Robert J. Sawyer

For those following Doranna Durgin’s posting — on her own blog and at the Writer Beware blog — about her dealings with Fitzhenry & Whiteside in relation to her novel Dun Lady’s Jess, my comments:

Doranna contends that the book is out of print, and so the rights should be reverted to her. Fitzhenry & Whiteside says, no, in fact the book is in print, and so the reversion clause doesn’t pertain.

Who’s right? There’s no question: Fitzhenry & Whiteside.

Fitzhenry & Whiteside isn’t just a publisher, it’s also one of Canada’s largest book distributors (they used to distribute Ace Science Fiction, and they do distribute EDGE, Canada’s largest SF line). A quick call to Bakka-Phoenix, Canada’s oldest SF specialty store, revealed that Dun Lady’s Jess is indeed available via the distributor Fitzhenry & Whiteside to any bookseller that wants it; the title is listed in the distributor’s catalog.

The contract language in question is this: “in print through normal trade channels.” Doranna’s own blog post makes it clear that the book is certainly in print — there are 1,600 physical copies available for shipment (and, checking, I find that they are traditional web-offset copies from the first and only printing — not print-on-demand or ebook editions; the book is in-print not just in some nebulous new-paradigm sense, but in the classic, normal, traditional sense of the term).

As for “normal trade channels,” Fitzhenry & Whiteside is a Canadian publisher. What constitutes “normal trade channels” in Canada?

Well, how ’bout via Chapters.Indigo.ca, Canada’s largest bookstore chain? Dun Lady’s Jess is available for purchase there: Chapters.Indigo.ca

Or maybe you prefer to shop at McNally Robinson, Canada’s major independent? They’ll sell you a copy, too: McNallyRobinson.com

Or Amazon.ca? They show the book as In Stock — that is, it’s in their own warehouse, not just the publisher’s: amazon.ca

Or perhaps you want to pick it up in a physical brick-and-mortar bookstore? It’s in stock and on the shelf at World’s Biggest Bookstore (the Chapters/Indigo store in downtown Toronto) (verifiable via the “Find It In Store” feature at the Chapters.Indigo.ca link above).

Oh! And the book is also in stock and on the shelf at Sentry Box in Calgary, a bricks-and-mortar science-fiction and fantasy bookstore.

On October 21, 2011, bookseller Andrew S. Balfour added this comment: I work for one of the booksellers on Rob’s list up there. I can say, with absolute certainty, that this book is just as available as any other in-print book. The fact that it’s not on our shelves has nothing to do with availability, and everything to do with the fact that, when we did stock the book, it didn’t sell.

That says nothing about the publisher, any more than it says anything about the quality of the book. They can’t force us to order something we don’t want, and no one can control the interests of the reading public.

In conclusion: Not selling ≠ Not available

There certainly are such things as reversion-of-rights clauses that require the publisher to meet a threshold number of actual physical copies sold or a threshold number of dollars earned to keep a book in print. But this contract doesn’t have any such language. The book is in print — copies exist — and it is available through “normal trade channels” in the country in which it was published.

ETA: Okay, so what’s all the online bouhaha about? Well, the book is clearly in print, but Doranna wanted the publisher to revert the rights anyway. Fitzhenry’s response was not an uncooperative “sure, you can force it out of print — by buying up all the existing copies at your normal author discount [typically 40% off cover price].” No, they went the extra mile for Doranna and said if she really wanted to force this title out of print, she could buy the existing copies at cost. [Source: direct quote from Fitzhenry’s Richard Dionne as posted by Doranna herself in her timeline of events; Richard is publisher of Red Deer Press, the division of Fitzhenry & Whiteside that produced Doranna’s book.]

Dun Lady’s Jess has a Canadian list price of Cdn$21.95; 40% off that would be Cdn$13.75 a copy; that’s what Doranna’s contract said she should have paid if she wanted to buy copies. But even though the book wasn’t out of print, Fitzhenry offered her a chance to buy the books at cost. I’ve bought books at cost from Fitzhenry myself — trade paperbacks similar to the one in question; cost, in my case, ranged from $1.66 to $3.19 a copy, depending on the title.

There’s no contractual reason in Doranna’s case that Fitz should offer copies at such a low price, but they did. That was more than fair, since an “at cost” sale means the publisher makes not one cent in profit — Fitzhenry bent over backward to let the author accomplish what she wanted to accomplish, namely forcing this clearly in-print title out of print.

For those unfamiliar with Fitzhenry & Whiteside, this is a publisher that has published Pierre Berton, Alice Munro, Northrop Frye, Charlotte Gray, and David Suzuki — some of the top names in Canadian writing.

This is a publisher whose books have won multiple Governor-General’s Awards, Canada’s top literary prize.

This is a publisher whose Fifth House division was recently named Alberta Publisher of the Year by the Book Publishers Association of Alberta.

This is a publisher that, over forty years in the business, has published many hundreds of titles to critical acclaim and commercial success.

This is not a publisher that abuses authors.

Note: there’s a lengthy comment thread attached to this blog post, with comments by Doranna Durgin, her agent Lucienne Diver, Victoria Strauss of the Writer Beware blog that Doranna originally posted in, booksellers, and others — and replies from me, covering a lot of ground about the business of publishing and distributing books. Click HERE to read the comments.

Robert J. Sawyer online:
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I stumbled today across this by-email interview I did in March 2007 for an American librarian preparing an article about Canadian science fiction, and I thought I’d share it here.

(1) Do you believe that there is a significant difference between Canadian and American SF? If so, how would you describe that difference?

I like to quip that American SF has happy endings, Canadian SF has sad endings — and British SF has no endings at all. Seriously, I do think we Canadians are much more interested in writing realistic emotional denouements — which often are ambiguous and sometimes downbeat — rather than heroic triumphs.

(2) What would you say is particularly Canadian about your writing?

The easy answer is the setting: most of my books are set in Canada. But beyond that, there’s a Canadian sensibility to my books, perhaps best displayed in my Hugo Award-winning Hominids and its sequels. As compared to Americans, Canadians are more secular, more environmentally conscious, more willing to trade individual liberty for collective security, and more open to alternative lifestyles — and those are precisely the traits I gave my modern-day Neanderthal characters in those books.

(3) Is there any significant conversation between Anglophone and Francophone science fiction in Canada, or are these really two separate literatures with little in common?

