Here’s my programming schedule for Readercon 19, being held near Boston from Thursday evening, July 17, through Sunday afternoon, July 20, 2008: 15. FRIDAY 11:00 ME Science Fiction as a Mirror for Reality. Robert J. Sawyer with discussion by Paolo Bacigalupi, Michael A. Burstein, Lancer Kind, Hildy Silverman, et al. Talk / Discussion (60 min.). […]
For those who enjoyed my post a couple of days ago about Tor’s free ebook program, I’ve just added another 1,300 words by me to the end of the comments section of that blog entry. Also, note that Jeffrey A. Carver, another participant in the Tor program, has now stopped by to comment there, in […]
Simon Owens at Bloggasm sent me this note this morning: I remember seeing one or two posts of yours about Tor’s experiment releasing free ebooks [actually I’ve never posted about that, but I have posted about free ebooks in general]. I got a chance recently to talk to several Tor authors [he quotes three, out […]
I noted earlier that my latest novel, Rollback, is in its third consecutive month on the Locus paperback bestsellers’ list, and, for the second month in a row, it’s the highest-ranked SF title. (Locus is the US trade journal of the science-fiction field.) Three months is a long run on the Locus list, but I […]
… is Dario Rivarossa, and besides being a great translator, he’s also a great photographic artist. Check out his website here, with his art and info about his translation services. And note that the samples of his translations skills are two passages from my Hugo Award-nominated 2003 novel Humans. the first passage in Italian is […]
I received today copies of the eighth mass-market paperback printing of my novel Calculating God, a Hugo Award-finalist first published in 2000 (and first in paperback in 2001). So, those of you who’ve had trouble finding it should have trouble no more. Amazon.com, which had been showing it as unavailable for the last few months, […]
There are many ways to convert DOS word-processing files to Windows formats, but one I never see mentione involves using the Windows file-viewing program Quick View Plus. It is, in fact, a quick-and-easy tool for that. (As many of you know, I still write with WordStar for DOS, for all the reasons I explain here.) […]
Thomas M. Disch, a great American science-fiction writer and critic, killed himself four days ago. My admittedly small relationship with him involved a couple of memorable miscommunications. In late 1980, when I was 20, the Ontario Science Fiction Club (OSFiC), which my friends Carolyn Clink, Ted Bleaney, and I had recently joined, was to devote […]
So, I’ve been reading a lot of game theory and popular economics (including Tim Harford’s excellent The Logic of Life). And tonight I encountered a fascinating example of an interesting economic effect. The first Thursday of each month is one of Toronto’s open science-fiction pub nights. We meet at a place called The Foxes Den. […]
It’s always nice to have happy clients, and it seems I do in my sideline as a keynote speaker. Last month I gave a keynote address in Hunstville, Ontario, for The MEARIE Group (the only Canadian insurance supplier dedicated to the energy industry) and moderated a keynote panel just outside Washington, D.C., for Gartner, Inc. […]
Woohoo! Rollback by Robert J. Sawyer is now in its third month on the paperback bestsellers’ list published by Locus, the trade journal of the SF field. I’m doubly pleased because this is the second month in a row that Rollback is the top-selling science-fiction title (all the higher ranked titles are fantasy). This is […]
Fictionwise.com is having a store-wide sale (that ends today) so I decided to stock up on ebooks for the summer. Here’s what I just bought: FICTION The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck The Stand: The Complete and Uncut Edition by Stephen King Doctor Strangelove, or Red Alert […]
Here’s my schedule, at least as it stands now, for Denvention 3, this year’s World Science Fiction convention, being held in Denver from Wednesday, August 6, through Sunday, August 10: “Canadian Science Fiction,” Fri, 10:00 “A World Made of Birds — What would the Earth be like if the Dinosaurs Had Lived?,” Fri, 11:30 (moderator) […]
Geoff Willmetts over at Stephen Hunt’s SF Crowsnest — one of Europe’s most popular SF sites — interviews Robert J. Sawyer right here. The teaser for the interview says: Our glorious editor GF Willmetts sits down with Canadian science fiction author Robert J. Sawyer to chat about whether aliens visiting Earth are likely to be […]
On May 31, 2008, in this post, I mentioned I was using the index-card feature in a free program called Celtx to plot out my new novel, Watch. But I didn’t like doing that, because Celtx provided no way to export the index-card text to an ASCII file, or a word-processing document — I didn’t […]
