The Primate Directive
Tuesday, December 30th, 2014My review of issue 1 of the Star Trek / Planet of the Apes crossover comic “The Primate Directive” is now online at TrekMovie.com. Robert J. Sawyer online:Website • Facebook • Twitter • Email
Archive for December, 2014
Idris Elba as James Bond
Saturday, December 27th, 2014Of course Idris Elba can play James Bond. Below is how Sam Spade is described by his creator Dashiell Hammett in the first paragraph of The Maltese Falcon novel, and the picture is Sam Spade as portrayed by Humphrey Bogart in the definitive film version; Bogart looks nothing like Space — but nonetheless nailed the […]
2014 Year in Review
Friday, December 26th, 2014For me, 2014 was a bittersweet year, with the loss of dear friends Colin Edmond, 19, and Michael Lennick, 61, both way too young. It was also the year we moved my parents out of the home I grew up in and closed up the house. Because of the time I took off during and […]
Apes as nonhuman persons
Tuesday, December 23rd, 2014Apropos of the news story about a court in Argentina deciding that an orangutan being kept in a zoo is entitled to the rights of a “nonhuman person,” I’ve been writing about this issue going back 20 years now; it’s discussed at length in my Nebula-Award-winning novel The Terminal Experiment, which was first published in […]
Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame
Friday, December 19th, 2014I realized today that I hadn’t noted yet here in my blog one of the biggest honours of my career: On Saturday, October 5, 2014, I was one of the initial inductees into The Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame, administered by The Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association — the same people […]
Tributes to Michael Lennick
Friday, December 19th, 2014Here are some of the tributes that came in to my great friend Michael Lennick, who passed away November 7, 2014. (The picture is of Michael and his wife Shirley Gulliford.) Michael will be missed by all who knew him. I enjoyed the wonderful times we shared working on The All-Night Show. I am very […]
FlashForward flashback
Monday, December 15th, 2014Long before the 2009-2010 ABC television adaptation of my novel FlashForward, the book was doing quite all right. It got a starred review (denoting a work of exceptional merit) from Publishers Weekly; it won Canada’s Aurora Award for best SF/F novel of the year; it won (in blind judging) the world’s top annual cash prize […]
My students and the Auroras
Sunday, December 14th, 2014I am thrilled and amazed to note that every single winner of Canada’s Aurora Award for Best Short Story of the Year between 2003 and 2014 (twelve years) was either (cough, cough) me or one of my writing students — with only one exception, and that exception was in a writing critique group with me: […]
The Blue Planet
Friday, December 12th, 2014On December 3, 1999, the Mars Polar Lander disappeared as it descended toward the red planet. Five days later, an editor with a wonderfully appropriate surname — Catherine Bradbury — at The Globe and Mail: Canada’s National Newspaper called to ask me if I could write a science-fiction story explaining the probe’s disappearance. The only […]
35th anniversary of Star Trek: The Motion Picture
Sunday, December 7th, 2014Today, December 7, 2014, is the 35th anniversary of the premiere of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. In tribute, I offer this excerpt from Watch, the Hal Clement Award-winning second volume of my WWW trilogy, published by in April 2010 by Ace (US), Penguin (Canada), and Gollancz (UK). In this scene, sixteen-year-old Caitlin (who was […]