So, I was at an event today during which four authors, from four different publishers, were addressing booksellers. Each of us was to have 10 to 12 minutes to speak. The first guy said right up front that he wasn’t going to bother to keep track of his time, and rather would leave it up […]
A great podcast. Check it out here. The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
A little while ago, I had a post here about being asked for a quote about a New Jersey bookstore separating SF and fantasy. Here’s the resulting article, from the Trentonian. The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Carolyn and I had a wonderful day today at Fanshawe College in London, Ontario, a two-hour drive from our home in Mississauga. I gave two readings and talks there. The first one, at 2:00 p.m., was mostly for the Fanshawe faculty and students; the second one was open to the public, and co-sponsored by the […]
Mark R. Kelly has just posted the annual update to his monumental Locus Index to Science Fiction Awards, a huge database listing award wins and nominations for awards major and minor; it’s really an amazing piece of work, and must have taken an awful lot of time and effort to compile. The summary page about […]
The official pub date for my next novel, Rollback, is April 3, 2007, and, as I’ve already noted here, the novel has received a starred review, denoting a book of exceptional merit, from Publishers Weekly. Well, I’m pleased as punch to see that my good buddy Allen Steele has a new novel being published the […]
… and the royalty checks I just received for Far-Seer, Fossil Hunter, Foreigner, and Golden Fleece are proof. :) Woohoo! The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
I’ll be giving two free public readings and talks (each one different) at Fanshawe College in London, Ontario, this Thursday, February 8, 2007: 2:00 to 2:50 p.m.: Reading plus Q&A 8:00 to 9:00 p.m.: Reading plus Q&A Both are in D-Building room D-1060. Everybody is welcome! The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
I do a lot of research for my novels, and so I thought I’d share a list of the nonfiction books currently on my desk, for those who might be interested: Hoffman, Donald D. Visual Intelligence: How We Create What We See. Wolfram, Stephen. A New Kind of Science. Farah, Martha. The Cognitive Neuroscience of […]
A few months ago I groused about having missed out on a friend’s 50th birthday party because the invitation came with a spam-like subject line of “TOP SECRET!!!!” Well, today I got a important email that actually had the word “SPAM” in the subject line (saying “this is not SPAM”), and just now I received […]
Look who’s coming to the Toronto World Horror Convention! Thomas Harris, the creator of Dr. Hannibal Lecter, is coming to Toronto, to receive the Horror Writers Association Lifetime Achievement Award. Cool! The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
I do get quoted in the darnedest places. :) Just received a copy of the January 3, 2007, issue of the Daily Commercial News, which quotes me in a page-one story on health and safety headlined “Safety will lead in technology,” by Peter Kenter. Paragraph two begins: “Everything in the workplace is moving toward safety,” […]
I mentioned The Chicago Manual of Style‘s online Q&A a couple of posts back. Well, today I saw this on the BBC Website: “Canada is the second largest country in the world after Russia.” This sort of phrasing has always bothered me. Isn’t it equally true to just say: “Canada is the largest country in […]
There was a time when the web was young during which lots of people were emailing writers, actors, and so on, asking for autographed pictures. That seems to have died down, but I did always wonder what happened to them after I sent them out. Now I know. (That photo dates back to the days […]
These are always fun: Chicago Manual of Style Q&A, updated monthly. The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
In what other line of work do you routinely get thanked for things you did 15 years ago? This popped into my email box this morning from New Mexico: Dear Mr. Sawyer, I used to be a big SF reader, and somehow fell away from the genre. But that all changed last month. I discovered […]
I heard on the news yesterday that Al Gore has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Made me think of the great Canadian who won it, Lester B. Pearson, the man after whom Toronto’s airport is named (not to mention a starship in my novel Starplex). And now a new book has come out […]
… as evidenced by this newsletter’s very nice article about me entitled “Great Canadian Sci-Fi,” in Volume 2, Issue 1 (Winter 2007), on page 5, which you can download here. (No, I don’t go ego-surfing for my name; Google currently has 350,000 references to me, and it would take the rest of my life to […]
It’s going to be one swanky night! I had a blast last year, and am very much looking forward to this year’s Book Lover’s Ball in Toronto, a gala, black-tie evening at the Liberty Grand, raising funds for the Toronto Public Library.
I’m pleased to announce the sale of Polish rights to all three volumes of my “Neanderthal Parallax” trilogy (Hominids, Humans, and Hybrids) to Solaris. Yay! The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
I’ll be keynote speaker at the ICE 2007 conference being held in Toronto on March 21-22, 2007. ICE stands for “Interactive Content Exchange,” and the conference is billed as “the world’s coolest interactive content business event.” Now, it’s fair to say that I do a lot of keynotes, so I wouldn’t want anyone to think […]
Got asked by a newspaper reporter in New Jersey today to comment on the “nuts” idea that a local bookseller had divided science fiction and fantasy into separate sections. Here’s what I had to say: Actually, it’s not nuts at all — nuts was when Ottawa’s House of Speculative Fiction separated the male and female […]
Right up to the day of the Tor sales conference, my novel Mindscan had the title Action Potential, which I thought was quite wonderful. Not only is it a cool term from neuroscience, but it also worked well with the plot of the book, since it dealt with an exploration of what actions any of […]
February is Keep Toronto Reading month — a celebration of the written word in Canada’s largest city. Of course, I’m taking part. I’ll be at the Book Lover’s Ball on Thursday, February 15, 2007, and doing a free literary lunch along with Karl Schroeder on Wednesday, February 28. You can read more about Keep Toronto […]
Carolyn and I spent the afternoon with Janis Ian, the Grammy Award-winning folk singer best known for “At Seventeen” and “Society’s Child.” Janis lives in Nashville, Tennessee — which is where we were getting our flight home after Chattacon (in Chattanooga). Janis took us out for a great barbecue-chicken lunch, then we hung around her […]
Carolyn and I have just finished a very pleasant weekend at Chattacon 32 in Chattanooga, Tennessee — which is being held in the Chattanooga Choo Choo hotel. I was the author guest of honor, along with Kevin J. Anderson, and Wen Spencer was the special guest. At my reading, I read a bit from Mindscan […]
The next book being published under my Robert J. Sawyer Books imprint is Birthstones, by Phyllis Gotlieb. The cover, designed by Karen Thomas Petherick, is magnificent. To really appreciate it, check out this PDF, which shows the full dustjacket. We’ll be launching the book on Friday, March 2, 2007, at Toronto’s Ad Astra SF convention, […]
These bastards suck. If you sign up, your email box will get flooded with messages — not from long-lost friends, but from the service itself trying to get more money out of you. And then, just when you think you’re finally done with the sons of bitches, they send you one of these, with no […]
… which is a lot more fun to say than it is to do. :( The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
(A pun that reads better on the page than said outloud …) Stephen Mann, a computer-graphics professor at the University of Waterloo, has very nicely articulated why we Canadians hate getting packages shipped to us by United Parcel Service. Please, please, please, use the regular U.S. mails. See what Mann has to say right here. […]
