Robert J. Sawyer

When the chips are down (kind of a pun in this context …), SF fandom always comes through: there will indeed be an Internet lounge at Worldcon this year. Details

See here for the full review by John Joseph Adams. An excerpt: … kudos to Robert J. Sawyer for making this book available via his imprint at Red Deer Press. Books like this one remind us that the small press is of vital importance to the field, and remind us that it’s up to us, […]

Left to right: Stewart Brand of the Long Now Foundation, Google co-founder Larry Page, and SF writer Greg Bear at Rob’s brainstorming session Yes, it’s officially true: my life rocks! I spent this past weekend (August 11-13, 2006) at the Googleplex, the headquarters of Google, in Mountain View, California. I was a participant at Science […]

My friend Don Wilkat drew this to my attention, from today’s Globe and Mail — one misplaced comma in a contract that ended up costing a company millions of dollars.

I’m off on Tuesday for a trip that will ultimately take me to Califonia for a meeting with my film agent — and one of his favorites of my books is Flashforward. And so, for this week’s Monday spotlight — a day early! — a few words about writing Flashforward.

Maclean’s: Canada’s Weekly Newsmagazine asked me to recommend a book for this summer. My pick appears on page 83 of the August 14, 2006, double issue, now on sale. Here’s what I had to say: Summer is the perfect time for people watching — on the beach, at the mall, in the park. Nothing makes […]

Another rave for Nick DiChario‘s A Small and Remarkable Life, published under my Robert J. Sawyer Books imprint. The review is from SciFi Dimensions. The review concludes, “This is a pearl of a first novel; DiChario rocks.” As editor, I couldn’t agree more.

That provocative question was the springboard for my 1995 novel The Terminal Experiment, which went on to win the Nebula Award: how do we decide whens someone is gone for good, so that it’s appropriate to harvest their organs. Here’s a snippet from that book:      “Let’s go,” said Mamikonian.      A nurse moved in and injected […]

And a Toronto connection, to boot. 

Being an author is kinda cool sometimes. :) Today I got recognized not once, not twice, but three times in public — a record to date. It happened first at BestBuy, where a sales associate in the computer department told me how much he’d enjoyed my books, including Factoring Humanity and Calculating God. Then it […]

Just learned that my Rollback will be the SciFi Essential Book for April 2007. Cool!

Charming, I’d say! :) A bigger version (PDF) is here. This issue — dated October — is on sale now, and contains the first of four parts of the serialization of Rollback. The cover art is by John Allemand, and the cover design is by Victoria Green.

In another conversation elsewhere, I’ve been reminded of an old interview I did for the Canadian SF magazine Challenging Destiny. This one’s a transcription of a recorded interview, so it’s kinda loose reading, but it’s still interesting. Oh, and just for the record, nowhere does it say that the science in science fiction is actually […]

I’m delighted to announce that I will be the Edna Staebler Writer in Residence at the Kitchener (Ontario) Public Library this fall. I will be doing free appraisals/critiques of manuscripts of all types, and having private one-on-one hour long consultations with the authors of the works submitted. I’ll also be leading a couple of workshops […]

Over at Meme Therapy, they have this Brain Parade going on, exploring this topic: Science fiction isn’t a predictive tool. Do you agree with that statement? And if so why do we fuss over plausibility in science fiction? The question is illustrated with the picture above of a Star Trek communicator — but there’s no […]

I’ll be interviewed live today on 1370 Connection on WXXI 1370 AM, the National Public Radio affiliate in Rochester, New York. You can listen live here. I go on at 12:10 p.m. Eastern time (9:10 a.m. on the West Coast).

Steven H. Silver has weighed in very kindly on Nick DiChario’s A Small and Remarkable Life, the latest title from my Robert J. Sawyer Books imprint. You can read Steven’s review here.

I’m a huge fan of this free TrueType font, provided by Hewlett Packard as an alternative to the spindly Courier New that comes with Windows. Manuscripts are still routinely done in Courier, and this version is much easier on the eyes.

I finally got my programming schedule for L.A.con IV, the World Science Fiction Convention in Los Angeles. You can see it here.

I mistakenly said it was yesterday in an earlier post. The deadline is tonight at midnight Pacific time. If you’re a Worldcon member, you can vote here. You’ll need both your membership number and your voting PIN, which should be on any progress report (or envelope that contained same) for the convention. Your voting PIN […]

For this weeks’ Monday Spotlight, highlighting one of the 500+ documents on my website at sfwriter.com, I offer this tribute to Fred Gambino, one of the finest artists working in SF today.

Lou Anders has done up a very nice blog post about the Campbell Conference that took place last month in Kansas. You can read it here.

Hugo Award ballots must be cast by midnight PACIFIC time today. They can be cast here. Today’s also the last day for getting my Hugo-nominated novella “Identity Theft” for free from me, or from Fictionwise. If you want it, download it now from here.

Lou Anders has a fascinating discussion going on his blog about the state of science fiction. See his posts (and the comments to them) here and here. I just posted almost 900 words over there on this topic, and thought I’d share them here as well: We often hear references in discussions like these (as […]

I was asked the above question a couple of years ago by a guy writing a book with practical advice for unusual situations. I never heard back from him, and don’t know what happened to the book, but here’s my answer: What to do if an alien shows up in your living room: First, in […]

Talebones has just posted a nice review of my novel Mindscan, using such terms as “extremely satisfying” and “excellent.” You can read it here (you may have to scroll down as they add more reviews, although right now it’s in their “top five” featured on the main page).

That’s me standing up yesterday at Fort York in Toronto, site of one of the big battles of the War of 1812. I was guest speaker at the “Junior Authors” summer camp hosted by the Harbourfront Centre, home of the world-famous International Festival of Authors. I had great fun talking to a dozen young people, […]

So, the wonderful Chris from Bakka-Phoenix, Toronto’s science fiction bookstore, called today with a classic good-news/bad-news bit. The good news was that the October 2006 issue of Analog, featuring the first of four serialization installments of my latest novel, Rollback, arrived at the store today. The bad news was that instead of their usual order […]

For those reading the serialization of my novel Rollback in Analog, which has just begun (with the October issue), I’d be very grateful if you’d let me know about any typos you might spot. I can still get them fixed in the Tor hardcover, coming next year. My email address is sawyer at sfwriter dot […]

I haven’t seen it yet myself, but it’s been reported in my Yahoo! Groups newsgroup that the October 2006 issue of Analog, which contains part one of my serialized novel Rollback, is now out on newsstands, at least in Ohio. Woohoo!