Fictionwise.com is having a store-wide sale (that ends today) so I decided to stock up on ebooks for the summer. Here’s what I just bought: FICTION The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck The Stand: The Complete and Uncut Edition by Stephen King Doctor Strangelove, or Red Alert […]
Here’s my schedule, at least as it stands now, for Denvention 3, this year’s World Science Fiction convention, being held in Denver from Wednesday, August 6, through Sunday, August 10: “Canadian Science Fiction,” Fri, 10:00 “A World Made of Birds — What would the Earth be like if the Dinosaurs Had Lived?,” Fri, 11:30 (moderator) […]
Audible.com has recently released editions of my Hominids, Humans, Hybrids, Calculating God, The Terminal Experiment, and Flashforward. You can get them all here. This is all part of a big push into science fiction for Audible.com, and over at io9, they have an interview with Steve Feldberg about all this. Check it out. The Robert […]
Geoff Willmetts over at Stephen Hunt’s SF Crowsnest — one of Europe’s most popular SF sites — interviews Robert J. Sawyer right here. The teaser for the interview says: Our glorious editor GF Willmetts sits down with Canadian science fiction author Robert J. Sawyer to chat about whether aliens visiting Earth are likely to be […]
On May 31, 2008, in this post, I mentioned I was using the index-card feature in a free program called Celtx to plot out my new novel, Watch. But I didn’t like doing that, because Celtx provided no way to export the index-card text to an ASCII file, or a word-processing document — I didn’t […]
This has been a good month for fact catching up with fiction in the novels of Robert J. Sawyer … Not only is CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, which I wrote abut in 1999’s Flashforward, finally about to come on line, but now the Parliament of Spain has approved a resolution to grant some human rights […]
Over at SciFi Wire, the news service of the SciFi Channel, John Joseph Adams interviews Robert J. Sawyer about his new collection, Identity Theft and Other Stories. The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
OMG, this is the coolest thing ever! Back on October 2, 2007, I gave a talk at the University of Waterloo entitled “A Galaxy Far, Far Away” My Ass!, about science fiction’s relevance for the here and now. TVOntario’s lecture series Big Ideas was on hand to record it, and an MP3 of the soundtrack […]
Three of Canada’s science-fiction editors were all together in the same room at Keycon in Winnipeg last month, and Hayden Trenholm nicely took a picture of us all. Left to right: Robert J. Sawyer, editor of Robert J. Sawyer Books, the science-fiction imprint of Fitzhenry & Whiteside; Rob lives just outside Toronto, Ontario. Virgina O’Dine, […]
Granted, it’s a repeat — from 33 years ago! To commemorate the passing of George Carlin, the first-ever host of Saturday Night Live, that very first episode is being repeated this Saturday night, June 28, 2008, on NBC in SNL‘s usual timeslot — and one of the musical guests on that historic first episode was […]
Just gave a keynote in Huntsville, Ontario, at the Deerhurst Resort — which will host the 2010 G8 summit. The keynote was for The MEARIE Group (MEARIE = “Municipal Electric Association Reciprocal Insurance Exchange”), at a conference on risk management, and I ended my keynote by doing a William Shatner impression, reading what I think […]
Tom Easton, who will retire this year as book reviewer for Analog, reviews Nick DiChario’s Valley of Day-Glo (which was published under my Robert J. Sawyer Books imprint) and my own Identity Theft and Other Stories in the September 2008 issue. The review concludes: “Fitzhenry & Whiteside is a Canadian house that deserves cross-border attention. […]
I received today the page proofs for the first of the four serialization installments of my next novel Wake, which will appear in Analog, starting with the November 2008 issue (which will be out in September). Yay! I wrote an article today for my alumni magazine, on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of Ryerson’s […]
On my way to my signing in Rochester yesterday, I stopped at a Borders store to play with the PRS-505, the latest model of eBook reader from Sony. It’s a nice, attractive, solid-feeling unit, and, at $299, not badly priced as these things go. But it had several showstoppers for me. Number one (and huge): […]
The joint reading and signing by Nick DiChario, Nancy Kress, and Robert J. Sawyer at the Barnes and Noble in Pittsford (Rochester), NY, or Saturday night rocked — we all read well, 100 people showed up — it was standing room only (about 70 chairs were filled), and we sold a ton of books. Many […]
