The latest progress report for L.A. Con IV (the Los Angeles Worldcon) will be going out shortly. SAVE THE ENVELOPE, PLEASE! You’ll need the Personal Identification Number from the mailing label in order to vote for the Hugos online. (U.S. progress reports don’t go in envelopes, but the ones to Canada do — which means […]
Aurora Award nominating is now over, but Dennis Mullin has at last posted a “provisional” list of potentially eligible works.
Penguin Canada has just published The Penguin Dictionary of Popular Canadian Quotations, edited by John Robert Colombo. To my absolute delight, 23 quotations from my writings appear in the book, on topics such as “Privacy,” “Humanity,” “Immortality,” “Gods,” “The Moon,” “Society,” and, of course, “Science Fiction.” (Not that anyone’s counting, but Margaret Atwood is only […]
Today, Monday, April 24, 2006, I finished final revisions on my seventeenth novel, Rollback. I started the book on Monday, May 16, 2005 (just shy of one year ago), and did a total of six drafts. Unusually for me, the book got shorter as time went on — I cut 10,000 words while preparing the […]
I spent a fair bit of time this past week on stuff related to various potential TV/film adaptations of my novels and short stories, as well as looking at a media project somebody else wanted me to be involved with. And that put me amind of a pitch I put together six years ago to […]
One reason I was particularly disappointed to miss Eeriecon was that I was looking forward to talking shop with colleagues I don’t see often enough, including Guests of Honor Harry Turtledove, Tanya Huff, and Esther Freisner, and other fine con-goers such as James Alan Gardner, Mark Garland, and Nancy Kress. But I did manage a […]
To my considerable sadness and frustration, I didn’t make it to Eeriecon after all. My apologies to anyone who went hoping to see me there. I hadn’t planned to arrive until Saturday evening, because Saturday morning I was giving a keynote address to the annual meeting of the Federation of State Medical Boards, which was […]
I’m always tickled pink when one of my writing students has success. Best of all was probably when my student Pat Forde was nominated for a Hugo in 2003 (for best novella, for “In Spirit,” from Analog); Pat had come to see me when I was writer-in-residence at the Richmond Hill Public Library in 2000, […]
Wow! Some major-league nice discussion of me and my book Hominids appears in the online serial “I, Death” (the link takes you to the chapter that concerns Hominids; scroll way up to the top of the page to read the serial from the beginning). The serial is dealing with rape, and Hominids is invoked for […]
I won’t show up until Saturday evening, ’cause I’ve got a speaking gig in Boston Saturday morning, but I’ll be spending Saturday night and all day Sunday this weekend at Eeriecon in Niagara Falls, New York. It’s usually a very good convention, and I recommend it.
Things I’ve done in the last day and a half: Written an 1,800-word letter to my agent. Written 900 words of responses to an email interview with a major web site about a recent award nomination. Written 700 words of responses to an email interview for a Canadian computer publication about writers and blogs. Written […]
Sorry this is a day late; I was in Seattle yesterday. As part of that trip, I visited (for the third time) the Science Fiction Museum, which is quite wonderful. But I was sad to see that the Robot from Lost in Space had been taken off display, and replaced with one of the robots […]
Vatican astronomer Brother Guy Consolmagno on CBC Radio’s Quirks and Quarks, Saturday, April 15, 2006: I love science fiction. I love reading the stuff. And I’m fascinated because it’s a way of doing thought experiments — playing “what ifs?” One of the authors who’s done a lot of this is Robert Sawyer, great Canadian author, […]
I’m writer-in-residence at Odyssey: The Fantasy Writing Workshop this summer in New Hampshire. The applicaton deadline is just two days away, hence this reminder: Odyssey Workshop
Got asked by a friend what advice I’d give his daughter on what to study at university or college in order to become a creative writer or journalist. Here’s what I had to say: My advice for someone who wants to actually make a living in creative writing (in general) or science fiction (in particular) […]
Those in Canada might be interested to know that my review of The Dance of Molecules, Ted Sargent’s nonfiction book about nanotechnology, appears in the April edition of Literary Review of Canada. My 1,200-word review begins: In 2000, Bill Joy, the chief scientist for Sun Microsystems, published his now-famous anti-technology manifesto entitled “Why The Future […]
Got asked today about the availability of my books on audio. Only one has been released so far, the Nebula Award-winning The Terminal Experiment, and you can find the audio version right here. Also, my Hugo-nominated short story “Shed Skin” is available as an MP3 here.
Michael A. Burstein pointed out this wise and intelligent blogger on LiveJournal to me: Glishara
Courtesy of Toshiko Shichiri, Chair of The 45th Japan Science Fiction Convention, known as “Michinoku SF Festival ZUNCON,” and Hirohide (Jack R.) Hirai, Staff/Overseas Relations for that convention, here are this year’s nominees for the Seiun Awards in the translated categories. Often called “the Japanese Hugos,” the Seiuns are Japan’s top honor in science-fiction writing. […]
Just finished a wonderful weekend in Calgary, attending the Spring 2006 Write-Off weekend organized by Danita Maslan for the Imaginative Fiction Writers’ Association (IFWA). I knew it was going to be a great trip, ’cause I got recognized by the staff in the bookstore at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport, and asked to sign stock, which […]
Some kind soul has arranged for this blog of mine to be syndicated to LiveJournal. If you prefer to read it there, add this page to your LJ Friends List.
My friend Andrew Weiner forwarded this bit of humor to me from The Onion: Science-Fiction Novel Posits Future Where Characters Are Hastily Sketched
From my friend bookseller Dan Foster: “On Wednesday of this week at two minutes and three seconds after 1:00 in the morning, the time and date will be 01:02:03 04/05/06.” (Dan’s an American; in Canada and most of the rest of the world, which logically writes dates as day/month/year, the magic date will be May […]
Woohoo! I just got the go-ahead to commission an all-new cover painting by five-time Aurora Award-winning artist Jean-Pierre Normand for the trade-paperback reissue of Karl Schroeder’s The Engine of Recall, which we published last year in hardcover under my Robert J. Sawyer Books imprint. Jean-Pierre has done covers for Analog, Asimov’s, and On Spec. You […]
Got it! The ape head package is quite large; maybe 3/4 lifesize. Look at the picture above, with the DVDs in front — that gives you an idea of the scale. The head is well made, but to me it just doesn’t look like Caesar; the likeness in the much, much smaller (6″ body height) […]
Just got back from Ad Astra, Toronto’s annual SF convention. As usual, there was much SMOFing about the Aurora Awards (SMOF: Secret Master of Fandom, a person who is influential behind the scenes in fanish activities), and so I thought it might be time to dust off this piece I wrote back in 1997 entitled […]
Ad Astra — Toronto’s science-fiction convention — celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary this past weekend. I had a terrific time. Highlights included the launch of Nick DiChario’s book A Small and Remarkable Life, a wonderful lunch with members of my Yahoo! Groups discussion group, another wonderful lunch with Del Rey editor-in-chief Betsy Mitchell, seeing old friend […]
Curious about the future of ebook-reading devices? This is the site you should read.
We had the launch party tonight for Nick DiChario‘s first novel, A Small and Remarkable Life, the latest (and fifth) title under my Robert J. Sawyer Books imprint. Damn, but the book looks gorgeous — and we had cover flats for the new trade-paperback editions of Marcos Donnelly’s Letters from the Flesh and Andrew Weiner’s […]
