Ten years ago today: Sally Ride, the first American woman in space — an inspiration to a generation, a true patriot and hero — died. Sally Ride was a lesbian. Sally Ride’s partner of 27 years, Tam O’Shaughnessy, was ineligible for survivor benefits because Tam happens to be a woman. Supreme Court of the United […]
Fifty-five years ago, we got our first good look at the surface of Mars — a photo that figures prominently in my new novel The Oppenheimer Alternative. As I said five years ago, on the 50th anniversary of this picture from Mariner IV:Possibly the saddest science photo ever. Our first close-up look at Mars, from Mariner 4, […]
75th Anniversary of the Birth of the Atomic Age Book an Expert Interview! Award-winning author ROBERT J. SAWYER has over 800 radio and TV interviews under his belt The atomic age was born 75 years ago in 1945. Commemorate these important anniversaries with an expert interview subject:Thursday, July 16, 2020: 75 years since the first […]
Today is the 90th birthday of SETI pioneer Frank Drake. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Frank several times, and his work makes an appearance in The Oppeheimer Alternative:“Yeah, that wouldn’t be so bad.” Feynman held up the latest Astronomical Journal, dated October 1959. “But Frank Drake’s got a note in here. He found decimetric […]
Today is the 50th anniversary of the release of Beneath the Planet of the Apes, the second film in the series. I gain more respect for that film on each viewing. There were production choices, dictated by budget I suppose, that bothered me when I first saw it as a kid: the use of so […]
Robyn Meta Herrington, active member of both SFWA and SF Canada, passed away fifteen years ago today, on Monday morning, May 3, 2004, in Calgary, Alberta, after a courageous multi-year battle with cancer. Robyn’s short fiction appeared in such places as On Spec, Talebones, Adventures of Sword and Sorcery, Parsec, and in Mike Resnick‘s DAW […]
A piece I finished five years ago today, on April 15, 2012, for the blog of Gollancz, my UK publisher: Triggers, FlashForward, and Me by Robert J. Sawyer Thanks to the good people at Gollancz, I was recently interviewed in SFX, the world’s top-selling English-language magazine devoted to science fiction. I spoke in that interview […]
Forty years ago, on August 16, 1976, I made my first submission to a science-fiction magazine. I was sixteen years old. I submitted a story called “Loophole” to a small-press magazine called Unearth: The Magazine of Science Fiction Discoveries, edited by John M. Landsberg and Jonathan Ostrowsky-Lantz. I had almost no recollection of “Loophole” until I […]
Forty years ago today, the fabulous fan-run convention TORONTO STAR TREK ’76 began at the Royal York Hotel. Here’s one of the flyers for the con (Nichelle Nichols and Mark Lenard, listed as only “invited” on this flyer, actually did come — as did the entire cast, except for Shatner, Nimoy, and Kelley). One of […]
