After being on sale for just one day at the World Horror Convention, Rollback is now officially Bakka-Phoenix Books’ number-one bestselling hardcover title for the entire month of March. Woohoo! (Bakka-Phoenix is Toronto’s SF specialty bookstore, and the principal new-book dealer at the World Horror Convention now on in Toronto; they are also one of […]
“Are We Alone?” — the SETI Institute’s Weekly Science Radio Program (podcast) — features Robert J. Sawyer on his SETI related novel Rollback, in the episode “Array of Hope,” which went online on March 29, 2007. Host is Seth Shostak. The segment with me runs starts at 32:45, and goes to 41:13. The Robert J. […]
I do a newsletter for booksellers and media whenever I have a new book, and the latest issue — number 23 — is going in the mail starting today. You can get a PDF of it here, if you’re curious, and if you’d like to see back issues going back several years, they’re all here. […]
By special arrangement with H.B. Fenn, Tor’s Canadian distributor, my new novel Rollback will have its world debut tomorrow at the World Horror Convention in Toronto. Bakka-Phoenix Books will have the first copies on sale anywhere at their table in the dealers’ room. Carolyn just got back from the Fenn warehouse, where she picked up […]
Just got a phone call from a producer at The Gill Deacon Show. Everyone there was delighted with the interview I did yesterday on the suburbs, but after the show was in the can someone higher up the food chain at the CBC looked at the program and decided that it had too many men […]
Yes, I am a total geek. :) Months ago, I ordered a limited-edition 33-inch reproduction of the U.S.S. Enterprise from the original Star Trek TV series from Master Replicas, and it arrived today. I must say, it’s gorgeous. The attention to detail in making this model is very good, and the lighting effects are terrific: […]
As I mentioned back in December, Carolyn and I are going to Dawson City, the heart of the Klondike Gold Rush, in Canada’s far-north Yukon Territory for the months of July, August, and September on a writing retreat at Berton House, the childhood home of famed Canadian writer Pierre Berton. Well, the Designer Guys — […]
Recognize her? That’s Gillian Deacon, former co-host of @discovery.ca, the nightly science program on Discovery Channel Canada. I used to be a regular columnist for them in the 1997-98 season, doing a segment called 2020 Vision, and on January 2, 2000, Gill and I co-hosted a two-hour prime-time documentary for Discovery Channel Canada called Inventing […]
To my astonishment (and delight!) I stumbled on the fact this evening that Wikipedia has an entry on “Quintaglio,” the species of intelligent dinosaurs that feature in my novels Far-Seer, Fossil Hunter, and Foreigner. There’s also an entry on the “Quintaglio Ascension Trilogy”, and one on the main character of the trilogy, “Afsan”. Cool! The […]
I now have a MySpace page. Check it out! The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Phyllis Gotlieb, Jay Lake, and I have stories in the anthology Fall and Rise edited by Ahmed A. Khan. My contribution, “The Shoulders of Giants,” is a reprint — but also, I think, one of my very best stories. The anthology’s theme is instriguing: There have been anthologies of post-apocalyptic fiction ,but none such as […]
Stumbled across a wonderful little article about me on a web site called LabLit.com: The Culture of Science in Fiction & Fact. The (pseudonymous) author is a scientist in Philadelphia, according to the bionote. The article concludes: If this doesn’t sound like your father’s science fiction, it isn’t. Sawyer’s novels are thought-provoking, literate, erudite and […]
Last week I noticed for the first time that Nebula Awards Showcase 2007, edited by Mike Resnick, is now out. Although I didn’t win the Nebula last year, I was nominated for it — and this anthology includes my nominated novella “Identity Theft.” It also includes a non-fiction piece by me on the state of […]
I’m pleased to report that The Easton Press has renewed its license on my 1995 Nebula Award-winning novel The Terminal Experiment; they’ve been producing a beautiful leather-bound edition with a great introduction by James Gunn (this year’s SFWA Grand Master), and now they get to continue to do so (they license five-year periods). (This means […]
An innovative program, offered by the Kitchener Public Library, where I was writer-in-residence last year: Book Club in a Bag. A set of ten copies of the same book, plus a book-club discussion guide, all circulating from the library as a single item, nicely packaged in a canvas bag. My Hominids is one of the […]