This has been a good month for fact catching up with fiction in the novels of Robert J. Sawyer … Not only is CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, which I wrote abut in 1999’s Flashforward, finally about to come on line, but now the Parliament of Spain has approved a resolution to grant some human rights […]
Over at SciFi Wire, the news service of the SciFi Channel, John Joseph Adams interviews Robert J. Sawyer about his new collection, Identity Theft and Other Stories. The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
OMG, this is the coolest thing ever! Back on October 2, 2007, I gave a talk at the University of Waterloo entitled “A Galaxy Far, Far Away” My Ass!, about science fiction’s relevance for the here and now. TVOntario’s lecture series Big Ideas was on hand to record it, and an MP3 of the soundtrack […]
Three of Canada’s science-fiction editors were all together in the same room at Keycon in Winnipeg last month, and Hayden Trenholm nicely took a picture of us all. Left to right: Robert J. Sawyer, editor of Robert J. Sawyer Books, the science-fiction imprint of Fitzhenry & Whiteside; Rob lives just outside Toronto, Ontario. Virgina O’Dine, […]
Granted, it’s a repeat — from 33 years ago! To commemorate the passing of George Carlin, the first-ever host of Saturday Night Live, that very first episode is being repeated this Saturday night, June 28, 2008, on NBC in SNL‘s usual timeslot — and one of the musical guests on that historic first episode was […]
Just gave a keynote in Huntsville, Ontario, at the Deerhurst Resort — which will host the 2010 G8 summit. The keynote was for The MEARIE Group (MEARIE = “Municipal Electric Association Reciprocal Insurance Exchange”), at a conference on risk management, and I ended my keynote by doing a William Shatner impression, reading what I think […]
Tom Easton, who will retire this year as book reviewer for Analog, reviews Nick DiChario’s Valley of Day-Glo (which was published under my Robert J. Sawyer Books imprint) and my own Identity Theft and Other Stories in the September 2008 issue. The review concludes: “Fitzhenry & Whiteside is a Canadian house that deserves cross-border attention. […]
I received today the page proofs for the first of the four serialization installments of my next novel Wake, which will appear in Analog, starting with the November 2008 issue (which will be out in September). Yay! I wrote an article today for my alumni magazine, on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of Ryerson’s […]
The joint reading and signing by Nick DiChario, Nancy Kress, and Robert J. Sawyer at the Barnes and Noble in Pittsford (Rochester), NY, or Saturday night rocked — we all read well, 100 people showed up — it was standing room only (about 70 chairs were filled), and we sold a ton of books. Many […]
The deadline for voting in the 2008 Hugo Awards is approaching rapidly. All ballots must be received by midnight (2400 hrs.) Pacific Daylight Time at the end of Monday, July 7, 2008. That’s 17 days from now. :) And, in case you missed the offer earlier, members of this year’s Worldcon can get free electronic […]
It’s my week for podcasts, it seems! Right on the heels of the SMOFcast podcast interview with me going online, Hardcore Nerdity has just put up an interview with me, recorded on Sunday, June 15, 2008, at BookExpo Canada. The interviewer is Lesley Livingston. The interview with me starts at 19 minutes, 10 seconds (19:10) […]
I’m pleased to announce the sale of French rights to my current Hugo Award-finalist Rollback to Editions Robert Laffont in Paris. The deal was made by Ralph Vicinanza in conjunction with Agence Littéraire Lenclud. The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
I’ve been reading a lot of books on human behavior, the economics of daily life, and game theory, as research for my current novel, Watch, and because I often drop references to such things into my keynote addresses. Although Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner is the most famous recent book of […]
I was interviewed by the new podcast SmofCast at Keycon last month (18 May 2008), and you can listen to it here. The interview with me comes on at 31 minutes, 40 seconds (31:40), and ends at 49:12. The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
An article about how Nick DiChario, Nancy Kress, and I all came to be doing a signing together in Rochester, New York, this coming Saturday appears in today’s Canandaigua Daily Messanger. Check it out. The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
