Robert J. Sawyer

Hugo and Nebula Award-Winning Science Fiction Writer

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Next tour stops: Vancouver and Calgary

Wednesday, April 15th, 2009

Next up on the book tour for Wake: stops in Vancouver and Calgary. Come on out and say hello! Bookstore SigningWhite Dwarf Books3715 West 10th AvenueVancouver, British ColumbiaMonday, April 20, 2009, 7:00 p.m.http://www.deadwrite.com/wd.html Bookstore SigningSentry Box1835-10th Ave SWCalgary, AlbertaTuesday, April 21, 2009, 7:00 p.m.www.sentrybox.com The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

Autographed copies of Wake at Mysterious Galaxy soon

Wednesday, April 15th, 2009

Mysterious Galaxy, the wonderful science-fiction specialty bookstore in San Diego, California, shipped a carton of 24 copies of my Wake to Borderlands Books in San Francisco, where I was reading on Monday, April 13, and I autographed them all, so you’ll soon be able to get signed copies there, too. Yay! The Robert J. Sawyer […]

Rob in San Francisco on Monday

Saturday, April 11th, 2009

Robert J. Sawyer will be reading and signing Wake at Borderlands Books in San Francisco this Monday, April 13, 2009, at 7:00 p.m.: Borderlands Books866 Valencia StreetSan Francisco, CaliforniaMonday, April 13, 2009, 7:00 p.m. Other Wake book-tour events The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

Canadian SF writer John Mireau is podcasting his fiction

Thursday, April 9th, 2009

Check out John’s podcast “Serving Worlds” here. The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

When am I supposed to sleep?

Thursday, April 9th, 2009

Today started at midnight, of course — and at 12:30 a.m., I was on the air, doing a live half-hour radio interview with Peter Anthony Holder, simultaneously on CJAD-AM in Montreal and CFRB-AM in Toronto. Just eight hours later, I was back on the air again, this time for a full-hour on The Mike Shinabery […]

The Earth says hello

Thursday, April 9th, 2009

Good morning starshineThe earth says helloYou twinkle above usWe twinkle below Good morning starshineYou lead us alongMy love and me as we singOur early morning singing song Gliddy glub gloopyNibby nabby noopyLa la la lo loSabba sibby sabbaNooby abba nabbaLe le lo loTooby ooby wallaNooby abba nabaEarly morning singing song Good morning starshineThe earth says […]

Email woes — some messages lost

Tuesday, April 7th, 2009

If you wrote to me, and haven’t heard back — I apologize! My Yahoo! Mail account has been eating some of my email; I don’t know why. (It hasn’t just been misfiling it as spam; it’s actually just not showing up in the account at all.) All email to my sfwriter.com domain gets mirrored to […]

Dragonmaster

Tuesday, April 7th, 2009

I’m always delighted when one of my writing students has success, and I’m thrilled to announce that the wonderful Karleen Bradford has a new book! Karleen was my student for a week at the Banff Centre in September 2005. Dragonmaster is the third book in her celebrated “Taun Series” from HarperCollins’s young-adult HarperTrophy imprint. Way […]

Phil Currie in the news

Tuesday, March 17th, 2009

My friend the great Canadian paleontologist Phil Currie is interviewed by the BBC today about Hesperonychus, the smallest meat-eating dinosaur yet to be found in North America. The story is here Phil’s a big SF fan, and is mentioned in Calculating God. The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

Even SciFi doesn’t like the term "sci-fi"

Monday, March 16th, 2009

Old-timers in the science-fiction field hate the term “sci-fi,” considering it derogatory; they insist the preferred abbreviation is “SF.” Me, I gave up the fight when the US cable network devoted to the genre chose to call itself SciFi. (And, in fact, the hardcover of my Rollback was branded with the SciFi logo on the […]

Crypto-Gram

Sunday, March 15th, 2009

My buddy Bruce Schneier — cryptographer, security specialist, incisive commentator — does a free monthly newsletter called Crypto-Gram. Well worth signing up for — which you can do right here. His books — including the most-recent one, Schneier on Security, shown above — are also always worth reading. (Oh, and he’ll be on 60 Minutes […]

Craptions on the Pioneer 10 plaque

Sunday, March 15th, 2009

Cracked magazine puts up a photo or image every day at 3:00 p.m. Eastern time, and invites people to write funny captions (or “Craptions”) for it. Today’s image is the Pioneer 10 plaque, and some of the craptions are hysterical. Check it out. The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

All the Hugo and Nebula winners: just $116,530

Friday, March 13th, 2009

My friend David Aronovitz has just listed a one-of-a-kind library of first editions on ABE.com: all the Hugo and Nebula Award winning novels, first editions, 95% of them signed or inscribed. Wow! See here. I very fondly remember visiting David’s house in Michigan in January 2004, and having a tour of his amazing collection of […]

Audrey Niffenegger gets $5 million for her next novel

Thursday, March 12th, 2009

And you know what? She deserves it. Her The Time Traveler’s Wife is one of the best science-fiction novels I’ve ever read. The New York Times has the scoop. The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

High-school SF course — w00t!

