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
Just recorded interviews for Bravo! Canada’s The O’Regan Files with Seamus O’Regan (above) — for a full half-hour installment of the program — and for CTV’s ETalk. Not sure when they’ll air. Visit The Robert J. Sawyer Web Siteand WakeWatchWonder.com
The CBC Book Club has interviews with the CBC’s Joe Mahoney and Mark Askwith of Space: The Imagination Station about their relationships with me, along with their recommendations for SF books by authors other than me. Check ’em out: Mark Askwith Joe Mahoney Photo above: Mark Askwith interviews Robert J. Sawyer live on stage at […]
See here. ISFiC Press is the publisher of my collection Relativity. Visit The Robert J. Sawyer Web Siteand WakeWatchWonder.com
I’ll be in Canada A.M. — Canada’s most-watched morning show — tomorrow (Tuesday) at 8:40 a.m. The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Thanks to my friend Virginia O’Dine for this very funny link. Visit The Robert J. Sawyer Web Siteand WakeWatchWonder.com
Karl Schroeder, one of my SF writing colleagues here in Toronto, had first-hand experience with Canadian health care recently, and is blogging about it here. Visit The Robert J. Sawyer Web Siteand WakeWatchWonder.com
This is fascinating: imagine seeing colours you have never seen before. “Gene Cure” for Colour Blindness (As some will recall, colour blindness figures in the plot of my novel Mindscan, and the plasticity of the brain is key to my novel Wake.) Visit The Robert J. Sawyer Web Siteand WakeWatchWonder.com
… and President Barack Obama was perfectly within his rights to call him that (when asked about West’s conduct). If Obama had called West an “asshole,” maybe that would be marginally newsworthy, but none of the dictionaries I’ve checked flag “jackass” as objectionable, of questionable taste, or obscene. “Jackass” refers to a donkey, not an […]
An email I received today about Final Draft, a popular scriptwriting program. The version I use, 6, is about to have tech support discontinued, which I don’t mind. But I do mind this: Because authorizing version 6 is very much a technical matter, this service will also be discontinued on December 23rd. You will still […]
At Astronomy Picture of the Day, over here. Cool! Visit The Robert J. Sawyer Web Siteand WakeWatchWonder.com
… and, really, that means that each year there are two Hugos given for books, one for fiction and one for nonfiction (for instance, the year my novel Hominids won the Hugo, Better to Have Loved, the wonderful biography of Judith Merril, by Judy and her daughter Emily Pohl-Weary, also won a Hugo in the […]
A response to the person who decided to nitpick about one sentence in a 12-minute radio interview I did a week ago: An interview is a pop quiz — you have to answer live on air immediately, often about things you haven’t thought about for years. We who are brave enough to go on the […]
My great friend playwright Linda C. Carson sent me this link to an article by John Olson in The Village Voice. Given that I get asked almost every day to read someone else’s manuscript, all I can say is that Olson has nailed it exactly: it’s a terrible imposition and a no-win situation. [Update: and […]
I missed the announcement last month, because I was traveling, but there’s now an official Hugo Awards logo (shown above), which an be used on winning books (such as — cough, cough — my own Hominids). The rocket is the one standard part of the Hugo trophy design; everything else varies from year to year. […]
SF Scope has a roundup of RJS news here. Visit The Robert J. Sawyer Web Siteand WakeWatchWonder.com
My latest email newsletter, sent out today: Hello, Robert J. Sawyer reader! Here’s the latest news from Hugo and Nebula Award-winning science-fiction writer Rob Sawyer: ==== FLASHFORWARD TV SERIES PREMIERE The TV series FLASHFORWARD, based on my novel of the same name, premieres in the United States (on ABC) and Canada (on CTV’s A channels) […]
The editors of Tesseracts 14 will be John Robert Colombo and Brett Savory (Carolyn and I edited Tesseracts 6). Details are here. Visit The Robert J. Sawyer Web Siteand WakeWatchWonder.com
I was asked to comment on “the death of science fiction” today; here’s what I had to say: Science fiction isn’t dead; it’s in the witness-protection program, and thriving under a new identity. The term “science fiction” is downplayed by Hollywood and American publishing, so that movies like The Time Travelers Wife, TV shows like […]
After a Herculean effort, I am done. I critiqued 29 manuscripts when I was writer-in-residence at the Canadian Light Source, and I’ve just finished going through a dozen more (most of them 8,000 words long) for the writers’ workshop I’m running staring on Wednesday in Calgary. I’ve written the last book introduction I was committed […]
So a nice fellow wrote me, very politely, to say he had been working on a book and only recently was it pointed out to him that one of the core concepts was very similiar to something I’d written about, and would I sign off on him being able to continue with his project? My […]
“‘Let me help.’ A hundred years or so from now, I believe, a famous novelist will write a classic using that theme. He’ll recommend those three words even over ‘I love you.’” — James T. Kirk, “The City on the Edge of Forever” Visit The Robert J. Sawyer Web Siteand WakeWatchWonder.com
… on the McNally Robinson Saskatoon trade-paperback bestsellers list and Calculating God is #10 on the trade list. Meanwhile, Wake is #10 on the hardcover list, and Flash Forward is #5 on the mass-market list. Great way to end my residency at the Canadian Light Source! Current McNally Robinson Saskatoon trade-paperback bestsellers’ list: 1. Distant […]
For many years now, Seton Hill University’s Master of Arts program in Writing Popular Fiction has been one of the few places where genre-fiction writers (including those doing science fiction and fantasy, as well as romance and mystery) have been welcome in a graduate-level program in creative writing. And now, Seton Hill has upgraded its […]
