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 […]
Penguin Canada is my new Canadian publisher; I’m about to turn in Wake, the first volume of my upcoming WWW trilogy, to them. Good to know that they’re doing fine, as you can see in this Publishers Weekly article. The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
One of the coolest things about Amazon’s new Kindle eBook reader is the ability to download content directly to the reader, without having to use a separate computer. (Although, as I mentioned before, it was really the old Rocket eBook devices that pioneered this notion, delivering eBooks just by plugging your reader into a phone […]
Happy New Year, Everyone! This past year was spectacular for me, I must say. In approximately chronological order: I won the $2,500 Toronto Public Library Celebrates Reading Award presented at the Book Lovers’ Ball (pictured above) My 17th novel Rollback was published by Tor to rave reviews I had a fabulous 22-city book tour for […]
Besides writing in good old WordStar for DOS, Ialso use a legacy program for maintaining my contacts database: I use Alpha Four for DOS version 1.1b (from 1990), which stores its data in the old dBase *.dbf format. (I use it because WordStar can read data from .dbf files, and because it works well, and […]
I’ve always been fascinated by studies of identical twins separated at birth, because they shed so much light on the nature-vs.-nurture debate. This one is particularly fascinating, in part because of the questionable ethics involved. The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
… can be found here, over at The Breathing Corpse blog. The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
I’ve just started experimenting with EverNote, a way cool program good for (among other things) organizing all those little research clippings a writer grabs from various places on the Internet. It has a really slick interface, and I think it’s going to be quite useful — so I went ahead and registered it. It’s on […]
The January 2008 edition of Report on Business Magazine — one of Canada’s top glossy magazines, distributed for free with the Friday 28 December 2007 edition of The Globe and Mail: Canada’s National Newspaper — contains a series of emails from the future by Robert J. Sawyer, along with comments from a bunch of other […]
Remember that Classic Star Trek episode about the Greek god Apollo? The title of that episode is not “Who Mourns for Adonis?” — despite the fact that you see it rendered that way frequently. No, the title actually is “Who Mourns for Adonais?” It’s a line from the poem “Adonaïs: An Elegy on the Death […]
Canadian fans of my work: grab a copy of The Globe and Mail on Friday, December 28, 2007. It will include the January 2008 edition of the monthly Report on Business Magazine, which has … well, it’s not quite a story, but it is a creative piece by me in it. Remember, Friday is the […]
Egypt has decided to essentially copyright its antiquities, according to this article from the BBC. How they’re going to enforce this, and why other countries should pay any attention, I’m not quite sure … The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Carolyn and I started the day by visiting her mother’s house, where her side of the family had gathered, and then it was off to the home of my brother Peter and his wife Jacquie for a wonderful turkey dinner. A really nice day. Among Carolyn and my presents were some TV shows on DVD, […]
My great friend Jeanne Robinson — co-author of Stardance with her husband Spider — is going to get a zero-G flight experience next week. Read all about her adventure in her new blog — and about the Stardance movie project here. The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
The very first Doctor Who serial I ever watched was “The Time Warrior,” featuring the third (and still my favourite) Doctor, Jon Pertwee. When I first saw it, I had no idea that it was a turning point in the series: it contained not only the first-ever mention of the name of The Doctor’s home […]
Check it out: Right Brain v Left Brain For me (and I’m right-handed) she spins clockwise, unless I focus on the lower-left corner of the frame, in which case she spins counter-clockwise, or “anti-clockwise,” as they say on this Australian site — which prompted Carolyn, who is also right-handed and also saw the dancer spinning […]
Save The Cat!, subtitled “The Last Book On Screenwriting That You’ll Ever Need!” … … now has a sequel! (But both books — Save the Cat! and Save the Cat! Goes to the Movies — are excellent. More info at author Blake Snyder’s website) The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Today is the last day my wonderful publicist Janis Ackroyd will be with H.B. Fenn and Company, the Canadian distributor for Tor Books. A great many of the good things that have happened to me in the last few years have been the result of Janis’s very hard work. Janis is moving on to new […]
Spoiler alert! But if you’ve read my Calculating God you might enjoy these questions a grade-12 student just sent me. Needless to say, I told him he’d have to come up with his own answers. :) 1. Who did you mean your audience to be when you wrote this book and what did you want […]
Gabriel McKee’s blog “SF Gospel” has this fascinating list of The 10 Best Science Fiction Stories About Religion. I’m particularly pleased to see him skipping such simplistic fare as Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Star” and “The Nine Billion Names of God,” and Isaac Asimov’s “The Last Question,” which usually choke such lists; and I’m delighted […]
My friend Shoshana Glick mentions in a comment to this post of mine that those weren’t really very hard Star Trek questions on Jeopardy! a few days ago. I agree. So, here are a few super-hard ones of my own devising, with suggested Jeopardy! dollar values. If you know the answers, put them in a […]
The great British SF magazine Interzone joins Asimov’s, Analog, and F&SF in being available in all standard ebook formats at Fictionwise.com. For Interzone, see here. The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
See here. Of course, I knew all the answers. :) The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
What ever happened to WordStar, the grand old word-processing program for CP/M and MS-DOS? And what about its clone, NewWord, published by NewStar Software? John C. Dvorak explains: What ever happened to WordStar? What ever happened to NewWord? I still use WordStar for DOS 7.0 (and have been a WordStar user for 24 years, as […]
Stumbled on this fascinating database, which quotes various SF and fantasy books about real religious groups, including excerpts from my Flashforward and Calculating God. I’ve just sent them an email, though, because they had an amusing typo. In Flashforward, a character says, “Souls are about life immortal” — but they transcribed that as “Souls are […]
I get all kinds of interesting questions in email, including this one: For several years, I have been collecting 1st, 2nd and 3rd printings of the original Ace Science Fiction Specials pb of “Neuromancer” (William Gibson). The ISBNs are 0-441-56956-0, 0-441-56957-9, and 0-441-56958-7, respectively. I’m very much interested in knowing how many copies of these […]
There used to be a guy online called Blackmask who formatted Project Gutenberg public-domain titles for various ebook readers. He folded his tent, but his old DVD of 10,000 titles for Mobipocket reader (a format supported by Amazon’s new Kindle, the iRex iLiad, and just about every other ebook-reading device) is available again from a […]
