Today in Gainesville, there’s a celebration of Barbara Haldeman, sister-in-law to Joe Haldeman and the widow of Joe’s late brother, Jack.I can’t be there, but I’m thinking fondly about my friend Barbara today. Those, like me, who used to frequent the CompuServe Science Fiction and Fantasy Forum may remember her as Barbara Delaplace, where she […]
For this article in Canada’s National Post newspaper, Books editor Mark Medley asked me about killing my characters. Here’s what I had to say: My brother Alan died this past summer. I got a call from my sister-in-law telling me he was slipping away, and I grabbed the first plane back to Toronto from Montreal, […]
My younger brother Alan Bruce Sawyer passed away Saturday night. He was born September 12, 1961, in Toronto, and died in that city June 8, 2013, at the age of 51. Alan was diagnosed with lung cancer last September [2012], and by the time it was diagnosed, it had already metastasized to his brain, abdomen, […]
Great writer, great person. A real loss. Visit The Robert J. Sawyer Web Siteand WakeWatchWonder.com
Henry Gibson died this week as well; people today probably knew him best for his recurring role as a virginal judge on Boston Legal, but to people my age or older, he was best known for his poetry on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, which I watched often with my parents in the 1960s. Anyway, it […]
One of the things I inherited from my parents is a love of folk music. I am a huge Pete Seeger fan, and also greatly admired Peter, Paul and Mary. (In fact, this no doubt had an influence on the kind of writer I turned out to be. One school of writing says, if you […]
The Rocky Mountain News, a major daily newspaper in Denver, Colorado, one of the few US dailies to routinely and intelligently review science-fiction novels over the years, is gone. Mark Graham, the usual SF reviewer there, had been very kind to me. For instance, on Calculating God, he wrote: “I always look forward to Robert […]
Eric McMillan, the Chair of Skeptics Canada, reports: With great sorrow, we report that Henry Gordon has passed away. Henry was a professional magician, journalist, book author, and leading Canadian skeptic. He was a founder and chair of the Ontario Skeptics, a precursor to Skeptics Canada, for which he remained chair emeritus and a respected […]
All the press coverage about the passing today of the very talented Ricardo Montalbán is mentioning his work on Fantasy Island and Star Trek. And, of course, I loved his portrayal of Khan. But you know what his best work was? The role of Señor Armando in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, the […]
“Where am I?” “In the Village.” “What do you want?” “Information.” “Whose side are you on?” “That would be telling. We want information. Information! Information!” “You won’t get it.” “By hook or by crook, we will.” “Who are you?” “The new Number Two.” “Who is Number One?” “You are Number Six.” “I am not a […]
Monday, April 22, 1996: Carolyn and I arrive in Los Angeles for a few days of vacation leading up to the Nebula Awards ceremony. Went to NBC, but arrived too late to get tickets to The Tonight Show and so we drove around in our rental car, looking for somewhere to eat, and found a […]
Last week, I posted my comments on the American Film Institute’s list of the top-10 SF films, and suggested some of my own substitutions for that list. That list only went to ten places, but one that’s on my own list of the top 20 SF films is Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Seriously. If […]
Baby, if you’ve ever wondered,Wondered whatever became of me,I’m living on the air in Cincinnati.Cincinnati, WKRP. Got kind of tired of packing and unpacking,Town to town, up and down the dial.Baby, you and me were never meant to be,But maybe think of me once in a while. The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
In the introduction to my short story “Star Light, Star Bright,” which appears in my first collection, Iterations, I wrote: In 1997, I happened to run into WKRP in Cincinnati star Gordon Jump at a deli in Los Angeles; I introduced myself by saying I wanted to shake the hand of the man who had […]
A fixture of Toronto SF fandom, and a mainstay of the science-fiction club U.S.S. Hudson Bay, Eric Layman passed away recently. A poet and a thinker, Eric could be cantankerous, but he was always courtly toward my mother, who sometimes attended meetings of that same club. He won an Aurora Award in 2004 for his […]
For over thirty years, my family had a vacation home near Rochester, New York, and I got pretty plugged into the literary community down there. And the grand old man of Rochester letters was Edward D. Hoch — a real gentleman, and a very fine writer. Peter Sellers and I published a story by him […]
My Robert J. Sawyer Books imprint is published by Red Deer Press, which, in turn, is owned by Fitzhenry and Whiteside, a long-established, mid-sized Canadian publisher, run by Sharon Fitzhenry, daughter of co-founder Robert I. Fitzhenry. Sharon’s dad just passed away. There would be no Robert J. Sawyer Books — and a lot less Canadian publishing in […]
Canadian actor Percy Rodriguez — known to Classic Star Trek fans as Commodore Stone from “Court-Martial” — has passed away. It’s hard to overstate the impact in 1967 of having Captain Kirk’s superior officer be a black man, and the absolute authority and dignity Rodriguez brought to the part was perfect. I’m sorry to see […]
Those of you who’ve read my Mindscan may remember this scene that takes place shortly after Jake has his consciousness copied into an artificial body: I went to see Dr. Porter about the problem with thoughts I intended to keep private being spoken aloud. “Ah, yes,” he said, nodding. “I’ve seen that before. I can […]
Air Canada managed to get me on a later flight, after my earlier flight from Vancouver was canceled because of an impending snow storm in Toronto, and so I’m now home safe and sound in freezing Mississauga (quite a contrast to the balmy weather in Victoria). I’ve been on the road for five days, but […]
I am a huge fan of the Mamas and the Papas, and usually have a CD of theirs in my CD changer. Denny Doherty, the Canadian member of the group, passed away on Friday, here in Mississauga. He was far too young to go; just 66. I was telling a friend just a couple of […]
Those who bother to read the Acknowledgements in my novels may have notice the name Howard Miller there; it’s in just about every novel of mine starting with The Terminal Experiment (and will be in the Acknowledgments of my upcoming novel Rollback). Howard read and commented on those books prior to publication, as well as […]
