Mark your calendars! The Toronto launch party for Robert J. Sawyer’s new collection Identity Theft and Other Stories will be Saturday, May 10, 2008, from 3:00 p.m. on at Bakka-Phoenix Books, 697 Queen Street West (just west of Bathurst Street), Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Penguin Canada is looking for a full-time editor specializing in science fiction, fantasy, mystery, and other commercial fiction to work out of its Toronto office. The new editor will work on the Canadian editions of Robert J. Sawyer‘s upcoming WWW trilogy, on future books by Guy Gavriel Kay, and on other projects. The job posting […]
A high-school student wrote me this evening to say he was doing a project for his English class on my Rollback, in which he was going to explore four major moral issues related to rejuvenation and life prolongation — and he asked me to suggest what those issues might be. And so, in 90 seconds, […]
The American Library Association has announced its 2008 Reading List: Best Adult Genre Fiction, selecting books in eight different categories “that merit special attention by general adult readers and the librarians who work with them.” The winner this year in the Science Fiction category is In War Times by Kathleen Ann Goonan (congrats, Kathleen!), published […]
(Left to right: Carolyn Clink, Robert J. Sawyer, Peter Halasz, Shoshana Glick, Robert Charles Wilson) Shoshana Glick, my dear friend from Seattle, came to stay with Carolyn and me for two days this week (Tuesday and Wednesday), and I played tour guide. On Tuesday, Sho and I went to the Royal Ontario Museum — my […]
Personhood for great apes is an issue I allude to from time to time in my writings, particulary in my Nebula Award-winning The Terminal Experiment from 1995: When Peter Hobson had taken a university elective in taxonomy, the two species of chimpanzees had been Pan troglodytes (common chimps) and Pan paniscus (pygmy chimps). But the […]
As a guy who not only lost a lot of weight four years ago by restricting my carb intake, but has kept it off, I was gratified to see the following commentary in the January 19, 2008, New Scientist: For the past century, the advice to the overweight and obese has remained remarkably consistent: consume […]
The cover for Valley of Day-Glo by Nick DiChario, coming in May 2008 from Robert J. Sawyer Books, the science-fiction imprint of Red Deer Press. The wonderful cover design is by Karen Petherick Thomas, who also did these covers for my upcoming collections. The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
The nonfiction book The Gospel According to Science Fiction by Gabriel McKee is a very worthy candidate, in my humble opinion, for the 2008 Hugo Award for for Best Related Book. Check out what I had to say when I first read the book last year. (The 2008 “Best Related Book” Hugo is to honor […]
I quite like the Pierre Boulle novel sometimes called Monkey Planet in English (a lousy translation of the title: Planet of the Apes is much closer in structure to the original French, which was “La Planète des singes” — and although “singe” is both “ape” and “monkey” in French, they are two different words (and […]
The whole 20-minute interview with science-fiction writer and futurist Robert J. Sawyer about robot ethics that aired Monday, January 14, 2008, on TVOntario’s flagship current-affairs program The Agenda is now available online here. To watch, click on Robert Sawyer. (There’s also a second interview with me accessible from the same page: Web-Exclusive: Robert Sawyer. That’s […]
Coming in May 2008 to a bookstore near you: Red Deer Press is releasing my second collection of short stories, Identity Theft and Other Stories, in May 2008 in hardcover and trade paperback. At the same time, they’re issuing a new trade-paperback edition of my first collection, Iterations and Other Stories, which was first publised […]
I sent the first 207 manuscript pages of Wake — about half the book — to Barbara Berson, my editor at Penguin Canada, today (and I’ll be sending her and Ginjer Buchanan, my US editor, the rest next month). Wake is the first volume of my new WWW trilogy. I note for the record that […]
I’ll be a guest on TVOntario’s flagship current affairs program The Agenda tomorrow, Monday, January 14, 2008. The Agenda is seen across Ontario at 8:00 p.m. and 11:00 p.m., and also at 5:00 a.m. Tuesday morning, and will be available online. The host of the agenda is the always insightful Steve Paikin. We actually recorded […]
One week from today I head off to Cambridge, Massachusetts, for Arisia, a four-day SF convention over the 2008 Martin Luther King Day holiday weekend. Here’s my programming schedule: Robert J. Sawyer ReadingSat 11:00 AM 1hr Hugo winner Robert J. Sawyer reads. Trend? What Trend?Sat 1:00 PM 1hrLauran Anne Gilman (m), Robert J. Sawyer In […]
