Robert J. Sawyer

I’m pleased to announce the sale of Polish rights to all three volumes of my “Neanderthal Parallax” trilogy (Hominids, Humans, and Hybrids) to Solaris. Yay! The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

I’ll be keynote speaker at the ICE 2007 conference being held in Toronto on March 21-22, 2007. ICE stands for “Interactive Content Exchange,” and the conference is billed as “the world’s coolest interactive content business event.” Now, it’s fair to say that I do a lot of keynotes, so I wouldn’t want anyone to think […]

Got asked by a newspaper reporter in New Jersey today to comment on the “nuts” idea that a local bookseller had divided science fiction and fantasy into separate sections. Here’s what I had to say: Actually, it’s not nuts at all — nuts was when Ottawa’s House of Speculative Fiction separated the male and female […]

Right up to the day of the Tor sales conference, my novel Mindscan had the title Action Potential, which I thought was quite wonderful. Not only is it a cool term from neuroscience, but it also worked well with the plot of the book, since it dealt with an exploration of what actions any of […]

February is Keep Toronto Reading month — a celebration of the written word in Canada’s largest city. Of course, I’m taking part. I’ll be at the Book Lover’s Ball on Thursday, February 15, 2007, and doing a free literary lunch along with Karl Schroeder on Wednesday, February 28. You can read more about Keep Toronto […]

Carolyn and I spent the afternoon with Janis Ian, the Grammy Award-winning folk singer best known for “At Seventeen” and “Society’s Child.” Janis lives in Nashville, Tennessee — which is where we were getting our flight home after Chattacon (in Chattanooga). Janis took us out for a great barbecue-chicken lunch, then we hung around her […]

Carolyn and I have just finished a very pleasant weekend at Chattacon 32 in Chattanooga, Tennessee — which is being held in the Chattanooga Choo Choo hotel. I was the author guest of honor, along with Kevin J. Anderson, and Wen Spencer was the special guest. At my reading, I read a bit from Mindscan […]

The next book being published under my Robert J. Sawyer Books imprint is Birthstones, by Phyllis Gotlieb. The cover, designed by Karen Thomas Petherick, is magnificent. To really appreciate it, check out this PDF, which shows the full dustjacket. We’ll be launching the book on Friday, March 2, 2007, at Toronto’s Ad Astra SF convention, […]

These bastards suck. If you sign up, your email box will get flooded with messages — not from long-lost friends, but from the service itself trying to get more money out of you. And then, just when you think you’re finally done with the sons of bitches, they send you one of these, with no […]

… which is a lot more fun to say than it is to do. :( The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

(A pun that reads better on the page than said outloud …) Stephen Mann, a computer-graphics professor at the University of Waterloo, has very nicely articulated why we Canadians hate getting packages shipped to us by United Parcel Service. Please, please, please, use the regular U.S. mails. See what Mann has to say right here. […]

Turns out Mike Bond, lead designer on Koei’s racing game Fatal Inertia for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, is a big fan of my work — how cool is that! (And what great company to be in: he says his favourite authors are Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, and yours truly.) Read the interview […]

Given that I’ve been a low-carb dieter for almost three years now, I thought this Google news alert that landed in my mailbox today was funny:Robert Sawyer, CARB chairmanIt’s a different Rob Sawyer of course … and CARB turns out to the California Air Resources Board. :) The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

To my surprise, I’m mentioned in a column by Robert Fulford in today’s National Post newspaper here in Canada. It’s about writers who have had work rejected, and he cites me and Ursula K. LeGuin, among others: Robert J. Sawyer, the highly successful Canadian science-fiction writer, recently noted that he has 142 rejection slips in […]

Kevin J. Anderson — who is one of my best friends in this industry — and I are the Author Guests of Honor at Chattacon in Chattanooga, Tennessee, this weekend. My programing schedule: Fri 7p – GOH speeches followed by reception Sat 10a – panel with Snider, Douglas, Buettner – Post 9/11 – has SF […]

Just a reminder that I’m on Toronto’s JAZZ.FM91 tomorrow morning at 9:20 talking about the future of listening to music. The program is called Benmergui in the Morning. And, in the interesting-coincidence department, I got an email today from Jerry Good, who had been my instructor in radio production theory back in 1979-1980 at Ryerson; […]

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 […]

… of me! They were taken by Carolyn on the set of the Rogers Television morning show in Kicthener-Waterloo, Ontario, last Monday, where I was a guest talking about the contest (after struggling through some of the worst winter weather we’ve had this year to get there — the normally one-hour drive took two, and […]

I am totally thrilled and delighted to announce that my forthcoming novel Rollback will be a Main Selection of Doubleday’s Science Fiction Book Club in May 2007. The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

I’ll be on “Benmergui in the Morning” on Toronto’s Jazz FM91 this coming Monday, January 22, 2007, starting around 9:20 a.m. Toronto (Eastern) time, talking about the future of listening to and distributing music. The show is hosted by Ralph Benmergui. You’ll be able to listen online via the link on the station’s web site. […]

Doomsday Clock moves closer to midnight And I wish the Canadian government would wake up and do more to combat global warming. I’m not often ashamed of Canada’s record on the world stage, but I am over this. The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

The first review of my upcoming Rollback is in, and it’s a corker: Publishers Weekly — the trade journal for the book business — has given Rollback a “starred review,” their highest honor; starred reviews “denote books of exceptional merit.” An excerpt from the review, which is in the 15 January 2007, edition: Canadian author […]

I’m a dual U.S./Canadian citizen. I frankly don’t often pay attention to U.S. holidays, since I live in Canada. But I do like to note the occurrence of Martin Luther King Day each year. Dr. King is one of my personal heroes, and I try to honor him in my work when I can. For […]

HELP! Anybody in Ottawa out there? The people in Ottawa I asked to pick up today’s Ottawa Citizen for me are out of town, it turns out. I could really use a couple of copies of today’s edition (Monday, January 15). I only need the page my article appears on (page A11). Many thanks to […]

I have an op-ed piece on Michael Crichton’s tendency to bend the truth in his fiction in today’s Ottawa Citizen, the largest circulation newspaper in Canada’s capital city. You can read it online here. (An op-ed piece is an article that appears opposite the Editorial — that is, on the facing page; it’s an opinion […]

Barbara J. King is just about to come out with a book entitled Evolving God. As it happens, that particular title wording was one of the working titles I used for my own novel Calculating God, as you can see here. Why did I change it, given that it was apt? Because if your eye […]

A very nice review of Boarding the Enterprise, the Star Trek essay collection edited by Robert J. Sawyer and David Gerrold, is online now at Talebones. Check it out. 

I have excellent publicists at Tor and H.B. Fenn (Tor’s Canadian distributor); Alexis Saarela is my publicist at Tor and Janis Ackroyd is my publicist at Fenn. But I also always do up a press release of my own for my novels, in addition to the ones they do. And that press release for Rollback […]

With all this talk about my upcoming novel Rollback, I wouldn’t want to forget good old Mindscan, my current book. And, as it happened, I saw a very nice new review of it today, from Kliatt, the principal reference used by schools and libraries for choosing young-adult material. Says the reviewer, Dr. Lesley Farmer: Want […]

The cover for Rollback has been slightly revised. The illustration is the same, but the typography is different, and even nicer). The new version looks like this: My name is now in a typeface called Minion, and the title of the book is in Yearling Light. The old version looked like this: You’ll find a […]