Con-Version, the long-standing Calgary SF&F convention, has announced its Annual General Meeting — just four days in advance of it actually taking place. The meeting is this Monday, March 21, 2011, at the Sentry Box in Calgary from 7:00 to 9:00 p.m. A Facebook announcement is here.
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The Walrus is a very popular Canadian glossy newsstand magazine, rather similar to The Atlantic. The April 2011 issue has a 2,500-word essay built around my WWW trilogy of Wake, Watch, and Wonder. The essay/review is called “Intelligence Deficit: What will happen when computers become smarter than people?,” and is written by Alex Hutchinson. You can read the whole thing online here.
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Here’s the current itinerary for the Canadian book tour for Wonder, third and final book in the WWW Trilogy (more events will be added when they are confirmed, and the up-to-date list will always be here).
All events are free, except for the mega-three-author blowout in Calgary, which is in a fancy theatre; that one’s got a $5 cover charge per the bookseller to defray facilities-rental costs. Many thanks to Penguin Group (Canada) for their incredible support and to the participating booksellers!
- Toronto Launch
Dominion on Queen Pub
500 Queen Street East
Toronto, Ontario
Tuesday, March 29, 2011 at 7:00 p.m.
Bakka Phoenix will be on-hand to sell books
(Note: the event is not at Bakka)- Saskatoon
McNally Robinson Booksellers
3130 8th Street East
(8th Street at Circle Drive)
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan
Thursday, March 31, 2011 at 7:30 p.m.
McNally Saskatoon- Calgary Event with Edge Press authors: Marie Jacober & Billie Milholland
Pages at the Plaza
The Plaza Theatre
1133 Kensington Road NW
(right next door to, and hosted by, Pages on Kensington)
Calgary, Alberta
Sunday, April 3, 2011 at 11:00 a.m.
Admission is $5, but gets you 10% off Wonder
You can purchase a box lunch (well) in advance
A panel discussion of science fiction as a mirror for reality
Plus readings and Q&A
pages.ab.ca/readings.html- Edmonton
Audreys Books
10702 Jasper Avenue
Edmonton, Alberta
Monday, April 4, 2011 at 7:00 p.m.
Audreys Books- Vancouver
Vancouver Public Library
Central Branch, Level 3 Meeting Room
350 West Georgia Street
Vancouver, British Columbia
Tuesday, April 5, 2011 at 7:00 p.m.
White Dwarf Books will be on hand to sell books.
(Note: the event is not at White Dwarf)- Winnipeg
McNally Robinson Booksellers — Grant Park Mall
1120 Grant Avenue
Winnipeg, Manitoba
Thursday, May 19, 2011 at 7:00 p.m.
McNally Winnipeg
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The members of the Yahoo! Groups-based Classic Science Fiction Message Board discussed my novel FlashForward, which was the basis for the ABC TV series of the same name, as their February 2011 modern book-club title. The group discusses one classic (more than 30 years old) and one modern book each month. (The group is open to new members, and in June 2011, their modern pick will be my Calculating God.)
After they were done, they sent me three questions about my novel and the adaptation of it. The questions were so provocative, I thought I’d share them — and my answers — here.
1) How do you really feel about how ABC mangled your story? I’m sure you’re pleased to get such world-wide attention, but your story as written was great and their rewrite took out all the dazzling science. Lost proved there is an audience for a story based on far-out philosophical and religious ideas, but evidently ABC didn’t think the masses could handle philosophical explorations based on physics?
David S. Goyer, Jessika Borsiczky, and Brannon Braga were wonderful people to deal with. When they got serious about wanting to adapt my novel for television in 2007, we had an amazing meeting at the Chateau Marmont in Hollywood, and they did something few producers would do. Before I’d signed over the rights, they outlined the changes they felt needed to be made for the show to work for an American audience: much shorter flashforwards, a US instead of European setting, and a focus on cops, doctors, and lawyers — the only professions Americans will watch on TV — instead of physicists. And I said it didn’t matter to me if they changed any of those things, so long as they were true to the central philosophical underpinnings of the book: a rational, thoughtful exploration of the question of fate vs. free will.
And, at the outset, I think we really did have that; the pilot episode, “No More Good Days,” was magnificent. Brannon left us after the pilot to work on 24, and David bowed out partway through our first — and, as it turned out, only — season, and, yes, I do think the show lost some of its focus. Part of it was the burden of the conspiracy plotline that had become front and center.
