… 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 […]
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 […]
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
The deadline for nominating for the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Awards (“the Auroras”) is fast approaching. Online ballots must be cast by Monday, March 17, 2008 (one week from today). Any Canadian may nominate, and there is no charge to do so. The online ballot is here. A comprehensive list of eligible works to […]
I’ll be participating at the Gartner IT Security Summit in Washington, DC, in June 2008. When Gartner’s Victor Wheatman approached me about putting together a panel of SF authors for the summit, we quickly came up with a dream-team list, and were delighted by who said yes: Sigma chair Arlan Andrews, plus Greg Bear and […]
Some of my upcoming events for 2008: Reader and PanelistInternational Conference on the Fantastic in the ArtsOrlando, FloridaMarch 19-23, 2008http://www.iafa.org PanelistAd Astra 2008Toronto, OntarioMarch 28-30, 2008http://www.ad-astra.org PanelistEerieCon 2008Niagara Falls, New YorkApril 18-20, 2008http://www.eeriecon.org Book Launch for Identity Theft and Other StoriesBakka-Phoenix Books697 Queen Street WestToronto, OntarioSaturday, May 10, 2008, at 3:00 p.m. PanelistKeycon 25The 2008 […]
I’ll be interviewed this coming Monday, March 10, 2008, at 1:00 p.m. on CBC TV Toronto’s program Living in Toronto about my novel Rollback — and I’ll be recommending some other good SF reading, too. The segment with me was recorded a little while ago at Toronto’s Bakka-Phoenix Books, and also features the lovely Chris […]
McNally Robinson, Canada’s second-largest bookstore chain, has bestsellers’ lists for Winnipeg, Calgary, and Saskatoon. Right now the Rollback paperback is #7 on the mass-market list (combined fiction and nonfiction) in Calgary, and it’s #1 in Saskatoon. Here’s the Saskatoon list: #1. RollbackBy Robert J Sawyer – $8.99 #2. JumperBy Steven Gould – $9.99 #3. The […]
Woohoo! BookNet Canada’s BNC SalesData service has just released its list of the top 20 Canadian fiction titles for the two weeks ending February 24, 2008. BookNet tracks actual point-of-sale purchases at over 650 bookstores across Canada. The top five Canadian-authored fiction titles for the last two weeks are: 1. Water for Elephants, Sara Gruen(HarperCollins […]
Penguin Canada has just announced the hiring of the person who will be my Canadian editor — and will head up the commercial-fiction publishing list for the company. (I copied the job listing here back in January.) Laura Shin, formerly a Senior Editor at Harlequin — where she worked on crime, fantasy, and women’s fiction […]
You gotta take this with a grain of salt, ’cause I’m one of the few people on the planet who likes the Thunderbirds live-action film … but I also really like 2005 theatrical Bewitched film. I’d seen it before on an airplane, but Carolyn hadn’t, so we watched it on DVD tonight. Like the live-action […]
Yesterday, Carolyn and I had three friends from high school over for a game of Trivial Pursuit, some ordered-in Swiss Chalet barbecue chicken, and watching some stuff on our big-screen TV. The friends were Carolyn’s brother David (one of my best friends quite separate from being my brother-in-law), Ted Bleaney (known to fans of my […]
Writers live at the mercy of publishers who often take unconscionably long times to pay, but in all my 29 years selling my work professionally, I think a new record for lateness was reached this week. One full year after it was due, Pearson Educational Canada sent me a cheque for a reprint of one […]
I start most mornings by treadmilling for half an hour. I’ve got a portable DVD player with a 10-inch screen mounted on my treadmill’s control panel, and I watch sitcoms to pass the time. And I’ve just recently finished watching the third and final season of Arrested Development, a wonderful series about a rich family […]