Last week, I posted my comments on the American Film Institute’s list of the top-10 SF films, and suggested some of my own substitutions for that list. That list only went to ten places, but one that’s on my own list of the top 20 SF films is Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Seriously. If […]
The deadline for voting in the 2008 Hugo Awards is approaching rapidly. All ballots must be received by midnight (2400 hrs.) Pacific Daylight Time at the end of Monday, July 7, 2008. That’s 17 days from now. :) And, in case you missed the offer earlier, members of this year’s Worldcon can get free electronic […]
It’s my week for podcasts, it seems! Right on the heels of the SMOFcast podcast interview with me going online, Hardcore Nerdity has just put up an interview with me, recorded on Sunday, June 15, 2008, at BookExpo Canada. The interviewer is Lesley Livingston. The interview with me starts at 19 minutes, 10 seconds (19:10) […]
I’m pleased to announce the sale of French rights to my current Hugo Award-finalist Rollback to Editions Robert Laffont in Paris. The deal was made by Ralph Vicinanza in conjunction with Agence Littéraire Lenclud. The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
I’ve been reading a lot of books on human behavior, the economics of daily life, and game theory, as research for my current novel, Watch, and because I often drop references to such things into my keynote addresses. Although Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner is the most famous recent book of […]
I was interviewed by the new podcast SmofCast at Keycon last month (18 May 2008), and you can listen to it here. The interview with me comes on at 31 minutes, 40 seconds (31:40), and ends at 49:12. The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
The Robert J. Sawyer blitz at Audible.com continues! They’ve just added my novel Flashforward to their collection of RJS unabridged audibooks (joining Calculating God, Hominids, Humans, Hybrids, and The Terminal Experiment, plus my Hugo-nominated short story “Shed SKin”). You can get all my Audible titles right here. The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
An article about how Nick DiChario, Nancy Kress, and I all came to be doing a signing together in Rochester, New York, this coming Saturday appears in today’s Canandaigua Daily Messanger. Check it out. The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
The Age is the oldest newspaper in Melbourne, Australia, and the 20 June 2008 edition has an article about Indian-Canadian filmmaker Srinivas Kirshna. Page two of the article notes: “Krishna’s next film project is a science fiction/fantasy epic based on Robert Sawyer’s Nebula Award-winning novel The Terminal Experiment, about monsters on the internet.” Well, not […]
This Saturday, June 21, 2008, at 7:00 p.m., Robert J. Sawyer, Nancy Kress, and Nick DiChario will be reading and signing at: Barnes & Noble3349 Monroe AvenuePittsford (Rochester), New York After, we’ll be heading upstairs at Wegman’s to the food court along with members of the Rochester Fantasy Fans, and anyone else who’d like to […]
The American Film Institute has revealed its list of the top-ten science-fiction films: 1. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)2. Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope (1977)3. E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial (1982)4. A Clockwork Orange (1971)5. The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)6. Blade Runner (1982)7. Alien (1979)8. Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)9. Invasion […]
Chris Streib puts to rest Margaret Atwood’s assertion that ebooks are inferior to printed books because, she says, you can’t read an ebook in the bathtub. The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
The Canadian Press wire service sent out this story entitled “Oil at $250 a barrel would transform Canada as we know it” just now, including quotes from an interview done with me. The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Next month, I will be attending Readercon 19, near Boston. It’s a conference devoted entirely to the printed literature of science fiction. In their program book, they publish elaborate “bio-bibs” (biography/bibliography combos) for each program participant, with all kinds of detailed info. Since it’s a good overview of my career, I thought I’d share mine […]
It delights me that my books are widely taught — and it’s always a special thrill when I get to visit a class that’s studying one of them. Yesterday, I went to the University of Toronto at Mississauga and spoke to Chet Scoville’s class for two hours about my 2000 novel Calculating God. Lots of […]