All terrorists are fungible: it doesn’t matter whether you’re trying to assassinate a US presidential candidate, as in the first season of 24, or trying to engineer a global blackout, as in the first season of FlashForward, once you’ve gone down the terrorist route, you’re stuck telling the same sort of stories — a point driven home quite dramatically by the fact that the same actor, Michael Massee, played the bad guy in both those shows, actually: he was our Dyson Frost, playing cat-and-mouse with Mark Benford, and he was Ira Gaines, the guy playing cat-and-mouse with Jack Bauer in the first season of 24. You could have swapped many of Massee’s scenes between those two shows and philosophically, it would have made very little difference.
I was originally to write the sixth episode of FlashForward, then the eleventh, then the seventeenth, and finally it ended up being the nineteenth, and that was quite telling. David and I agreed early on that I’d do an episode that played to my strengths: the physics and philosophy of what consciousness displacement through time actually meant. But as the conspiracy angle just grew and grew, actually getting to those questions kept getting pushed off more and more.
My first draft of “Course Correction” really dealt with a lot of that stuff, but by that point we were also so burdened with a checklist of loose ends that had to be tied up that there was really very little latitude for anything but crossing items off that list.
And when it came down to the philosophical issues, we really were starting to go off track by that point, and in one of the later episodes we actually had a character say, “It’s not fate vs. free will — it’s fate and free will.” That is, we no longer had a philosophical vision, and instead just wanted to please everyone; heaven forbid we should actually come down on one side or the other of a contentious issue.
Meanwhile, as our ratings continued to slip — and they did almost every single week — the TV show that actually embraced the lives of physicists was going through the roof, having its breakout year: The Big Bang Theory. It turned out, in fact, that US audiences would hugely watch bright people as long as they were quirky, charming, and witty — and I do think FlashForward really distinguished itself from other chase/conspiracy shows whenever Jack Davenport as Lloyd Simcoe and Dominic Monaghan as Simon Campos were on the screen.
2) In your novel, during the original flashforward, why wasn’t anyone reading or seeing a news story about the original flashforward? (News agencies love to do 20-years-later type of features.) Also, why wasn’t anyone watching or reading a story about the upcoming attempt at a creating a second flashforward? Surely that kind of thing would have been mentioned in Theo’s obituary.
Well, that’s the point. They weren’t doing that because the original global blackout interrupted the deterministic flow of time by eliminating qualified observers to collapse all the potential quantum realities into one actual reality; the visions people saw in their flashforwards were of the timeline as it would have unfolded had the flashforwards — and the discontinuity in consciousness — not occurred.
That went right out the window in the TV adaptation — and I pointed this out to Dave and Brannon as soon as I read the draft of the pilot — because they had cameras recording what happened during the flashforward, and at least one qualified observer — “Suspect Zero” — awake through it.
Setting aside the ridiculousness of Janis Hawk finding in a matter of hours the one and only security-camera video in the whole world of someone being awake during the global blackout, it also meant there was no philosophical underpinning anymore for why the timelines diverged. I tried to argue in the writers’ room, later in the series, that since we’d thrown out my version of the logic from the novel, we had to go back to Mark Benford having written on the desk calendar page in the pilot, “Who else knows?,” and make that a coded message to himself in the past — but that was never picked up on.
3) In Theo’s flashforward, he experienced darkness to represent his death. There was no vision of any afterlife, either Heaven, Hell, or reincarnation. Surely this would have sparked a major discussion and debate among the various religious leaders on its significance. How would you have approached this if you could have pursued this rabbit trail?
I’d already written The Terminal Experiment, a novel about the nature of the putative afterlife, and won awards for it, including the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Nebula Award for best novel of the year and Canada’s Aurora Award. So, I didn’t want to do that again, especially so soon — The Terminal Experiment came out in 1995, and FlashForward came out in 1999.
And, as you say, it’s a rabbit trail. But in the context of FlashForward, it’s one that’s easy to dismiss. As I write this today, an earthquake just occurred off the coast of Japan. Where is God in all that? Why isn’t he intervening? Well, if you believe in God, he’s right there, right now, but we just can’t see him or comprehend his logic. And if you don’t, well, you don’t, and there’s nothing to explain related to him and today’s events.