Thursday, March 12th, 2009

Man! Why couldn’t they have offered courses like this when I was in high school? In the 2009-2010 academic year, a teacher named David Rice at North Park Collegiate in Brantford, Ontario, is offering a “Studies in Literature” course on science fiction. The class will do two core novels — the Hugo Award-winning Hominids by […]

Jeanne Robinson surgery

Thursday, March 12th, 2009

My dear friend Hugo winner Jeanne Robinson is recovering from surgery. Husband Spider has the scoop here. Spider ends with, “And God bless Tommy Douglas, who created Canada’s socialized medicine.” Amen to that, brother. Amen. And best wishes to Jeanne! The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

A good day for royalties

Monday, March 9th, 2009

Nice checks from my agent today for royalties from Audible.com and my Spanish publisher Ediciones B, plus the Korean advance for End of an Era. W00T! The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

7 dinosaurs you could take in a fight

Monday, March 9th, 2009

Hee hee hee. See Cracked.com. The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

BBC Online interviews Rob and Brother Guy on Kepler Mission

Thursday, March 5th, 2009

Check it out right here. The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

CTV in trouble

Saturday, February 28th, 2009

CTV is the parent corporation of Space (Canada’s science-fiction specialty channel) and Discovery Channel Canada. The are predicting a $100 million loss from their broadcast TV operations this year. The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

Consumer protection laws and cell phones

Friday, February 27th, 2009

Yeah, yeah, we all know Rob’s into big government :) so feel free to tune this out, but here’s a guy who just got a $6,000 phone bill for using his iPhone in Mexico. And, yeah, sure, we can all smugly argue that this particular guy should have known better — but stories like this […]

I love Barenaked Ladies

Wednesday, February 25th, 2009

They broke up today. Steve Page, the lead singer, has left the band “to pursue a solo career.” The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

The Saucer Fleet

Wednesday, February 25th, 2009

OMG, if you like 1950s and 1960s SF movies and TV shows as much as I do, you have to run and buy The Saucer Fleet by Jack Hagerty and Jon Rogers. It’s a painstaking, loving, profusely illustrated tribute to the great screen flying saucers of SF: the C57-D from Forbidden Planet, the Jupiter 2 […]

Sequels "R" Us

Sunday, February 22nd, 2009

There’s a mini writing retreat going on at Chez Sawyer right now, and it’s all about sequels. Hayden Trenholm is here, visiting from Ottawa, and he’s working on his laptop at my kitchen table, sprinting towards the end of his revisions on Steel Whispers, the terrific sequel to his hard-boiled SF novel Defining Diana from […]

25 Random Things About Me

Tuesday, February 17th, 2009

Over on Facebook, there’s a meme going around about posting “25 Random Things” about yourself, and tagging 25 other people to do the same. I didn’t tag anyone else, but here’s the list I posted today: 1. I am, by birth, a dual US-Canadian citizen. 2. My childhood imaginary friend wasn’t a person or an […]

Shifting emphasis

Monday, February 16th, 2009

An interesting shift over the last little while at Locus Online. Its subtitle has always been “The Website of The Magazine of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Field,” but that used to be best read as “The Website of The Magazine of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Field” — that is, the site was updated […]

The end of the Writer’s Digest Book Club?

Saturday, February 14th, 2009

Twenty-six years ago, on January 4, 1983, I joined the Writer’s Digest Book Club. I bought a lot of books from them over the years — my friend book-collector Jack Brooks once remarked, looking at bookcases in my home, that I had the largest private collection of books about writing he’d ever seen. I let […]

Another nice bit of fan mail

Friday, February 13th, 2009

Woot! Go me! Well, it’s been almost a year and I have finished reading the last of your books and short stories. I’ve read every single one! I’m writing to tell you how much I have enjoyed them all. Your characters are believable. The science in the stories is fascinating. I love the philosophical and […]

The Book Lover’s Ball …

Friday, February 13th, 2009

… was a great success. I bought a tuxedo, so I wouldn’t have to keep renting one: More on The Book Lover’s Ball. The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

To quote Carl Sagan …

Thursday, February 12th, 2009

“Evolution is not a theory — it’s a fact. It really happened.” Happy 200th birthday, Charles Darwin. You gave us the most profound truth in all of science (and therefore the most profound truth of all). Relativity was interesting, in an abstract way; the Copernican revolution, likewise. But that species originate through natural selection speaks […]