The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America have just released their Preliminary Nebula Award Ballot. Here’s the list in the Novel category (under the SFWA “rolling eligibility” rules, a number of these books are from two years ago): The Accidental Time Machine, by Joe Haldeman Blindsight, by Peter Watts Harry Potter and the Deathly […]
Bookninja has it right: Raincoast casts off sheep’s clothing. The Canadian publisher of the Harry Potter books claims it’s too poor to do any domestic Canadian publishing. Yeah, right. The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Carolyn and I are having a party at our place in Mississauga (Greater Toronto Area) on Saturday, February 9, 2008, from 4:00 p.m. to midnight. This is a party for our friends in science-fiction fandom, and for fans of my books. If you fall into either category, and would like to attend, please send me […]
… check out this one, from the British comedy series Dead Ringers, brought to my attention on my newsgroup by the beauteous and talented Bonnie Jean Mah. It’s just two minutes, and it’s a hoot. The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Those savvy brothers Scott and Steve Pendergrast, who already run the best ebook store on the net, the venerable Fictionwise.com, have just bought the net’s biggest ebook store, eReader.com — and I’m delighted. eReader is a better format, in my view, than Mobipocket, with a much more livable DRM scheme. Very interesting times in the […]
Over on my Yahoo! Groups News Group, Steven H. Silver — a fine choice for the fan-writer Hugo, by the way — pimped this 8-minute Doctor Who special short, in which David Tennant’s Doctor meets Peter Davison’s one. It’s absolutely charming, if you’re a Doctor Who fan … The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
So, I saw out of the corner of my eye a promo for the new CBC TV series jPod today, based on the Douglas Coupland book, and I said to myself, “That can’t be Alan Thicke, can it?” So I googled, and end up at Thicke’s official website, and, indeed, it is Thicke, whom I’ve […]
This year’s finalists for the Philip K. Dick Award — honoring SF books first published in the previous year as paperback originals in the US — include my friend and fellow Canadian Minister Faust for The Notebooks of Dr. Brain. The full list: Grey, Jon Armstrong (Night Shade) Undertow, Elizabeth Bear (Bantam Spectra) From the […]
My friend Mark Leslie Lefebvre sent me an interesting question today: I also had a question about remainders (since I know that some of your older titles or books that have gone into paperback have gone into remainder status — after an incredibly great run as a traditional trade book, of course). Remainders/Bargain Books are […]
I’m going to be one of the participating authors at the Toronto Public Library’s third annual Book Lover’s Ball, coming on Thursday, January 31, 2008. It’s a swanky, black-tie, $500-a-plate fund-raising dinner for North America’s largest public-library system. It’s also the event at which I will pass the torch of the Toronto Public Library Celebrates […]
Speaking of Hugo and Aurora Awards, might I gently remind the world that my novel Rollback is currently eligible for nomination for both? Rollback was published in hardcover by Tor in April 2007 (and was a Main Selection of the Science Fiction Book Club); the paperback comes out February 5, 2008. Rollback is currently on […]
Nominating is now open for the Aurora Awards. For the first time ever, you can nominate online. All Canadians are eligible to do so, and there’s no cost to nominate. And although the Canadian SF Works Database that Marcel Gagné and I founded provides a wiki list of professional works that are eligible for the […]
This year, 2008, is the 30th anniversary of Stanley Schmidt becoming editor of Analog Science Fiction and Fact. Despite Analog being consistently the English-speaking world’s #1 best-selling SF magazine for that entire period, Stan has never won a Hugo Award for Best Editor. It’s high time he did win. To nominate and vote, you have […]
… they pull a boneheaded stunt. Okay, we all know that traditional encyclopedia publishers have been taking a beating as people turn to the free Wikipedia for content. Still, every couple of years I update my Encyclopaedia Britannica CD-ROM. This year, I opted for the 2008 Ultimate DVD edition because, as it says on the […]
I’m pleased as punch to announced that my 17th novel Rollback was the #1 bestselling hardcover for the entire year of 2007 at Toronto’s Bakka-Phoenix, the world’s oldest surviving science-fiction specialty bookstore, beating out J.K. Rowling for the top spot. And Phyllis Gotlieb’s Birthstones, published under Red Deer Press’s Robert J. Sawyer Books imprint, was […]