So, someone has no flashforward because he or she is dead, and sees nothing? Well, if you believe in an afterlife, all you have to do to comfort yourself is say that there’s a barrier between this realm and that one, and the flashing-forward effect can’t cross it. There’s nothing that those disposed to believe in life after death can’t explain away, including the complete lack in our day-to-day lives of any credible evidence for its existence; what happened to Theo in the book wouldn’t be a game-changer for them because nothing can be a game-changer for them; they’re immune to evidence-based reasoning on that issue.
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On Sundays, The Toronto Star — the largest-circulation newspaper in Canada — contains a version of the New York Times Book Review. Last Sunday, March 6, 2011, the entire back cover was devoted to this terrific ad produced by Penguin Group (Canada) for my WWW trilogy of Wake, Watch, and Wonder. I’m absolutely thrilled! You can see a bigger version by clicking on the graphic above or on this link.
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The Toronto book-launch party for Wonder, the concluding volume of the WWW trilogy, will be Tuesday, March 29, 2011, at 7:00 p.m. at Dominion on Queen pub, 500 Queen Street East. The event is free and open to the public, and Bakka-Phoenix will be on hand to sell books.
The gorgeous invitation Penguin Canada made for this event is here (there’s no need to RSVP, though, and you don’t need to bring a copy of the invitation — just show up!).
Robert J. Sawyer online:
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I updated the letter I send to beginning writers who ask me for advice today; the current version follows:
Dear Beginning Writer:
You’re getting this letter because you’ve contacted me about writing science fiction. Unfortunately, so many people have taken to asking me for advice that I’ve had to resort to this form letter of response. Still, I hope it’s of some assistance.
This letter, the article that follows, and the advice on my web site contain 100% of the help I can give you; everything else is up to you.
First, The Things I Cannot Do:
1) I will not read any sample of your work; sorry, but I just don’t have the time and, besides, the only opinion that counts is that of an editor who is willing to pay you money.
2) I will not collaborate with you; writing fiction is a solitary profession, and, frankly, if you’re a beginner, you’ve got nothing to bring to the table, anyway. Ideas are a dime a dozen; if I stopped having ideas today, I’d still have enough not-yet-used ones to continue writing for the rest of my life. The same thing is true for all professional writers.
3) I will not recommend you to my agent. The agency I’m with was founded by the top name in the field, and when I switched to him in 1996, I had to be simultaneously both a Hugo Award and a Nebula Award nominee to attract his interest. His agency is not looking for beginning writers.
Second, The Things You Should Remember:
1) Money always, always, always flows to the writer, never the other way around. Any “publisher,” “editor,” or “agent” who asks you for money up front for anything is a ripoff artist. Period. Never pay to have anything published, agented, or critiqued.
2) Aim for quality markets: ones that have good reputations, ones from which stories routinely appear in “Year’s Best” anthologies or on major award ballots, ones you’ve actually heard of in some context other than just a market listing, and ones that established, big-name pros routinely publish in.
Third, The Home Truths:
1) A writer needs talent, perseverance, and luck — yes, all three of them.
2) Fewer than one percent of those who want to be science-fiction writers ever publish even a single story. This is a tough, tough game to get into, and there are thousands of aspirant writers just like you. Almost all will fail, and 90% of those who manage to sell a first novel or a few short stories will also fail after that, never selling anything again.
3) Almost nobody gets rich writing SF, and hardly anyone gets to do it full-time. If you’re going into this for the money, you are making a mistake. Most SF magazines pay between three and eight cents US a word for stories, and most first novels in this field get advances of between US$2,500 and US$7,500 — and never earn a penny beyond that in royalties. Flipping burgers at McDonald’s will make you more on an hourly basis.
4) You have to finish your first book before you can sell it; only later in your career will you possibly be offered contracts for unwritten books.
5) The response time from an editor for a novel submission (either the full manuscript, or a partial [first three chapters and an outline of the rest of your already-finished book] will be between three months and well over a year. Sad, but true. And almost all publishers frown on you submitting your work to more than one editor at a time.
6) North American SF publishing is centered in the United States, for the most part. If you want to publish SF, submit first to editors in New York. And submit to the big publishers first; the small press is where you salvage a book that otherwise wouldn’t be published at all (and I say that as a small-press editor myself).
Fourth, The Advice:
1) My own advice on writing science fiction is available on my web site. Read it.
2) If you need to learn the basics of writing or want someone to give you feedback, either take a creative-writing course (or, even better, an SF-writing course) at your local college or university, or see if your local college or library has a writer in residence with whom you can consult; that’s what they’re there for. You might also check out the online Critters workshop.