We all know each other, and like each other, but the sad truth is that although Canada is an officially bilingual country, what that really means is that most French Canadians can also read and speak English; very few English Canadians are comfortable in French. It’s a national embarrassment and a failure of our otherwise quite good public-education system. So the Francophone writers certainly know the major English-language SF books, but the reverse just isn’t true.

The only French-Canadian writer widely translated into English is Elisabeth Vonarburg, who writes in a sort of Ursula K. LeGuin voice.

(4) Can you give me a brief description of your most recent (or, if you prefer, your most significant) book?

My seventeenth novel Rollback comes out in April 2007, and I think it’s probably the best example yet of what I try to do as an SF writer. My mission statement, if you will, is to combine the intimately human with the grandly cosmic.

Rollback‘s plot involves communicating with aliens via radio about what morals and ethics might transcend species boundaries — that’s the grandly cosmic part. The novel tells the story of Sarah Halifax, an 87-year-old radio astronomer who is involved with this project is offered a “rollback,” an experimental procedural that will make her young again — so that she can keep up the dialog with the aliens, which, because of the slowness of the speed-of-light, takes almost 40 years between messages.

She refuses to have the rollback unless her husband of 60 years gets one, too — and the procedure succeeds for him, and fails for her. That’s the intimately human part: the impact the suddenly huge disparity in physical ages has on her husband’s relationship with her, with their children, and so on.

To my delight, Publishers Weekly gave it a starred review, and Quill & Quire — the Canadian counterpart of PW said exactly what I was hoping reviewers would say, which is: “Sawyer handles the demands of the heart and the cosmos with equal skill” — which is precisely what good science fiction should do, in my opinion.

Robert J. Sawyer online:
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Here’s the US cover for Triggers, my 21st novel, coming April 3, 2012, from Ace Science Fiction in the US, Penguin Canada (under the Viking imprint) in Canada, and about the same time from Orion (under the Gollancz imprint) in the UK — with simultaneous audiobook (from Audible) and ebook editions.

Click the little version above for a full-size 300-dpi version (if your browser sizes that one down to fit your window, click the image to see full size).

Cover art is by Stephan Martiniere (who also di the cover for my novel Rollback. Jacket design by Diana Kolsky.

The jacket will also feature the photo of me below. You can click it for a large 300-dpi version, too.

Robert J. Sawyer online:
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My novel FlashForward (published by Tor and the basis for the ABC TV series of the same name) was published in 1999 but is set today. In it, as many hundreds of people have mentioned to me over the years, I correctly predicted that the current Pope would take the name Benedict XVI.

Well, here’s another prediction from that novel that just came true: I predicted that Saul Perlmutter and Brian P. Schmidt would be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work showing that the universe will expand forever. Today, they — along with Adam G. Riess — were named this year’s Nobel Laureates in that category. Congratulations to them!

Here’s the relevant passage from FlashForward (the opening paragraphs of Chapter 26):

Like every physicist, Theo waited with interest each year to see who would be honored with the Nobel Prize — who would join the ranks of Bohr, Einstein, Feynman, Gell-Mann, and Pauli. CERN researchers had earned more than twenty Nobels over the years. Of course, when he saw the subject header in his E-mail box, he didn’t have to open the letter to know that his name wasn’t on this year’s list of honorees. Still, he did like to see which of his friends and colleagues were getting the nod. He clicked the OPEN button

The laureates were Perlmutter and Schmidt for their work, mostly done a decade ago, that showed that the universe was going to expand forever, rather than eventually collapsing down in a big crunch. It was typical that the award was for work completed years previously; there had to be time for results to be replicated and for the ramifications of the research to be considered.

Well, thought Theo, they were both good choices. There’d doubtless be some bitterness here at CERN; rumor had it that McRainey was already planning his celebratory party, although that was doubtless just scurrilous gossip. Still, Theo wondered, as he did every year at this time, whether he’d someday see his own name on the list.

Robert J. Sawyer online:
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Just sent corrections for the paperback of Wonder to Ace and Penguin Canada — the very last work I’ll ever do on the WWW trilogy books. It’s the end of an era that began getting on to nine years ago, on Friday, January 10, 2003, when I wrote this in my journal:

Wrote 300 words explaining how I was going to expand “Shed Skin” into a novel to be called Skins, and, after wracking my brain for a couple of hours, came up with an idea that I liked for a second novel: consciousness emerges on the World Wide Web. Admittedly, not completely original (Clarke’s short story “Dial F for Frankenstein” comes to mind), but I checked on Amazon.com and Google, and couldn’t find any book that had actually done this. (I had been thinking of outlining a novel about humans adopting alien children, but I have yet to figure out how to develop that plot enough.)

“Shed Skin” was a short story I wrote that went on to be a Hugo finalist; Skins became Mindscan, and the alien children idea eventually became Rollback. By “second novel,” I meant I was looking for a two-book contract; originally, the story of Webmind was only going to be a single novel, and the two-book contract would have been for Mindscan and that book. Wake, Watch, and Wonder ended up being my 18th, 19th, and 20th novels.

Robert J. Sawyer online:
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On the Facebook page for Con-Version XXVII, Calgary’s long-running science-fiction convention, con-com member Amilee Hagon posted the following on September 18:

Good evening everyone.

It is with deepest regret that I inform you all that until further notice Con-Version will not be going ahead as planned next year.

I am truly sorry for this and would ask that anyone who has pre-purchased tickets for the next Con-Version get in touch with Laurie Lalonde for a full refund. If you are unable to reach her for the refund please get in touch with Derek France who should be able to issue the refund on behalf of Con-Version.

Again we are sorry for the delay and more information is soon to follow.

Please get in touch with either Laurie Lalonde or Derek France for refunds.

Thanks you for your support.

Fortunately, Calgary’s terrific new literary convention When Words Collide will be coming back next year.

Robert J. Sawyer online:
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A Glimpse into the Future on “Faster-than-Light Neutrinos”: Hope, Hype and Magic

World-renowned science-fiction writer and futurist comes to Canada Science and Technology Museum

Robert J. Sawyer was been called “a writer of boundless confidence and bold scientific extrapolation” by the New York Times, and declared “one of the most-successful Canadian authors ever” by Maclean’s. Sawyer has published 21 bestselling novels, one of which became the basis for the ABC television series, FlashForward.

