Hey, all you newsmagazines and other media outlets that did their “2006-in-review” news coverage earlier this month: Don’t you think that the execution of Saddam Hussein was one of the top news stories of 2006? Yeah, well, people looking back at your coverage would never know it. A polite request: leave writing about the future […]
CBC Television’s The Hour with George Stroumboulopoulous, which airs at 11:00 p.m. local time coast-to-coast in Canada, is doing a three-part series on the future to kick off the new year. The three segments will air Tuesday, January 2; Wednesday, January 3; and Thursday, January 4. Each segment features a different theme, and a different […]
How can you not love this show? The episode I watched today, “Gavin’s Pipe Dream,” includes an appearance near the end by Robby the Robot (an absolutely spot-on perfect recreation of the robot from Forbidden Planet). It also has a funny bit in which Christopher Lloyd’s ex-NASA-scientist, who never throws out anything that’s still good […]
My friend Kirstin Morrell drew this fascinating article entitled “How the anti-copyright lobby makes big business richer,” from The Register, to my attention. In general, it’s about how the web has been demolishing the ability of creative people to make a living; in particular, it’s a photojournalist’s perspective on that. In light of all the […]
In today’s edition of The Globe and Mail: Canada’s National Newspaper, the books section is devoted to “Books of the Year.” Among the 38 people The Globe asked to discuss their picks are yours truly, plus Jane Urquhart, Freeman Dyson, Jack Whyte, Emily Pohl-Weary (Judith Merril and Fred Pohl’s daughter), and Ronald Wright — plus […]
It was a nice Christmas this year. It was Carolyn and my turn to host the Sawyer family get-together. Among the goodies I found under the tree: * The first new series of Doctor Who on DVD * The second season of The Simpsons on DVD * The book The Trouble with Physics by my […]
Following up on this earlier blog entry of mine about cash flow, I note for the record that I received today my “on publication” portion of the advance for Boarding the Enterprise, the Star Trek essay collection I edited with David Gerrold for BenBella Books. Publication date was August 1, 2006; today was December 27, […]
I’ve watched three episodes now of Stacked, the short-lived Fox sitcom starring Pamela Anderson as an unlikely bookstore clerk, and, you know what? It’s charming, funny, cute, clever, and intelligent. The show’s characters include a failed novelist, and a physics professor (played by Taxi‘s Christopher Lloyd), and the setting is a lovely little independent bookshop. […]
I’ve been a member of the The Writers’ Union of Canada for 16 years now. I’ve got nothing to do with the one-day seminars they’re putting on across Canada entitled “Writing as a Profession: How to Get Published and Survive as an Author: Professional Development Workshops for Writers in All Phases of Their Careers,” but, […]
Here’s the word-verification screen that Blogger offered me this morning. Gee, thanks!
My RCA REB1100 (REB-1100, REB 1100) eBook reading device succumbed yesterday to the dreaded grid of death: a condition in which the internal flash ROM is corrupted, and the device won’t do anything. After googling around, and an hour or two of trial-and-error on my own, I managed to get the device working again, including […]
Just received the following email, with the subject line “My Friend is an excellent Science Fiction, Military, And “What If” Writer.” Dear Mr. Sawyer, I have a Writer Friend who has a great imagination and is an excellent Writer! We met at our Writer’s group and are “Writer Friends.” Do you know of an agent […]
There’s a lot of discussion in Planet of the Apes fandom about what the back end of Colonel Taylor’s ANSA spaceship looked like. The ship is only ever seen partially submerged in water in the film (at Lake Powell), so the details of the rear end have been left mostly to the imagination. William Creber, […]
Not sure how long it’ll be available on-line but the latest electronic newsletter from Writers of the Future contains my essay “Eight Things New Writers Need to Know,” reprinted from the latest volume in the long-running series. I’m a judge for the contest, and I do recommend beginning writers enter it.
… about a Japanese reader’s visit with me. It’s a meeting I fondly remember, and I’m delighted it meant so much to him, too. You can read what he had to say here. (And thanks to the friend who drew this to my attention!)