3) Information about markets can be found online — one excellent source is Ralan.com — and most major book and magazine publishers have their submission guidelines online; check their websites.
4) There’s only one right way to do a manuscript. The format is explained on here.
5) The best book on writing SF is The Writer’s Digest Guide to Science Fiction & Fantasy by Orson Scott Card and the Editors of Writer’s Digest, published by Writer’s Digest Books.
6) Don’t worry about copyright. No one is going to steal your idea, and you don’t have to register a work in order for it to be protected by copyright.
7) Know the marketplace. If you don’t read SF regularly, you’re doomed to failure. Printed SF is almost nothing like what you see on TV and in the movies. And different book publishers and different magazines like different types of SF. Spend hours browsing in the SF section of large bookstores — know who is publishing what.
8) There are no magic words, no secret handshakes, and no fast-tracks. The way to get published is to write a really good story, submit it by paper mail, and wait for an editor to buy it. You don’t have to know somebody; you don’t have to belong to any organization; you don’t need an agent ever to sell SF short stories, and most authors submit their first novels without an agent.
9) When you get an offer from a book publisher, find yourself an agent to negotiate the contract. Literary agents aren’t regulated by law, and anyone can claim to be one. A list of reputable agents specializing in science fiction can be found here.
10) Do not self-publish. Seriously. Don’t.
11) Finally, read the article below.
That’s it! I wish you the best of luck.
— Robert J. Sawyer
BREAKING INTO THE SCIENCE-FICTION MARKETPLACE
(particularly if you’re Canadian)
Science fiction is a genre in which Canadian writers are having international success, but unless you follow the rules, you’re doomed to failure.
First, SF literature has nothing to do with what you see on TV and in the movies. For one thing, printed SF is a largely character-driven genre, devoid of the simplistic heroes and villains of Star Wars. For another, SF is a literature of ideas. Although there is a place for mindless action-adventure, good SF is usually about something (and often something very profound, such as whether or not God exists).
Second, science fiction and fantasy are radically different — indeed, antithetical — genres. There is always a way to get from our here and now to the setting of any science-fiction story (usually by making reasonable advances in science and technology as time marches on); there is never a way to get from our real world to the setting of a fantasy story (magic simply doesn’t work in our universe).
Third, science fiction is a largely pro-science genre. Although Vancouver’s William Gibson is right when he says the job of the SF writer is to be “profoundly ambivalent about changes in science and technology,” printed SF rarely takes the anti-science stance of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park. Nor does it embrace the paranoia and credulous acceptance of the supernatural that underlies The X-Files.
Fourth, the science in printed SF must be accurate. In Star Wars, Han Solo could talk about parsecs as a unit of time (rather than distance), and about “making the jump to light-speed” (the one thing Einstein prohibits is traveling AT the speed of light); those gaffes would spell instant rejection from most print SF markets. Still, much of the best science fiction is written by nonscientists. To keep up to date, read the magazines New Scientist, Discover, and Scientific American, and watch Discovery Channel Canada’s nightly science newscast Daily Planet and listen to CBC Radio’s weekly science show Quirks and Quarks.
Fifth, science fiction, although sometimes a medium of stylistic experimentation, is usually told in either third-person limited narration (following the point of view, and knowing the thoughts of, one character per scene), or first-person (unlike some fields, there is no taboo in SF against first-person narrative).
Note, too, that SF is an adult literature: strong language, explicit sex, and graphic violence are acceptable if required by the story. Readership (and authorship) is evenly split between men and women.
Mystery writers complain that US publishers are prejudiced against Canadian settings. That’s not true in SF. The works of Terence M. Green, Nalo Hopkinson, Spider Robinson, and myself have all been published by major New York houses, yet revel in their Canadian settings.
If you’re scratching your head and saying, “How can SF possibly take place in Canada — isn’t it all set on alien planets and spaceships or in the far future?,” you haven’t done your homework. The only way to write SF successfully is to read it. An excellent “SF 101” course would be to read all the Hugo- and Nebula-winning novels, as well as the annual reprint anthologies The Year’s Best Science Fiction edited by Gardner Dozois (St. Martin’s) and Year’s Best SF edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer (Eos).
