We Canadians grew up with Coles Notes; Americans are used to Cliffs Notes, Barron’s Notes, and SparkNotes or Spark Notes (the brand that Barnes and Noble sells) — study guides for various scientific and historical subjects, or for great works of literature and plays. Well, the full text of all the SparkNotes are now online […]
IFWA Christmas Book Festival! (in conjunction with the Calgary 2008 World Fantasy Convention) Come one, come all to the first ever IFWA-sponsored Christmas Book Festival. Food! Fun! … and Books! (IFWA is the Imaginative Fiction Writers Association, Calgary’s venerable SF&F writing workshop.) View the poster (with map) here. From high noon through 4:00 p.m. we’ll […]
No big deal, but I was playing around a bit with Yahoo! Answers, to see if it might be a substitute for the defunct Google Answers (it’s not; it’s a quite different beast, although interesting in its own right). And in the process of testing it, I answered the question: “What effect, if any, has […]
A provocative question: “What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?” Edge Foundation asked that of 120 scientists, philosophers, and futurists. The answers make fascinating reading. Very, very stimulating stuff. Check it out (All 120 answers are free at the above site; eReader.com also has them collected in an easy-to-navigate ebook […]
I must have been one of the very last people to use Google Answers, the service through which freelance researchers answered tough questions for those who couldn’t find what they were looking for with Google on their own. Four days ago, I needed to find a document that my keyword searching wasn’t turning up, and […]
Sometimes, life is particularly nice. This evening, Carolyn and I were guests at a $150-a-plate fundraising dinner (I’ll tell you for what in another post). The meal was at a Chinese seafood restaurant — and I’m not a big fan of seafood. But the eight-course dinner included Peking duck and crispy chicken, so I actually […]
I’m pleased to note that my novel Calculating God is now in its seventh mass-market paperback printing.
This is excellent: Arts News Canada — the publishing news section. A great way to keep up with what’s happening in the wacky world of Canadian writing, updated frequently. (They cover all areas of the arts, not just publishing: for the whole shebang, go here.)
… but it isn’t. Mobipocket’s Ultimate Handheld Classic Library. I’m not happy with this at all. Instead of giving you a separate file for each book, the books are clustered into giant files, one per author. If you want to read Dickens, you better have TEN MEGABYTES free on your device, ’cause that’s how big […]
Well, I think it’s safe to say now that they loved me in Kitchener. :) Tonight was my last event as the Tenth Annual Edna Staebler Writer in Residence at the Kitchener (Ontario) Public Library. Seventy people showed up for the farewell reception, the local Chapters bookstore was on hand to sell books by me, […]
… and writers have particular needs in that area, as Neil Gaiman points out in his blog.
In honour of its 50th anniversary, New Scientist is running a subscription special. In Canada, the deal is one full year — 51 issues — for just Cdn$50, an incredible bargain. To get the deal, you need to access the website here, and select your country.
I bought this set of five DVDs, totaling nine hours of interviews with 20 different scientists on the topic of consciousness, and I must say, although I’ve just started watching it, I’m really impressed. It’s just talking-heads interviews, with a guy asking (really well informed) questions, but, so far, it’s great. And at US$29.95, it’s […]
I won’t be there (I’ll be at the Kitchener Public Library, doing my writer-in-residence gig), but Bakka-Phoenix Books in Toronto is having a launch this Saturday, November 25, at 3:00 p.m. for the Canadian SF anthology Tesseracts 10, edited by two of my best friends, Edo van Belkom and Robert Charles Wilson.
A legally blind US reader sent me an email urging me to have my books made into commercial audiobooks, and to also have them produced as talking books by the US National Library Service for the Blind; she also suggested who she thought would make a great narrator. Here’s what I had to say in […]
A great library of over 2,100 public-domain ebooks, in Microsoft Reader and Palm DOC formats, is here at the University of Virginia Library’s Electronic Text Center. You can read the Palm versions with your favorite Palm reader (or the Windows versions of eReader or Mobipocket, or — ptui! — in Microsoft Reader). And check this […]
The Chicago Manual of Style is the bible for how text is presented in books. The Fourteenth Edition (section 5.4) says this: “Generally, punctuation marks are printed in the same style or font of type as the word, letter, character, or symbol immediately preceding them.” And that’s the way it should be, in my view […]
I was Writer in Residence at the Odyssey workshop this past summer, and had a great time. Quotes and photos from this year’s session are now online here, including a fair bit of the wit and wisdom of yours truly, including such pronouncements as, “Acknowledging that a question isn’t answered isn’t the same as answering […]
… is here.
An oldie but a goodie, from 1999: “Famous SF Authors & The Future of Sex” — including yours truly. Part One is here. Part Two is here (use this link; the one on the Part One page is broken).
Roddenberry.com — the company run by Gene Roddenberry’s son — has teamed up with CafePress.com to offer handsome perfect-bound volumes of the scripts for the original Star Trek. They started with a special limited-edition of “The Cage” (the original pilot, later incorporated into “The Menagerie”). I bought that, and was favorably impressed. And now I’ve […]
New Scientist, my favourite magazine, has an excellent weekly podcast about what’s new in science and techology. You can get it for free here.
A letter I received today: Hello Mr. Sawyer. I noticed your website while I was online and searching for ways to start publisizing my book before completion. The most common problem that I run into is the fact that most publsists only want to deal with nonfiction first time authors only, not fiction. Dorrence publishing […]
So, here I am, at the Kitchener Public Library, doing my weekend gig as Writer-in-Residence. And in comes a fellow named John R. Little — who had also come to see me three years ago in Toronto when I was Writer-in-Residence at the Toronto Public Library’s Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation and Fantasy. And […]
The one and only time I met him — in 1998 — he was extraordinarily kind and supportive. Jack Williamson was a true gentleman, and a great writer. His “With Folded Hands” is one of my all-time favorite SF stories. He was born in 1908; he died today.
Today’s the last day for the US$100 / Cdn$113 membership rates for the Toronto World Horror Convention — they go up tomorrow (Saturday) to US$120 / Cdn$137. They take PayPal, and you can buy your membership online here. Carolyn and I bought our memberships today. By the way, in case you’re wondering what connection I […]
Can I pick ’em, or what? Another rave review for Nick DiChario’s A Small and Remarkable Life, published under the Robert J. Sawyer Books imprint of Red Deer Press. The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Over at FictionRight.com, Alan and Rebecca Lickiss interview Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens and Robert J. Sawyer. The three provide information and advice for writers of all levels. Run-time: 35 minutes. stream the audio or download the MP3 directly here.
A free podcast containing a full-text reading of my short story “The Shoulders of Giants” from the anthology Star Colonies is now available from Escape Pod. The story is read by Escape Pod producer Stephen Eley. You can get it here.
Just this past Sunday, during “An Hour with Robert J. Sawyer” at MileHiCon in Denver, I told the audience that half my career has been writing riffs on one of my all-time favourite SF films: Quatermass and the Pit (also known as Five Million Years to Earth). The author of the screenplay for the movie, […]
