my personal favourites of my books. It had a good life in hardcover, a good life in mass-market paperback, and is now doing well in trade paperback, as this second printing attests.

Among other cool things, Frameshift was a Hugo Award finalist, won Japan's Seiun Award for best foreign novel of the year, is the book that got me on Rivera Live with Geraldo Rivera (to talk about the Human Genome Project), and was recently a "summer reading" pick in the journal Science.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

John Demjanjuk ordered deported

My 1997 novel Frameshift (a Hugo finalist, and winner of Japan’s Seiun Award), which has just been reissued by Tor in a handsome trade-paperback edition, deals in part with the story of John Demjanjuk, the Cleveland autoworker falsely accused of being Ivan the Terrible, the notorious guard at the Treblinka death camp. The real Ivan the Terrible was actually a man named Ivan Marchenko, who bore a passing physical resemblance to Demjanjuk; Marchenko was never apprehended.

A U.S. immigration judge has just ordered Demjanjuk, now 85, deported to his native Ukraine. The Globe and Mail has the AP story, and there’s also coverage on the CNN web site.