Not only do American publishers routinely buy Canadian-authored SF, but you should in fact turn to them as your first choice. Most major US publishers have SF imprints (Ace and Roc at Penguin, Aspect at Warner, Del Rey at Random House, Eos at HarperCollins, and Spectra at Doubleday), and there are significant publishers that do nothing but SF (and fantasy): the giant Tor, and smaller Baen and DAW. Advances for North American rights to first novels usually range from US$2,500 to US$7,500; successful mid-career novelists can get between US$20,000 and US$50,000 up front; only a handful of giants slide into six figures per book.
The only Canadian publishers regularly doing SF are small, specialty presses, with advances usually around Cdn$500, and little chance of earning royalties beyond that. Canadian presses that have had success with SF include EDGE, Bundoran, and Red Deer.
Although many unpublished authors have cracked the US novel market with over-the-transom submissions, the standard career path is to first sell short fiction (at 5 to 8 cents US a word) to the genre’s digest-sized American magazines (Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction), or one of the “semiprozines” (semi-professional magazines, lower in pay and circulation). The only Canadian SF magazine whose contents are noted by American editors is Edmonton’s On Spec, although Neo-Opsis is also starting to make a splash.
Short-fiction sales can help you land one of the two dozen New York agents who handle the bulk of SF (don’t get a Canadian agent for this field). But even if you don’t have an agent, many publishers will read your novel manuscript, although response time may be over a year, and simultaneous submissions aren’t allowed.
There is a lot of e-publishing of books at the fringes of SF, but almost none of it is taken seriously. And speaking of not being taken seriously, don’t try to break in by doing tie-in novels based on SF TV shows, movies, or games. These are considered hackwork, and, besides, are generally open only to experienced hacks …
Canadian SF writers have two advocacy groups, neither overly effective. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA), which has a Canadian Region, has more stringent membership requirements and offers several publications. SF Canada’s main service is a listserve. Many pros do fine without belonging to either group.
Face-to-face networking is still the best way to meet SF writers and editors and to hear industry gossip. There are annual SF conventions with strong literary components in most regions of Canada, including VCON in Vancouver, Pure Speculation in Edmonton, When Words Collide in Calgary, KeyCon in Winnipeg, Ad Astra and SFContario in Toronto, Can-Con in Ottawa, and Con*Cept in Montreal.
Canada has two SF awards, the venerable Aurora (voted on by readers) and the juried Sunburst.
Information on Canadian SF can be found at
The principal reference works on Canadian SF are Northern Dreamers by Edo van Belkom (Quarry, 1998) and Dictionary of Literary Biography 251: Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Authors (Gale, 2001); I myself wrote the entry on science fiction in The Canadian Encyclopedia (2000).
Robert J. Sawyer‘s 20 SF novels include the Hugo Award-winner Hominids, the Nebula Award-winner The Terminal Experiment, and the national bestsellers Calculating God and Wake. He lives in Mississauga, Ontario. Visit his website at sfwriter.com.
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For those who’d pre-ordered WWW: Wonder through Amazon.ca (the Canadian Amazon), Amazon was mistakenly listing the American edition. They’ve now cancelled those orders, but unfortunately didn’t refer buyers to the Canadian edition. If you want to pre-order Wonder from Amazon.ca, this link will do the trick.
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The second (and most recent) print edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction by John Clute and Peter Nicholls begins its entry on me thus:
SAWYER, ROBERT J(AMES) (1960- ) Canadian writer who began publishing sf with “If I’m Here, Imagine Where They Sent my Luggage” for The Village Voice in 1981 …
And indeed I did. I’d had an earlier fantasy publication (“The Contest,” in the 1980 edition of White Wall Review, the literary annual of my alma mater, Ryerson Polytechnical Institute, edited by Ed Greenwood, who created the “Forgotten Realms” for Dungeons & Dragons), and I’d sold a science-fiction story to be produced as a planetarium starshow), but that was my first science-fiction publication — and it came out exactly 30 years ago today.
That story appeared in the 14-20 January 1981 issued of The Village Voice: The Weekly Newspaper of New York, as a winner in a ten-week contest they were running called “Sci-Fi Scenes,” featured in the “Scenes” column by Howard Smith & Lin Harris.
The rules required a story of exactly 250 words — no more, no less (title words didn’t count, a fact I took full advantage of).
The judges for the contest were Shawna McCarthy, then editor of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Victoria Schochet, the editor-in-chief of SF at Berkley Publishing, and Robert Sheckley, the fiction editor of Omni. I’d learned about the contest from a poster promoting it that was on display at Bakka, Toronto’s science-fiction specialty bookstore. Each weekly winner won a copy of the first edition of Peter Nicholls’s The Science Fiction Encyclopedia, the forerunner of the work I quote above.