So, on Saturday night, Kirstin, Carolyn, and I watched To Serve All My Days, the new fan-produced Star Trek classic episode from New Voyages. The previous episode done by this group — In Harm’s Way, with guest star William Windom — was brilliant, with an amazingly clever and interesting script. And this new episode had […]
Last Saturday, Kirstin Morrell was in town from Calgary. She’s the managing editor of Red Deer Press, the company that publishes my Robert J. Sawyer Books imprint. I took her on a whirlwind tour of Toronto’s sites, with an emphasis on those of interest to an SF fan (which Kirstin most assuredly is: she’s also […]
I love the Planet of the Apes apes figures in this 12-inch series from Sideshow Collectibles (I’m not keen on the human figures, though — to me, they look nothing like Charlton Heston and the rest, suggesting that Sideshow didn’t have rights to their likenesses). But the apes are excellent, particularly the Zira and Cornelius […]
The biggest honour a writer can pay to another human being is to dedicate a book to him or her. I have been touched and deeply moved to have books dedicated to me before by Edo van Belkom, James Alan Gardner, and Mike Resnick. And I can tell you now from experience that the thrill […]
I’ve had an insanely busy — but very pleasant — last couple of weeks. The highlight was this past Friday night, December 15. Carolyn and I hosted a party in honor of two of this year’s Hugo Award winners: my editor David G. Hartwell, who won for Best Editor, and my great friend Robert Charles […]
I’m doing another marathon of interviews for CBC Radio stations coast to coast today. This time, it’s about the future of the Web — perfect for my upcoming WWW trilogy. The news hook is Time magazine having named “You” (all us bloggers, YouTubers, MySpacers, and so on) as its “Persons of the Year.” I’ll be […]
The Canadian bookselling chain Chapters / Indigo / Coles asked 150,000 members of its iRewards loyalty program to pick the top 100 Canadian-authored books of all time. Only one book published as science fiction made the list: my Calculating God, coming in at number 79. You can see the whole list here (I’m on page […]
I’m very pleased with this cover for the hardcover of Rollback, which will be published by Tor in April 2007. There’s actually a lot of detail in the dark background; if you can’t see it, turn the brightness and contrast up on your monitor. Click on the small version above for a bigger version; note […]
The fund-raising book fair for the World Fantasy Convention in Calgary in 2008 sponsored by Calgary’s writers’ workshop IFWA was a great success. Lots of money raised, lots of good books swapped or acquired. Plans are in the works for an even bigger such event next year. Tomorrow is a big party day for me: […]
David Suzuki is a leading Canadian science broadcaster, geneticist, and environmentalist, but if you didn’t know that and read the bio note on his article on page 18 of the 23 September 2006 New Scientist, you might think he was a raving ego-maniac, since it’s completely self-referential. :) It says, in its entirety: David Suzuki […]
A nice write-up about the Neanderthal Parallax trilogy is here at bTALK. Thanks, guys!
Carolyn and I will be spending three months next summer in Canada’s far north. We’ll be living at Berton House, the childhood home of famed Canadian nonfiction writer Pierre Berton, in Dawson City, Yukon Territory; Dawson City was the heart of the Klondike Gold Rush, and is at latitude 64 degrees north, about 100 km […]
We Canadians grew up with Coles Notes; Americans are used to Cliffs Notes, Barron’s Notes, and SparkNotes or Spark Notes (the brand that Barnes and Noble sells) — study guides for various scientific and historical subjects, or for great works of literature and plays. Well, the full text of all the SparkNotes are now online […]
IFWA Christmas Book Festival! (in conjunction with the Calgary 2008 World Fantasy Convention) Come one, come all to the first ever IFWA-sponsored Christmas Book Festival. Food! Fun! … and Books! (IFWA is the Imaginative Fiction Writers Association, Calgary’s venerable SF&F writing workshop.) View the poster (with map) here. From high noon through 4:00 p.m. we’ll […]
No big deal, but I was playing around a bit with Yahoo! Answers, to see if it might be a substitute for the defunct Google Answers (it’s not; it’s a quite different beast, although interesting in its own right). And in the process of testing it, I answered the question: “What effect, if any, has […]
