The Toronto Sun runs a “This Week in Canadian History” each Monday, and today’s edition has two shout outs to science fiction. April 26, 1912: Novelist A.E. van Vogt was born on a farm in a Mennonite community in Manitoba. Rather than writing boring coming-of-age-on-a-farm stories, van Vogt opted to pen sci-fi classics about space […]
The weekend of May 28-30, 2010, at the Banff Centre, it’s the 49th annual Banff Book Discussion Weekend, this year featuring Robert J. Sawyer and his Aurora Award-nominated novel Wake, with Rob in attendance, plus discussions of three other books. Banff is a gorgeous ski-resort town in Alberta (although skiing season will be long over […]
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My great friend Rick Wilber has a new novel out called Rum Point: A Baseball Novel. Rick is well known in SF circles for (among other things) being the administrator of the Dell Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing, associated with Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine. But he’s also a life-long baseball […]
My blog is currently hosted by Blogger, which is owned by Google. I use their FTP blogging service so that the URL of my blog can be hooked to my SFWRITER.COM domain: sfwriter.com/blog.htm. But now Google is eliminating that service — yup, just yanking it, poof, gone. Anybody know of a blogging solution that will […]
I posted this on Lou Anders’s Facebook wall, in a conversation about making sure cover artists get credited, but want to share it here, too: And let’s not forget the ART DIRECTOR. Rita Frangie, the art director for Ace, has done absolutely amazing design work for me, Joe Haldeman, Allen Steele, Charles Stross, and others, […]
The rock band Van Halen used to insist that there be no brown M&M’s in the bowls of M&M’s backstage. They weren’t just making outrageous demands to wield power, but they wanted to insure a level of attention to detail by the people behind the scenes, so that nothing actually important would get overlooked. Just […]
One of the reasons I love The American Heritage English Dictionary, Unabridged, is the extensive notes on word origins. This is from the entry on “Wednesday.” We say the names of the days of the week constantly, but for most of us they are nonsense syllables. The seven-day system we use is based on the […]
A really nice video. Thanks to Arwen Rosenbaum for the link! Visit The Robert J. Sawyer Web Siteand WakeWatchWonder.com
Testify, Keith! Keith Olbermann clip. Amen, brother. Visit The Robert J. Sawyer Web Siteand WakeWatchWonder.com
An email exchange I had over the last day (an NDA is a “nondisclosure agreement”): Him: “I have a screenplay that is written. My project would be very close to what seems to be at the heart of everything you are seeking to accomplish in your writings and if you are interested in reading it […]
A grade-ten student named Ryan wrote to me today to see if I’d be willing to answer some questions for a paper he was writing for school. I said sure: 1. About how long have you been writing? I’ve written stories ever since I was a little boy; my mother has one I wrote when […]
A great op-ed from John D. Dingell, the longest-serving congressman in U.S. history, on the current health-care debate in the United States. Well worth reading the whole thing, but here’s how it ends: Let me close with a personal note. I make an effort to treat each class of Congressional interns to a lunch in […]
Speaking of putting political views into one’s writing, I found the following from the book I’m currently reading very well said. It’s from The Age of Empathy: Nature’s. Lessons for a Kinder Society by primatologist Frans de Waal. He writes: What confuses some is that fairness has two faces. Income equality is one, but the […]
I’m hoping Google searches will bring some people here: On October 16, 1975, Robert J. Sawyer, Richard Gotlib, and Ted Bleaney founded NASFA, the Northview Association for Science Fiction Addicts, based at Northview Heights Secondary School in Willowdale (later North York; later still, Toronto), Ontario, Canada. We’re having a 35th anniversary reunion party on Saturday, […]
Mark your calendars: An event is being planned for Saturday, August 14, 2010, in Calgary, Alberta, called “How To Be a Kick-Ass Writer,” at which guest speakers (including Robert J. Sawyer) will discuss how Canadian genre writers can succeed in a global print and film market. More details as they become available. Visit The Robert […]
The Toronto store, which opened earlier this year, was gorgeous, and I had many friends who worked there. And the Polo Park store will always have a special place in my heart, because the premiere party for FlashForward, the ABC TV series based on my novel of the same name, was held there on Thursday, […]
There’s a great article in today’s Calgary Herlad about the new anthology Gaslight Grotesque: Nightmare Tales of Sherlock Holmes, edited by my friends J.R. Campbell and Charles Prepolic. You can read it here. (The Herald has the photo caption backwards, by the way. That’s Jeff on the left and Charles on the right.) More about […]
I have a nice new pub in my neighbourhood, in a renovated, century-old house. Been there twice now (both times with Hugo and John W. Campbell Memorial Award finalist Nick DiChario), and both times it’s been very good. If you also live in Mississauga, give ’em a try — a new business has a hard […]
Just FYI, I’m also on Twitter as RobertJSawyer. Visit The Robert J. Sawyer Web Siteand WakeWatchWonder.com
Recently, I blogged about the new anthology Women of the Apocalypse, containing wonderful stories by my writing students Eileen Bell and Ryan T. McFadden. I said that nothing gives me more joy than when my students do well. Now, to my delight, another of my students has a book out: Andrew Zimmerman Jones, the Physics […]
My friend Virginia O’Dine put me on to a great Twitter feed called “Shit My Dad Says,” from Justin, who says, “I’m 29. I live with my 73-year-old dad. He is awesome. I just write down shit that he says.” And, I gotta say, his dad is very funny and very wise. No wonder he […]
I’ve been teaching writing professionally for 19 years now, at such venues as the University of Toronto, Ryerson University, the Surrey International Writers Conference, and the Banff Centre for the Arts, as well as as writer-in-residence at the Richmond Hill (Ontario) Public Library; the Kitchener (Ontario) Public Library; the Toronto Public Library’s Merril Collection of […]
If you live in Los Angeles, go see the one-man play Nevermore starring Jeffrey Combs as Edgar Allan Poe; it’s at the Steve Allen Theatre. People say I read my own fiction well, but I’ve never heard anyone do a better reading of a short story than Combs’s rendition of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” which […]
My friend Matthew Tepper, who took the picture above, reminded me that the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society (which has its own way-cool clubhouse!) meets on Thursday nights, so this past Thursday, Carolyn and I attended their meeting, since we’re in L.A. so I can work on FlashForward, the ABC TV series based on my […]
Ten years ago, I pitched an idea for a monthly column to the SciFi Channel’s SciFi Weekly. They didn’t buy it, and I never got around to pitching it to anyone else. But even if they had bought it, I would have been out of work today; they just dismissed all their columnists because, apparently, […]
I won’t be a formal participant in National Novel Writing Month — indeed, I’ll be spending much of November working on my script for FlashForward, the ABC TV series based on my novel of the same name. But I do think NaNoWriMo is a cool idea. Check it out. Visit The Robert J. Sawyer Web […]
Fascinating stuff from The Paleoantrhopology Society: Dear Fellow Paleoanthropologists: We write to bring your attention to a matter which impacts strongly on all our research. You may be aware that in recent years, there has been a push by some Quaternary stratigraphers to redefine the Pliocene-Pleistocene boundary from its accepted position at ca. 1.8 Ma […]
I’m the cover boy on the current issue of the Thornhill Post, a monthly publication distributed for free to affluent homes and in street-corner boxes in Thornhill, Ontario. Thornhill is just north of Toronto. I don’t live there anymore, but I did when my first novel Golden Fleece came out; and I did when I […]
See here. Visit The Robert J. Sawyer Web Siteand WakeWatchWonder.com