The ten weekly winners, in order of publication, were:
(The grand-prize winner was the last listed; she won 10 novels of her choice from Gregg Press.)
Of the winners, the only names I recognize as having gone on to further significant publishing in the science-fiction field are Susan Shwartz, Edward Wellen, and Ted Reynolds.
Here’s my 250-word story, as it first appeared 30 years ago today:
If I’m Here, Imagine Where They Sent My Luggage by Robert J. Sawyer
One look at the eyes of that allosaur had been enough: fiery red with anger, darting with hunger, and a deeper glow of … cunning. Those sickle claws may be great for shredding prey, but he can’t run worth a damn on mud.
Come on, Allo-baby, you may have the armament, but I took Paleo 250 with Professor Blackhart!
Damn the professor, anyway. If it weren’t for his class, I’d be on Altair III now, not running for my life across a prehistoric mud flat.
Those idiots at Starport Toronto said teleportation was a safe way to travel. “Just concentrate on your destination and the JumpLink belt will do the rest.”
Hah! I was concentrating, but when I saw that fat broad, I couldn’t help thinking of a brontosaur. So I let my mind wander for half a second: the JumpLink belt still shouldn’t have dumped me here with the dinosaurs. There should be enough juice left for one more Jump, if I can get it to work.
Damn, it’s hard fiddling with your belt buckle while doing a three-minute kilometer. Let’s see: if I re-route those fiber optics through that picoprocessor …
The thwock-thwock of clawed feet sucking out of mud is getting closer. Got to hurry. Thwock-thwock!
There! The timer’s voice counts down: “Four.”
Concentrate on Starport Toronto. Concentrate. Thwock-thwock!
“Three.”
Toronto. The Starport. Concentrate. Thwock-thwock!
“Two.”
Concentrate hard. Starport Toronto. No stray thoughts. Thwock-thwock!
“One.”
Boy, am I going to give them Hell —
I love the fact that right off the bat I was showing signs of the hallmarks of my career: an abiding interest in dinosaurs and paleontology and being blatantly Canadian even when writing for a New York market.
For a time, I had this entire story reprinted on the back of my business card. In 1987 it was reprinted by a company called Story Cards in Washington, D.C., as a “Bon Voyage” card. The story also appears in my first collection, Iterations and Other Stories.
Click on the first image below for a PDF scan of the story as it appeared in the The Village Voice and the second one below for a PDF scan of my original handwritten two-page manuscript, dated 16 December 1980 (I didn’t get my first computer until three years later, December 1983).
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They’d done my Illegal Alien — which had been my last title in the 1990s for Ace — and, as soon as I moved back to Ace in 2009, they did editions of Wake and Watch.
Tor — who I’d been with for the intervening eight books — had always been reluctant to do business with this line (wanting their own editions to be perceived of as the true firsts). That was irritating, since Easton paid the author $3 a signature, and usually required about a thousand autographs per book — about $24,000 if Easton had picked up all eight of my intervening Tor titles; they also paid the publisher a nice fee for the rights to produce their edition, 50% of which was credited to the author’s royalty account with the publisher.
As soon as I moved back to Ace, the Easton Press was doing me in that line again, and the editions were gorgeous.
But now it’s over. I’ve just confirmed with their customer-service department: they are doing one final book (Moonworld by Howard Waldrop), then that’s it.
I’m sad for all kinds of reasons, not the least of which is that there’ll never be a matching leather-bound edition of Wonder, the final volume in my WWW trilogy, which is coming out at the end of March.
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Recently received:
This is a heart-felt “thank you” arriving seven months late. It took months of reading and re-reading WWW: Watch to put together words that can express my moment of ecstasy of reading that book, and the warmth that has stayed with me since.Upon absorbing the conversation between Dr. Kuroda and Caitlin pertaining to recent Japanese history and its implications, I literally jumped out of bed and started calling friends in dazed excitement, attempting to babble out my delight.
Those lovely passages presented something I have long searched for and have nearly despaired of ever finding. In this complicated and frequently depressing world, with history seeming to revolve through endless cycles of human misery, it is rare to find a fresh idea that offers hope and delight, and rarer still for that beautiful idea to come with evidence that really convinces the heart and mind, and moves someone to say: “yes, it’s true, we really can become better people, here is why — we have done it before.”