Sawyer’s vision and perspective on the future of science has been called upon by organizations ranging from the Canadian Department of Justice to DARPA, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Sawyer will bring his vision of the future to the Canada Science and Technology Museum Monday, October 17, 2011, between 7:00 and 8:00 p.m. as part of the museum’s programming for National Science and Technology Week., October 14-21.

A dynamic speaker, Sawyer can engage an audience with his science-fiction stories while inserting scientific principles in an understandable way. Scientifically rigorous and highly entertaining, Robert J. Sawyer is not to be missed.

This event is sponsored by the Science Media Centre of Canada in partnership with the Canada Science and Technology Museum.

FREE admission and parking!

Robert J. Sawyer online:
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I don’t think it was ever explained on air, but the Oxide Super stadium, where Suspect Zero is first spotted in the FlashForward TV series, is named that because it’s an anagram of Oedipus Rex, and alludes to this scene from my novel FlashForward, in which Theo (the character who became Simon on the show) reflects on Sophocles’s great tragedy:

Theo hadn’t been home for four years now, and he regretted it. Christ, he might be dead in twenty-one years — and he’d let a span of one-fifth that length slip by without hugging his mother or tasting her cooking, without seeing his brother, without enjoying the incredible beauty of his homeland. Yes, the Alps were breathtaking, but there was a sterile, barren quality about them. In Athens, you could always look up, always see the Acropolis looming above the city, the midday sun flaring off the restored, polished marble of the Parthenon. Thousands of years of human habitation; millennia of thought, of culture, of art.

Of course, as a youth, he had visited many of the famous archeological sites. He remembered being seventeen: a school bus had taken his class to Delphi, home of the ancient oracle. It had been pouring rain, and he hadn’t wanted to get off the bus. But his teacher, Mrs. Megas, had insisted. They had clambered over slippery dark rocks through lush forest, until they came to where the oracle had once supposedly sat, dispensing cryptic visions of the future.

That kind of oracle had been better, thought Theo: futures that were subject to interpretation and debate, instead of the cold, harsh realities the world had recently seen.

They’d also gone to Epidaurus, a great bowl out of the landscape, with concentric rings of seats. They’d seen Oedipus Tyrannos performed there — Theo refused to join the tourists in calling it Oedipus Rex; “Rex” was a Latin word, not Greek, and represented an irritating bastardization of the play’s title.

The play was performed in ancient Greek; it might as well have been in Chinese for all the sense Theo could make of the dialog. But they’d studied the story in class; he knew what was happening. Oedipus’s future had been spelled out for him, too: you will marry your mother and murder your father. And Oedipus, like Theo, had thought he could circumvent destiny. Forearmed with the knowledge of what he was supposed to do, why, he’d simply avoid the issue altogether, and live a long, happy life with his queen, Iocasta.

Except …

Except that, as it turned out, Iocasta was his mother, and the man Oedipus had slain years before during a quarrel on the road to Thebes had indeed been his father.

Sophocles had written his version of the Oedipus story twenty-four hundred years ago, but students still studied it as the greatest example of dramatic irony in western literature. And what could be more ironic than a modern Greek man faced with the dilemmas of the ancients — a future prophesied, a tragic end foretold, a fate inevitable? Of course, the heroes of ancient Greek tragedies each had a hamartia — a fatal flaw — that made their downfall unavoidable. For some, the hamartia was obvious: greed, or lust, or an inability to follow the law.

But what had been Oedipus’s fatal flaw? What in his character had brought him to ruin?

They’d discussed it at length in class; the narrative form employed by the ancient Greek tragedians was inviolate — there was always a hamartia.

And Oedipus’s was — what?

Not greed, not stupidity, not cowardice.

No, no, if it were anything, it was his arrogance, his belief that he could defeat the will of the gods.

But, Theo had protested, that’s a circular argument; Theo was always the logician, never much for the humanities. Oedipus’s arrogance, he said, was only evidenced in his trying to avoid his fate; had his fate been less severe, he’d never have rebelled against it, and therefore never would have been seen as arrogant.

No, his teacher, had said, it was there, in a thousand little things he does in the play. Indeed, she quipped, although Oedipus meant “Swollen Foot” — an allusion to the injury sustained when his royal father had bound his feet as a child and left him to die — he could just as easily be called “Swollen Head.”

But Theo couldn’t see it — couldn’t see the arrogance, couldn’t see the condescension. To him, Oedipus, who solved the vexing riddle of the Sphinx, was a towering intellect, a great thinker — exactly what Theo felt himself to be.

The riddle of the Sphinx: what walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, and three in the evening? Why, a man, of course, who crawls at the beginning of life, walks erect in adulthood, and requires a cane in old age. What an incisive bit of reasoning on Oedipus’s part!

But now Theo would never live to need that third leg, would never see the natural sunset of his span. Instead, he’d be murdered in middle-age … just as Oedipus’s real father, King Laius, was left dead at the side of a well-worn road.

Unless, of course, he could change the future; unless he could outwit the gods and avoid his destiny.

Arrogance? thought Theo. Arrogance? It is to laugh.

The plane started its descent into nighttime Athens.

Robert J. Sawyer online:
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Just under a year ago, I reviewed the Lightwedge Verso ebook light. I thought it wasn’t bad, but could use some improvements. Now, Lightwedge has brought out a new ebook light called the Lightwedge Flex Neck Tech Light — and this one I don’t like at all.

I’m unhappy for four reasons:

(1) The clear plastic covering the LEDs isn’t flush with the cowling around the head; instead, it protrudes about a quarter of an inch — meaning light sprays all around, including directly into your eyes; I couldn’t find a comfortable angle for lighting the screen without having light pouring at me, too.

(2) When closed — so that the head is tucked into the clamp — the on/off button is exposed through a round hole and almost flush with the surface, making it very easy for the thing to accidentally get turned on while in your briefcase, or wherever, draining the batteries. Also, another round hole exposes the entire acrylic cover for the LEDs, so that it can easily be scratched in transit. Whoever thought putting the holes in the clamp was a good idea perhaps has a few too many holes in his head. :)

(3) There are only four tiny little dots of silicone on the clamp (two on each side, each about a quarter-inch in diameter) to prevent scuffing/marking whatever you attach the clamp to — and if you have a soft leather case for your ereader, these will leave indentations. It should have had a large silicone patch on each side of the clamp.