Twenty years ago, back in 1987, I used to write for Playback, a Canadian trade publication about the broadcasting and production industries — although I’m sure no one at Playback today has any idea about that. But today, the tables were turned and Playback wrote about me. In its coverage of the ICE 07 conference, […]
On Thursday, March 15, I was in Calgary, to give a talk to the local branch of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada. My escort from the RASC, Anna Maria Bortolotto, took me to the Calgary store in the McNally Robinson bookstore chain. This was 48 days — almost seven weeks — in advance of […]
The website for this year’s World Science Fiction Convention in Japan has a nifty photo of a Hugo bookshelf — novels that have won the Hugo Award, including my own Hominids. It’s a cool photo, which you can see full-size here (click on the photo if your browser reduces it). (No, it’s not a complete […]
… well, almost! Carolyn tells me a couple of copies of Rollback, my 17th novel, have shown up at our place in Toronto (I’m in the Air Canada lounge at the Calgary Airport right now, heading home after giving my talk to the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada’s Calgary Centre). She says they look gorgeous! […]
For those who are interested in how this business works, an email I sent this week. Canada is full of small-time producers who are always making offers like the one referred to in my letter; in this case, the producer wanted an option on the film rights to one of my novels for Cdn$2,000 for […]
My own personal theme song has always been Barry Gray’s end-title music for the 1963 British TV series Fireball XL5, produced by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson. It’s one of the songs I’ll sing at the drop of a hat at parties. And finally it is getting the recognition it deserves: the latest edition of the […]
With the World Horror Convention set to start in Toronto two weeks from tomorrow, this interview between Canadian horror writer Mark Leslie and UK reviewer “Critical Mick” seems apropos — and if it happens to also contain some nice comments about me, well, who am I to complain? :) The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Quill & Quire, Canada’s publishing trade journal, has just weighed in with its review of Rollback. The review is by Robert J. Wiersema. The full text is online here (at least for the moment; it might disappear to where you need a paid Quill Online account to read it at some point). Note: there’s a […]
Rollback is featured today at NEW BOOKS, a blog by Marshal Zeringue that spotlights new titles in all genres. And, unlike just about everybody else, he’s actually got the correct version of the Rollback cover (note the typeface for the book’s title). The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Yup, I’m off to Cow Town! And I’m giving a free public lecture at the Telus World of Science (formerly the Calgary Science Centre) this coming Thursday, March 15, at 7:30 p.m., in the Discovery Dome. My talk is on “Astronomy and Science Fiction,” and is presented by the Calgary Centre of the Royal Astronomical […]
After the talk at McMaster, I scooted back to Toronto and gave another talk: I was the final speaker on a program of 20 (!) speakers at the grand opening of the Centre for Inquiry Ontario. I was quite honoured to be given the final slot, and I think I shook things up a bit. […]
This morning, I was the last of four speakers, each giving an hour-long talk, at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. Collectively, we were the program for the conference “Do You CO2?,” about global warming and climate change, sponsored by the McMaster Science for Peace / Pugwash Society. The other speakers were a McMaster grad student, […]
I thought about not even posting about this, since nothing at all concrete has actually happened, but, then again, a day like this is so rare in a writer’s career, I decided I’d like to at least mark it. I spent a good hunk of today dealing with not one, not two, but three different […]
Today’s mail brought a contract for Romanian rights to my 1995 Nebula-Award-winning novel The Terminal Experiment. The Romanian edition will be published by Nemira. Yay! Also in today’s mail: the March 2007 edition of The New York Review of Science Fiction, which has, on page 3, a nice photo showing Karl Schroeder, Marcel Gagne, Lorna […]
The grand opening of the Centre for Inquiry Ontario (“A new Canadian voice for reason, science and secularism”) is tomorrow night, Saturday, March 10, 2007, in Toronto, and I’m one of the speakers there. Also speaking are John Robert Colombo, James Alcock, Robert Buckman, and others. The event starts at 5:00 p.m.; I’ll be speaking […]
