Robert J. Sawyer

Just got word that Ad Astra, Toronto’s general SF convention, has set its 2007 dates: it will be March 2-4, 2007. Mark your calendars! We’ll be launching Phyllis Gotlieb’s new book there.

For this week’s Monday Spotlight, highlighting one of the 500+ documents on my website at sfwriter.com, I offer up this compendium of information about Alpha Centuari, which I kept handing while creating my 1997 novel Illegal Alien.

TVOntario has cancelled both More2Life and Studio 2. I was a frequent guest on the former, and an occasional guest on the latter. Both shows were great at promoting books and authors. My last appearance on More2Life was on June 20, 2006. I’m very sad about this. Mary Ito and her staff were absolute joys […]

My Hugo Award-nominated short story “Shed Skin” — which was the basis for my novel Mindscan — has been professionally produced as a 47-minute audio book by Deuce Audio, read very nicely by Stephen Hoye. You can get it for $2.99 from a variety of vendors: Fictionwise (MP3 standard or high-quality formats) Telltale Weekly (MP3, […]

I am honoured and thrilled to have just acquired the latest novel by Phyllis Gotlieb for my Robert J. Sawyer Books imprint. In the 1960s, Phyllis was the only significant Canadian science fiction writer; in a profile of her in Maclean’s, I was quoted as calling her “the grandmother of us all.” Her most-recent book […]

Today is the eleventh anniversary of my website going online — yes, it’s older than Amazon.com! My site at sfwriter.com has over 530 documents, over one million words of text, and over 25,000 internal hyperlinks. “The largest genre writer’s home page in existence.” —Interzone “Widely believed to have been the first science fiction author site.” […]

The current issue of Here’s How!, a Canadian consumer-electronics magazine that’s given away for free at various retailers, has a full-page interview with me (with nice photo) about blogging. You can get Here’s How! for free at: Bay Bloor Radio, Black’s Photography, Compusmart, East Hamilton Radio, foto source, Future Shop, Henry’s Cameras, Kromer Radio, London […]

That’s the title of a new interview with me by Giampietro Stocco of Genoa, Italy, which is now online here in English (and his English-language homepage is here).

In editor Mark Leslie’s blog.

A number of people have drawn this BBC science story to my attention, which reports on the discovery of what might be a human necklace, and might be 90,000 or 100,000 years old. In my “Neanderthal Parallax” trilogy (beginning with Hominids), I make much of the so-called “Great Leap Forward” — the notion that modern […]

SF/F/related conventions in Toronto this year (2006): Ad Astra (general SF) FilkOntario (filk-singing) Anime North (anime — and by far the largest of the cons) Corflu (fanzines) Gaylaxicon (gay-friendly general SF con) The Gathering of the Fellowship (Lord of the Rings — this coming weekend) TT (Toronto Trek) SFX (Science Fiction Expo — with Shatner […]

As some of you know, my upcoming novel Rollback is dedicated to my great friend, the late Robyn Herrington, and Robyn is also in that book’s acknowledgments. Robyn died two years ago, after a long battle with cancer. Well, I just got a copy of my friend Dave Duncan‘s first Tor novel, Children of Chaos […]

I’m going to be busy all day tomorrow, so here’s this week’s Monday spotlight, highlighting one of the 500+ documents on my website at sfwriter.com, a few hours early … In August, I’m heading out to Calgary for Con-Version 22, this year’s installment of one of my favourite SF conventions. One of this year’s guests […]

My friend Dennis Pettit (after whom Afsan’s apprentice Pettit in Foreigner is named) just drew this Planetary Society radio program to my attention; it first aired on June 12, 2006, and is now available for download and as an MP3 podcast. The show includes an interview with Dr. Art McDonald of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory. […]

The coolest thing ever … A fellow named Patrick J. O’Connor, who lives in Chicago, made this wonderful globe for me of the Quintaglio home world from my novels Far-Seer, Fossil Hunter, and Foreigner. Sitting on the base are two figures of Afsan: on the left, he’s young as he is at the beginning of […]

I’ll be a guest on TVOntario’s More 2 Life with Mary Ito tomorrow, Thursday, June 22, 2006, for their “Mind Over Matter” segment. The show airs from 2:00 to 3:00 p.m. TVOntario is the public broadcaster in Ontario, Canada; on most cable systems, it’s channel 2. This is my ninth appearance on More 2 Life […]

My op-ed piece for The Ottawa Citizen about space colonization is now online here.  