(4) The on/off switch makes an audible click when you press it. These sorts of lamps are often used for reading in bed without disturbing a partner; the switch should be silent (yes, this one is quieter than the switch on the Lightwedge Verso ebook light — but it’s still much noisier than it needs to be).

On the plus side, the neck is longer than on most ebook lights, and the clamp opens much wider.

If you are going to get one of these, get the all-black model. It’s the only one with a black neck; the other models have silver necks that will reflect light into your eyes.

Robert J. Sawyer online:
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This week marks my tenth anniversary as a reader of ebooks. I got in early because, as a science-fiction writer, I’d long been expecting this technology. After all, Captain Kirk read reports off a wedge-shaped device back in 1966, and the astronauts in the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey used tablet computers for viewing documents.

I tried lots of devices early on: Palm OS personal-digital assistants with tiny screens, early dedicated devices with monochrome LCD screens (such as the long-gone Franklin eBookman and RCA REB-1100), and later, first-generation e-ink devices (such as the iRex iLiad).

Several things immediately convinced me this was better than reading on paper.

First, even early on, most ebook systems offered built-in dictionaries. In the days of paper books, I rarely bothered to haul a dictionary off the shelf; now, whenever I encounter a word whose meaning I’m not exactly sure of, I effortlessly look it up.

Second, ebooks let you set the font size to whatever you’re comfortable with. As your eyes get older, you’ll find e-reading is much more pleasant, since every title is automatically available in a large-print edition.

Third, having an infinitely big library without it taking up any space is great — and to have that library be portable is fantastic. This year, I’ve travelled through all 24 timezones — right around the world. Having hundreds of books with me on that trek was heaven for a compulsive reader.

Fourth, searching: when I’m doing research, the ability to search in a book for the specific term I’m looking for is indispensable.

Fifth, free public-domain classics: maybe there’s an irony in using twenty-first-century technology to read nineteenth-century books, but I’m way better read today because of Project Gutenberg.

I heard Margaret Atwood pooh-poohing dedicated ebook readers a while ago, saying you can’t use them in the bathtub. Actually, Margaret, you can: just seal them in a Ziploc bag, and you’re good to go, and if you drop it, you’re fine — whereas a paper book is ruined if it gets soaked. (Yes, you can put a paper book in a baggie, too — but you can’t change the page once it’s in there; you easily can with an ebook reader.)

One constantly hears people saying they don’t like reading off computer screens and so will never read ebooks. Well, yes, it’s true that you can read off such screens — but you can also read ebooks on devices such as the Kobo Touch, Kindle 3G, and Nook, which all have modern e-ink displays that are as easy on the eyes as printed paper. As I’ve often said, the single biggest barrier to widespread adoption of ebooks is that most people still haven’t seen a dedicated ebook reader.

I very much like e-ink devices, but I also do much of my reading on my iPhone 4 (where, in my opinion, the Kobo app runs circles around the Kindle app — and not just because Kobo recognizes that full justification looks awful on narrow screens, and so gives you the option of turning it off).

One of the biggest pluses of reading ebooks on smartphones is that you can do it in the dark. I turn the brightness way down on my iPhone, switch to the Kobo app’s night-reading mode (which gives me white letters on a black background), and read to my heart’s content.

I’m a writer; books are my life. And I’m a Canadian; I’m proud of my heritage. But I’ve got to say that when fellow Canadian Marshall McLuhan said “the medium is the message,” he missed the boat on ebooks. The medium — paper book or ebook — is irrelevant. It’s the message — the content — that matters, and for me, for a full decade now, by far my favourite way to enjoy that content has been electronically. Give it a try: I bet you’ll become a convert, too.

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Here’s a YouTube video of me showing off some of the ebook-reading hardware I’ve used over the years; it’s embedded below, but you’ll see it bigger if you watch it at YouTube via this link.

Robert J. Sawyer online:
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The full text of “The Transformed Man”, my Aurora Award-nominated poem is available right here. Enjoy!

Robert J. Sawyer online:
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Star Trek debuted 45 years ago today. In honor of that, here’s a piece I wrote in 2006 for the 40th anniversary of Star Trek: the introduction to Boarding The Enterprise: Transporters, Tribbles and the Vulcan Death Grip in Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek, edited by David Gerrold and me (Robert J. Sawyer), and published by BenBella Books.

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Last fall, I got invited to the Singapore Writers Festival, along with fellow science fiction authors Bruce Sterling and Norman Spinrad. Periodically, when we were out sightseeing in that beautiful city, people would notice our fancy name badges, or overhear us chatting about the festival, and ask who we were. At first we mentioned our books, but, of course, the titles elicited blank stares. And so I started simply pointing to Norman and saying, “This man wrote an episode of Star Trek.”

“Oh, wow!” people always replied. “Which one?”

“‘The Doomsday Machine,'” I said. And the appreciative nods began. Four decades on, and all over the planet, people still know and love Star Trek — indeed, they know it so well that they recognize individual episodes by their titles.

And of course, everyone is familiar with the catch phrases from the show: “Beam me up,” “He’s dead, Jim,” “the Prime Directive,” “warp factor six,” “At the time, it seemed the logical thing to do,” “phasers on stun,” “hailing frequencies open,” “Live long and prosper,” and the most-famous split infinitive in human history, “To boldly go where no man has gone before.”

Those last words, part of Star Trek‘s opening narration, were first heard on September 8, 1966, when the debut episode was broadcast. In a way, that narration was hopelessly optimistic: it promised a five-year mission for the starship Enterprise, but Star Trek was taken off the air after only three seasons.

But in another way, the words also turned out to be enormously shortsighted. Forty years on — time enough for eight five-year missions — Star Trek is such a major part of our culture that it’s almost impossible to imagine the world without it. More people today know who Mr. Spock is than Dr. Spock; the prototype of the Space Shuttle — still the most advanced spacecraft humanity has ever built — was named Enterprise; our cell phones flip open just like Captain Kirk’s communicator; and the original fourteen-foot model of good old NCC-1701 is on permanent display at the Smithsonian.

To date, there have been five primetime television Star Trek series, a Saturday-morning animated Star Trek series, ten Star Trek motion pictures and hundreds of Star Trek books. And it all started when a former cop and airline pilot named Eugene Wesley Roddenberry decided that maybe, just maybe, television audiences were ready for some adult science fiction. His “Wagon Train to the stars,” with its irresistible mix of gaudy sets, hammy acting and sly social commentary, has been warmly embraced now by two full generations of human beings.

