Robert J. Sawyer

Hugo and Nebula Award-Winning Science Fiction Writer

Archive for December, 2020

R.I.P., James Gunn

Thursday, December 24th, 2020

The great James Gunn has passed away at 97. When people ask me what books influenced me the most as a writer, I always cite his The Listeners, the first great novel (a fix-up of novellas, actually) about the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Without it, I doubt my two Hugo nominees also about SETI — […]

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78 years ago today: Chicago Pile 1

Wednesday, December 2nd, 2020

Seventy-eight years ago today, the world’s first controlled nuclear chain reaction was achieved at the University of Chicago. Here’s how I dramatized that event in my 2020 novel The Oppenheimer Alternative: “Jim, you’ll be interested to know that the Italian navigator has just landed in the New World.” It was code, of course: the Italian […]

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