I’ve been getting a spate of submissions to Robert J. Sawyer Books, the line of books I edit for Calgary’s Red Deer Press, and almost all of them are unsuitable, meaning the submission was a waste of the author’s time and mine. If you want to submit to my line (or any other publisher’s line), […]

There will be a launch party for the anthology North of Infinity II edited by Mark Leslie at Bakka-Phoenix in Toronto, Saturday, June 24, 2006, at 3:00 p.m. Full details are in this Word document and this entry in Mark’s blog. My story “Forever” appears in this anthology, and I’ll be at the launch.

Toronto is a great city to visit in the summer — and for those who think Canada is cold, I’ll point out that it was 34 Celsius / 93 Fahrenheit here yesterday. Back in 2002, I was asked by the people putting together the then-upcoming World Science Fiction Convention in Toronto to write up a […]

The Science Fiction Research Association publishes a wonderful newsletter called SFRA Review, filled with reviews and critical articles about science fiction. Every issue from 2001 to 2005 is available as a PDF for free here (scroll down). These particular issues have very interesting reviews of books by me: Calculating God: #253 (July-August 2001). PDF document. […]

Just a polite reminder that the voting deadline for this year’s Aurora Awards is June 26. I’m nominated in all three pro categories, a very rare occurrence for anyone: Best Long-Form English for Mindscan. Best Short-Form English for “Identity Theft,” which you can read here. Best Other English for “Birth,” the radio drama I did […]

My Op-Ed piece in The Ottawa Citizen on Stephen Hawking has been bumped to next Tuesday, June 20.

Those of you in Ottawa (Canada’s capital city) might want to pick up the The Ottawa Citizen newspaper this Saturday, June 17, 2006. I have an op-ed piece in there about Stephen Hawking’s suggestion earlier this week that humanity needs to establish space colonies in order to ensure the survival of the species. (In Canada, […]

I’ll be doing two readings in Montreal this fall: Monday, October 16, 2006, at 6:30 p.m.Fraser-Hickson Library4855 Kensington AvenueMontreal, Quebec H3X 3S6 (514) 489-5301 Tuesday, October 17, 2006, at 6:30 p.m.Jewish Public Library1, carre Cummings Square (5151 Ste Ste-Catherine)Montreal, Quebec H3W 1M6(514) 345-2627 The two readings are sponsored by the Canada Council for the Arts […]

I’m doing a hastily arranged series of by-phone radio interviews for CBC Radio One this afternoon, to talk about Stephen Hawking’s idea, presented in Hong Kong on Tuesday, that humanity must move into space to save itself. Most of these are being recorded, at the Toronto times indicated; they’ll air once edited later in the […]

As anyone who has read my novels knows, I’m a huge Classic Star Trek fan. Today, I stumbled across one of the most interesting sites I’ve ever seen about the fine details fo the original show. Check out Star Trek History to see what the Tholian and the Melkotian actually looked like, lots of great […]

Busy three days, all related to BookExpo Canada. On Saturday, Danita Maslan, author of the novel Rogue Harvest, which I published under my Robert J. Sawyer Books imprint, flew to Toronto from Calgary, and Carolyn and I picked her up at the airport. Saturday night, we hosted a reception for the authors I’ve published under […]

A new interview with me has just gone online at Meme Therapy: Life From a Science Fiction Point of View.

I’ve been involved in a lot of discussions lately about potential panels for the science-fiction Con-Version 22 in Calgary this August. I have a long-standing special relationship with Con-Version: I was Author Guest at the mini-con Con-Version 21.5 held last summer in conjunction with Westercon, Canadian Guest of Honour at Con-Version 20, Toastmaster at Con-Version […]