Granted, for the first time in two decades, there’s no new Star Trek TV series in production, and, yes, there are no new Star Trek movies currently in the works. But if we’ve learned anything from the voyages of the Enterprise, it’s that even death is not permanent. Star Trek, no doubt, will live again.

And well it should: No TV series of any type has ever been so widely loved — or been so important. Yes, important: Star Trek was the only dramatic TV show of its day to talk, even in veiled terms, about the Vietnam conflict, and it also tackled overpopulation, religious intolerance and race relations (who can forget Frank Gorshin — Batman‘s Riddler — running about with his face painted half-black and half-white?). As William Marshall, who played cyberneticist Dr. Richard Daystrom in the episode “The Ultimate Computer,” said in an interview shortly before he passed away, it’s impossible to overstate the impact it had in the 1960s when white Captain Kirk referred to the black Daystrom as “Sir.” Was it any surprise, two decades later, that NASA hired Nichelle Nichols, who played Lt. Uhura, to help recruit the first minority astronauts? Star Trek gave us an appealing vision of a tolerant future that included everyone.

And that future is still compelling. We may not be quite sure how to get there from here but, as Edith Keeler said in Harlan Ellison’s episode “The City on the Edge of Forever,” Star Trek taught us that the days and the years ahead are worth living for. More than anything else, the series was about hope.

To celebrate four decades of exploring strange new worlds, of seeking out new life and new civilizations, we’ve commissioned these commemorative essays. Some are by the people who actually made Star Trek: Norman Spinrad is here, along with D.C. Fontana, Howard Weinstein, and my coeditor, David Gerrold, all of whom penned adventures of Kirk, Spock and McCoy that actually aired on TV. Other essays are by people like me: the current crop of science fiction writers who were deeply influenced by Star Trek, and at least in part took up our profession because of it. Still others are by academics who have found in those original seventy-nine hour-long episodes much worth pondering. Together, in these pages, we celebrate Star Trek with all the over-the-top gusto of Jim Kirk, we analyze it with the cool logic of Commander Spock, and we explore its fallible, human side with the crusty warmth of “Bones” McCoy.

The first-ever book about Star Trek was the phenomenally influential The Making of Star Trek, published in 1968 when the original series was still in production. Written by Stephen E. Whitfield and Gene Roddenberry, it made possible the Star Trek fan-following that exists today, providing us with photographs of the props that were only glimpsed on screen, official biographies of the characters, blueprints of the Enterprise and the Klingon battle cruiser, and the first ever Star Trek episode checklist. That book ended with these words: “Whither Star Trek? It really doesn’t matter. We have its legacy … all we have to do is use it.”

After forty years, we still don’t know where Star Trek is going. But one thing is sure: it’ll be a wondrous journey. So, come on aboard — we’re about to leave orbit. Mr. Sulu, ahead warp factor one!

Robert J. Sawyer online:
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I was recently asked by a journalist from Fox News Online for my thoughts about robot caregivers for the disabled, resulting in this brief article. But, as always in an interview, I sent him much more material than was actually used. Here are my fuller thoughts on the matter:

Absolutely robots will play a major role as caregivers for the disabled — and I don’t think it’ll be that many years in the future, either. The problem with a human caregiver is that he or she requires infinite patience and infinite kindness. We’ve all read the horror stories about the abuse of the disabled — they come mostly from harried workers snapping under the pressure. A robot won’t have that problem; it will simply perform its task reliably over and over again.

Also, this is liberating for the person being cared for. A human being feels helpless when he or she has to ask another person to get something off a high shelf for them, or help them with their hygiene. But we don’t feel we’re imposing on robots; we’re empowered when we have one. A robot is just another tool, like a wheelchair — but it’s a life-changing tool that improves the quality of one’s existence markedly.

Ironically, the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, which was designed to help humans, did just about everything needed to be done to support robots in our day-to-day lives, too. Robots are mobility-impaired compared to most humans: they need ramps and elevators to get around, and thanks to that wonderful bit of legislation, they already have them.

I actually wrote a short story on this theme called “Uphill Climb,” which was published in Amazing Stories in March 1987, although I did it in reverse — if you make the world accessible for robots, you also make it accessible for people in wheelchairs.

There are no downsides to robots helping the disabled — in conjunction, of course, with loving human support, too; this is totally a triumph of technology — a problem that’s long needed solving that we’re finally on the verge of being able to solve.

Photo: Robert J. Sawyer and friend at MIT’s robotics lab

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Today — August 30, 2011 — Ace Science Fiction releases a new US mass-market paperback of my Nebula Award-winning novel The Terminal Experiment. This beautiful edition features a new introduction by me.

The Terminal Experiment set an all-time record that still stands for the highest number of nominations in any category in the 45-year history of the Nebula Awards.

In addition to winning the Nebula, The Terminal Experiment also won Canada’s Aurora Award, was a finalist for the Hugo Award, was a finalist for Japan’s Seiun Award, and won the Homer Award (voted on by the 40,000 members worldwide of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature Forum on CompuServe, then the world’s largest online service).

Prior to its original book publication, the full novel had been serialized in Analog Science Fiction and Fact (under my original title for it, Hobson’s Choice), then and now the world’s top-selling English-language SF magazine — my first novel to be serialized there. It was also my first novel to become an audiobook (still available, now through Audible.com), and was a selection of the Science Fiction Book Club.

The original edition (from HarperPrism) was one of Amazon.com’s top 100 bestselling titles store-wide for the entire year of 1996, and was later ranked one of the top 50 bestselling science-fiction titles of all time at Amazon.com.

The new paperback is available now throughout the US in physical and online bookstores (Canadian readers got a separate new edition from Penguin Canada recently).

Praise for The Terminal Experiment:

“A terrific mix of science, technological derring-do, and murder. A great story; a crackerjack novel.” —The Globe and Mail

“Robert J. Sawyer won the Nebula Award with this novel, and I would have voted for it. There is so much of interest in this book — artificial intelligence, a good murder mystery, a nicely realized near-future, and, as I’ve come to expect from Sawyer’s novels, thought-provoking philosophy. This is science fiction at its most thought provoking.” —SF Site

Opening chapter

More about the book

Below: the Nebula Award trophy for The Terminal Experiment:

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Voting is now open for Canada’s Prix Aurora Awards. Any Canadian may vote. It’s free if you’re a member of this year’s Canadian National Science Fiction Convention (or “CanVanetion”), which is SFContario 2 in Toronto in November; if you’re not a member, the voting fee is $5.50.

I’m nominated in two categories: Best Novel for Watch and Best Poem for my 1,000-word prose-poem “The Transformed Man,” which you can read right here.

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The Globe and Mail: Canada’s National Newspaper has been running a feature called “My Books, My Place,” featuring writers in their favourite reading spots, and in the Saturday, July 9, 2011, edition, my living room is featured. Here’s the version at the Globe and Mail website, and below is a longer version of the same essay that I wrote for this blog:

Hugo Award-winning science-fiction writer Robert J. Sawyer’s latest novel is Wonder (Penguin Canada).

I have a lovely office in my home, but I almost never use it; I’ve migrated, both for reading and writing, into the living room of my penthouse condo in Mississauga. Part of it is to take advantage of my fireplace; part of it is the lovely views (including the sight of the jam-packed 403 full of commuters making their way into Toronto, and the pleasure I take in not being one of them). Part of it, too, was the final realization that the notion that you’re supposed to separate your work life and your home life just didn’t make sense for me: I’m a writer 24/7, and reading and writing in my living room reflects that.

I’m a member of the first generation of science-fiction writers to have come into the field through television and movies, instead of books. The limited-edition 33-inch model of Star Trek‘s Enterprise was an indulgence, but it acknowledges that debt; the first book that got me serious about wanting to be a writer was 1968’s The Making of Star Trek by Stephen E. Whitfield and Gene Roddenberry.

The Planet of the Apes statues are also an indulgence, I suppose — but it was through that series of films, before I’d read H.G. Wells, that I discovered that science fiction was a powerful medium for social comment. And the dinosaurs — that’s a Triceratops skull and a Stegosaurus reconstruction — remind me that I originally wanted to be a scientist, not a science-fiction writer. But at the time I was heading to university, the chances of being a world-class scientist in Canada seemed dim, whereas few if any had tested the proposition of whether one could be a world-class SF writer in this country.

I was an early adopter of ebooks — this is my tenth year of doing almost all my reading in that form. I have a letter rack next to my recliner that holds both my Kindle and my Kobo; each has its strengths and I like them both.

My next novel, Triggers, is about memory, and I’m reading the wonderful Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer; my editor Adrienne Kerr sent me a paper copy, so I’m reading it in that format. More than any other trait, our memories — what we recall about our own pasts — define who we are, and memory is a fallible and inaccurate faculty.

Meanwhile, my Kobo is loaded with Shelby Foote’s massive three-volume The Civil War: A Narrative, which is much less daunting in ebook form; you could kill a man with the paper editions. It might strike some as odd that a science-fiction writer reads history, but SF is about reasoned extrapolation into the future, and the only way to do that is by understanding the past. Foote’s prose style is absolutely engrossing — he presents fact with the sumptuousness of the best fiction writing.

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YouTube has a wonderful TV interview with me done during my book tour for Wonder. I appeared on Wednesday, April 6, 2011, on Studio 4, Shaw’s morning show, hosted by Fanny Kiefer.

Part One (12:12):

Part Two (10:49):

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Today is the 20th anniversary file-stamp date of the DOS TSR keyboard-macro program I use: SmartKey 6.0g Advanced, created by Australia’s FBN Software — an absolutely amazing program that I rely on daily. (I use WordStar for DOS, which is great on its own, but the combination of it with SmartKey has let me customize my writing tools precisely to my needs.)

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Rest in peace, Martin H. Greenberg. Marty was a consummate anthologist. He bought one of my very first short stories (“The Contest,” for 100 Great Fantasy Short Short Stories, way back in 1984), and bought many others from me since, and I had the honor of late to serve with him on the jury for the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award. He was a friend, a gentleman, and a huge asset to the field.

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The Purpose of Science Fiction

by Robert J. Sawyer

First published in Slate
27 January 2011

Forget Star Wars, Lost in Space, and all the other escapist fare you think of when you hear the term “science fiction.” Print science fiction is an important tool for dealing with real-life issues related to new technology — and it has been right from the beginning.

Most critics agree that the first work of science fiction was Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. It explores, in scientific terms, the notion of synthetic life: Dr. Victor Frankenstein studies the chemical breakdown that occurs after death so he can reverse it to animate nonliving matter. Like so many other works of SF that followed, Shelley’s story is a cautionary tale: it raises profound questions about who should have the right to create living things, and what responsibility the creators should have to their creations and to society.

Think about that: Mary Shelley put these questions on the table almost two centuries ago — 41 years before Darwin published The Origin of Species and 135 years before Crick and Watson figured out the structure of DNA. Is it any wonder that Alvin Toffler, one of the first futurists, called reading science fiction the only preventive medicine for future shock?

Isaac Asimov, the great American SF writer, defined the genre thus: “Science fiction is the branch of literature that deals with the responses of human beings to changes in science and technology.” The societal impact of what is being cooked up in labs is always foremost in the SF writer’s mind, and as our understanding of science advances, science fiction’s focus on issues gets ever sharper. H. G. Wells grappled with creating chimera life forms in The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), Aldous Huxley gave us a heads-up on modified humans in Brave New World (1932), and Michael Crichton’s final science-fiction novel, Next (2006), brought the issues of gene splicing and recombinant DNA to a mass audience.

Science-fiction writers explore these issues in ways that working scientists simply can’t. Some years ago, for a documentary for Discovery Channel Canada, I interviewed neurobiologist Joe Tsien, who had created super-intelligent mice in his lab at Princeton — something he freely spoke about when the cameras were off. But as soon as we started rolling, and I asked him about the creation of smarter mice, he made a “cut” gesture. “We can talk about the mice having better memories, but not about them being smarter. The public will be all over me if they think we’re making animals more intelligent.”

But science-fiction writers do get to talk about the real meaning of research; we’re not beholden to skittish funding bodies and so are free to speculate about the full range of impacts that new technologies might have — not just the upsides but the downsides, too, and we always look, as Isaac Asimov said, at the human impact, rather than couching research in vague, nonthreatening terms.

We also aren’t bound by nondisclosure agreements, the way so many commercial and government scientists are. Indeed, a year before the first atomic bomb was built, the FBI demanded that the magazine Astounding Science Fiction recall its March 1944 issue, which contained a story by Cleve Cartmill that detailed how a uranium-fission bomb might be built. And science-fiction writers began the public discourse about the actual effects of nuclear weapons (see for instance Judith Merril’s classic 1948 story “That Only a Mother,” which deals with gene damage caused by radiation); we also were among the first to weigh in on the dangers of nuclear power (see for example Lester del Rey’s novella “Nerves” in the September 1942 Astounding). Science fiction is the WikiLeaks of science, getting word to the public about what cutting-edge research really means.

And we come with the credentials to do this work. Many science-fiction writers, such as Gregory Benford, are working scientists; many others, such as Joe Haldeman, have advanced degrees in science; others still, such as myself, have backgrounds in science and technology journalism. Our recent works have tackled such issues as the management of global climate change (Kim Stanley Robinson’s Forty Signs of Rain and its sequels), biological terrorism (Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl), and the privacy of online information and China’s attempts to control its citizens’ access to the World Wide Web (my own WWW:Wake and its sequels).

And although one can’t imagine George Lucas being asked to advise the space program, print science-fiction writers often do consulting for government bodies. A group of SF writers called SIGMA frequently advises the Department of Homeland Security about technology issues, and Jack McDevitt and I recently were consulted by NASA about the search for intelligence in the cosmos.

At the core of science fiction is the notion of extrapolation: of asking “if this goes on, where will it lead?” And, unlike most scientists who think in relatively short time frames — getting to the next funding deadline, or readying a product to bring to market — we think on much longer scales: not just months and years, but decades and centuries.

That said, our job is not to predict the future. Rather, it’s to suggest all the possible futures — so that society can make informed decisions about where we want to go. George Orwell’s science-fiction classic Nineteen Eighty-Four wasn’t a failure because the future it predicted failed to come to pass; rather, it was a resounding success because it helped us prevent that future. Those wishing to get in on the ground floor of discussing where technology is leading us would do well to heed Alvin Toffler’s advice by cracking open a good science-fiction book and joining the conversation.

Robert J. Sawyer has won the Hugo, Nebula, and Aurora Awards for best science-fiction novel of the year. His latest novel is WWW: Wonder, and his website is sfwriter.com.

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My directory of award-winning Canadian science fiction and fantasy has been updated through June 2011. Have a look.

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I’ve been pretty lax about updating this blog. I’m much more active on Facebook these days. But I’m getting close to the 5,000-person limit for Friends there. I happily friend my readers, so if you’d like to send me a friend request, please do. My Facebook wall is here.

Here’s a taste of what you’ve been missing if you’re not there: the top-level Wall postings by me from the last four days; for many, spirited discussions ensued.

I’m glad I turned down THE GLOBE AND MAIL’s request that I review ROBOPOCALYPSE, since the fellow they got to review it instead says he prefers my WWW trilogy (see last two paragraphs). :)

Wonderful evening with Bram Stoker award-winner Edo Van Belkom, Robi Di Maio, and their son Luke.

I thought I didn’t have DVDs of the PLANET OF THE APES films anymore — only Blu-ray copies — then I remembered they were hidden inside a bust of Caesar.

SCI-FI BULLETIN reviews WWW: WONDER: “The conclusion to one of the best SF trilogies of modern times.”

Just read PODKAYNE OF MARS, a 1963 novel by Robert A. Heinlein, for the first time. Yes, books should be judged by the standards of their times, but his portrayal of a teenage girl struck me as both sexist and sexually creepy. I wouldn’t go so far as this Amazon reviewer — a book isn’t bad simply because it says things I find objectionable — but the reviewer does a good job of enumerating the problems: “No option for “negative” numbers of…” a review of: Podkayne of Mars

To commemorate the passing of Peter Falk, and in honor of the fact that I saw Leonard Nimoy in person last month at Phoenix Comicon, watched the “A Stitch in Crime” episode of COLUMBO tonight, in which Nimoy guest stars as a murderous surgeon.

My upcoming appearances, including my Worldcon programming schedule.

Finished watching PROBE, the pilot for SEARCH (NBC 1972), on DVD from Warner Archives. It looked fabulous, and I still love, love, love the PROBE Control set; to me, it’s one of the handful of great science-fiction sets (others being the original ENTERPRISE bridge and the centrifuge from 2001). Here’s a grainy version of the opening credits; the DVD is much sharper and more colorful.

In honor of Peter Falk: Sunday Mystery Movie Opening: www.youtube.com

Rest in peace, Peter Falk, the star of COLUMBO.

Just sold an op-ed piece to the OTTAWA CITIZEN on life prolongation; my seventh commissioned op-ed for them. I’ll post a note here when it runs.

One-hour podcast roundtable for writers: Colonizing New Markets with Robert J. Sawyer, Scott Sigler, and Nathan Lowell, hosted by John Mierau

I just want to say that I live in Mississauga, not Toronto: “Rob Ford Snubs Gay Pride Parade: Toronto Mayor Under Fire For Choosing Cottage Instead” — HuffingtonPost.ca

New Canadian online zine CanCulture — about Canadian Culture — reviews the WWW trilogy

When PROBE, the pilot film for SEARCH, first aired in 1972, Hugh O’Brian was 47; Burgess Meredith was 64, Angel Tompkins was 29, and Sir John Gielgud was 68. Except for Angel, they were all playing younger characters (Gielgud’s character was 53, given the on-air stated birthdate of 1919).

Interesting discussion about charging for author events. This came up during my WONDER book tour, when Penguin Canada booked me into a few venues that had admission charges. There are no easy answers.

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The Winnipeg Free Press ran a short version of this interview in Kenton Smith’s “Paper Chase” books column in its Saturday, May 14, 2011, edition; here’s the full interview:

1) What compelled you to sign the letter to the BBC re: its coverage of World Book Day? What would you personally have to add to what the letter already says?

The BBC’s dismissal of science fiction is ridiculous; as a field, SF has an enormously strong history of stylistic innovation as well as being a vehicle for trenchant social commentary, going right back to Mary Shelley (the field’s grandmother with Frankenstein) and H.G. Wells (its father with The Time Machine), both of whom, of course, were British. The BBC should have been ashamed of itself for ignoring the terrific work being done today in a field that Britain invented.

If there’d been room for a personal comment with the letter, I’d have added that the CBC in Canada has always been wonderfully supportive of science fiction; the BBC needs to up its game.

2) For people who might dismiss science fiction, what would you point to in your latest novel Wonder that you would say might be more relevant to them and the world they live in than they might think? Why read science fiction? Why read your science fiction?

Wonder deals with, among many other things, the rise of the religious right as a political force in the United States, the oppressive regime in China and whether it can survive the openness afforded by online communication, and whether surveillance technologies here in the West may finally put an end to bullying, rape, and assault.

Good science fiction is always about the here-and-now, although some science fiction uses metaphor to achieve that effect: aliens standing in for humans, another world standing in for ours. But my science fiction is set mostly in Canada, and in the present day or very near future; you don’t need a secret decoder ring to figure out what it’s actually talking about. President Obama, Hillary Clinton, and even The Daily Show‘s Jon Stewart all appear in Wonder. It’s a philosophical novel about things that plausibly might happen; as Alvin Toffler, the fame futurist said, “Reading science fiction is the only preventive medicine for future shock.”

3) What is it about the Internet as a subject that attracted (or perhaps compelled) you to write the WWW trilogy?

The World Wide Web has changed the whole planet; as I argue in Wonder, Tim Berners-Lee, who invented it, deserves the Nobel Peace Prize, because his creation has done more to bring disparate people together for peaceful collaboration than anything else in the history. To not be thinking about the Web’s future — about where all of this interconnectivity, and, yes, loss of privacy, is going to lead — is to have cultural blinders on. The WWW trilogy is my attempt to engage with those issues.

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Come join me for the conclusion of the book tour for Wonder, the final volume of my WWW trilogy: Thursday, May 19, 2011, at 7:00 p.m. at McNally Robinson in Winnipeg (Grant Park Mall). Here’s a little interview with me about what to exepct at the event.

“Wonder is not only a superb conclusion to a tremendous trilogy, but stands alone as one of the best books that Sawyer has ever written.” —Nick Martin in Winnipeg Free Press

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The Winnipeg Free press loves Wonder, as you can see in Nick Martin’s review here. The review concludes:

Wonder is not only a superb conclusion to a tremendous trilogy, but stands alone as one of the best books that Sawyer has ever written.

I’ll be in Winnipeg on book tour on Thursday, May 19, 2011, signing at McNally Robinson at 7:00 p.m.

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All Canadians are eligible to nominate for Canada’s top science-fiction and fantasy award, the Aurora! You can nominate here, and find lists of eligible works here.

(My own eligible works are the novel Watch published by Penguin Canada, the poem “The Transformed Man” from Tesseracts Fourteen, and, in the Best Work in English — Other category, “Course Correction,” my teleplay for FlashForward, the ABC TV series based on my novel of the same name.)

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Here’s the full 18-minute interview with me on CBC Radio One’s Spark, with host Nora Young (pictured above). Lots of stuff about Wake, Watch, and Wonder, plus some discussion of Mindscan.

God, I love the CBC. Who else let’s you answer questions at such length?

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Here’s a great new interview (in English) with me conducted at the Budapest International Book Fair, in Hungary, on Sunday, April 17, 2011, where my Hungarian publisher, Galaktika, was launching the Hungarian translation of my Nebula Award-winning novel The Terminal Experiment. Thanks to Hungary’s Ekultúra for the terrific interview!

It’s available in three video segments:

http://youtu.be/vhJGlxdeptY
http://youtu.be/7Sh8eDwUp1A
http://youtu.be/fawnd7lsJ0E

or you can read a text transcript here.

Discsussed: ebooks and piracy, the FlashForward TV series, the value of awards, research, my work on the TV series Charlie Jade, my next book Triggers, and more.

Below: the Hungarian edition of The Terminal Experiment:

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

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To be young again, knowing all you know now…
May not be the dream you hoped it would be.

Adapted from the popular novel Rollback by Robert J. Sawyer, Rollback: The Play will premiere in Prince George, British Columbia!

Thirty years in the future, technology provides us with the ability to roll back our bodies to the age of 25. Don and Sarah are comfortably retired until presented with the opportunity to have a Rollback. An exciting turning point in their lives — until it only works for one of them.

“An adventure in the strength of human spirit that will tug at your heart.”

Thursday, Friday and Saturdays
April 28 – 30, May 5 – 7, 2011
8:00pm – 10:00pm. Doors open at 7:30pm. Open seating.
Tickets $15.00 available at Books & Company or at the door.

Written and Directed by Virginia O’Dine
Cast includes:
Lynne Brown
Al Dawson
Vivian Johnson
Al Wiensczyk
Ciaran Maguire
Krista Levar

Intended for mature audiences. Contains a smidgen of foul language.

Press release.

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Still lots of events left on the Wonder book tour!

• Reading and signing from Wonder
  The Ottawa International Writers Festival
  Mayfair Theatre
  1074 Bank Street
  Ottawa, Ontario
  Saturday, April 30, 2011 at 6:30 p.m.
  Carleton Students with ID can get tickets for free
  General tickets are $15, reduced tickets are $10
  writersfestival.org

• Reading and signing from Wonder
  Waterloo Public Library
  35 Albert Street
  Waterloo, Ontario
  Words Worth Books will be handling book sales
  Tuesday, May 3, 2011 at 7:30 p.m.
  (Note: the event is not at Words Worth)
  wordsworthbooks.com

• Reading and signing from Wonder
  Books & Company
  1685 3rd Avenue
  Prince George, British Columbia
  Wednesday, May 4, 2011 at 7:00 p.m.
  booksandcompany.ca

• Reading and signing from Wonder
  McNally Robinson Booksellers — Grant Park Mall
  1120 Grant Avenue
  Winnipeg, Manitoba
  Thursday, May 19, 2011 at 7:00 p.m.
  McNally Winnipeg

• Guest
  Keycon 28
  Winnipeg, Manitoba
  May 20-22, 2011
  keycon.org

• Guest
  Phoenix ComiCon
  Phoenix Convention Center, North Building
  Phoenix, Arizona
  May 26-29, 2011
  phoenixcomicon.com

• Guest of Honor
  DelosDays2011
  37th Italcon / 4th Nextcon / 1st Uraniacon
  Milan, Italy
  June 2-5, 2011
  delosdays2011.it

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