I’ve heard of the expressions “answer to a prayer” and “a life-changing book” but have never experienced it directly before. The world was brighter to my eyes for having read your work. Those passages of yours, firmly planted in me, have been a flowing source of bubbling optimism since, and is the reason I can look to the future and believe that we will build a world with less suffering. I just wanted you to know that this “thank-you” will be on-going.
[Signed], a happier person because of you.
Robert J. Sawyer online:
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I rather like putting meta-references in my books (sly things that acknowledge that they are, in fact, fiction), and sometimes I give a freebie to the reviewers — a chance for them to take a free shot (I still regret letting myself being talked out of calling my second short-story collection Infodumps).
An example: for over a decade, we’ve run a quote on my books from the Montreal Gazette calling me “Canada’s answer to Michael Crichton.” Hence this little bit in Chapter 14 of WWW: Watch — but no one picked up on it. :)
“So do you guys read Mark Twain here in Canada?” [asked Caitlin]Hee hee hee.“Not much,” said Bashira. “There’s this old Canadian humorist named Stephen Leacock. We read him in English class instead.”
In Caitlin’s admittedly brief experience living here, anyone labeled as “Canada’s answer to …” followed by the name of an American was bound to disappoint.
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W00t! Senior Editor Rome Quezada at the Science Fiction Book Club has just picked up my next novel WWW: Wonder, coming in April 2011, as a Main Selection of the Club. This is the fourth consecutive main selection I’ve had: Rollback, Wake, Watch, and Wonder. Needless to say, I’m thrilled. (In total, 12 of my novels have been SFBC selections now.)
WWW: Watch — the concluding volume of my WWW trilogy — comes out in April 2011.
(“Main Selections” are the two books you get sent automatically each month if you’re a member of the Club, unless you decline a particular month’s titles in advance.)
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Every day, the front page of The Montreal Gazette, the major English-language daily paper in Montreal, contains a “Quote of the Day,” and on Thursday, November 25, 2010, the quote was from me:
“Learning to ignore things is one of the great paths to inner peace” — Robert J. SawyerThe quote is from Chapter 14 of my novel Calculating God. Tom Jericho, a human paleontologist, is being introduced to the ethical system of the alien Wreeds by a member of a different alien species, his friend Hollus the Forhilnor:
I laughed. “Oh, I know that. But that’s not the question. I think Marilyn is lovely, but, well, she’s quite curvy — zaftig, even. And she doesn’t exercise. Now, Bill keeps bugging Marilyn to go to the gym. Marilyn wants him to stop picking on her, saying he should accept her the way she is. And Bill, says, `Well, you know, if I should accept your not exercising, then you should accept my wanting to change you — since wanting to change people is a fundamental part of my character.’ Get it? And, of course, Bill says his comments are selfless, motivated by genuine concern for Marilyn’s health.” I paused. The whole thing gives me a headache whenever I think about it; I always end up wanting to say, “Norman, coordinate!” I looked at Hollus. “So who is right?”“Neither,” said Hollus, at once.
“Neither?” I repeated.
“Exactly. That is an easy one, from a Wreed point of view; because they do not do math, they never treat moral questions as a zero-sum game in which someone must win and someone else must lose. God, the Wreeds would say, wants us to love others as they are and also to struggle to help them fulfill their potential — both should happen simultaneously. Indeed, a core Wreed belief is that our individual purpose in life is to help others become great. Your brother should not vocalize his displeasure at his wife’s weight, but, until he attains that ideal of silence, his wife should ignore the comments; learning to ignore things is one of the great paths to inner peace, say the Wreeds. Meanwhile, though, if you are in a loving relationship, and your partner has grown dependent on you, you have an obligation to protect your own health by wearing safety belts in vehicles, by eating well, by exercising, and so on — that is Marilyn’s moral obligation to Bill.”
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Over at the National Post, one of Canada’s national newspapers, Mark Medley asks Canadian novelists to provide passwords for their fiction: single words that might sum up what they’re trying to do. My password was “rationality.”
Rationality: the belief that the universe makes sense, that it is comprehensible to the human mind, that the scientific method and reasoned analysis are the best tools for tackling any problem including those others might cede to religion, that — to quote the Vulcan philosopher Kiri-kin-tha’s First Law of Metaphysics — “nothing unreal exists,” that the supernatural should be abjured, and that a curious mind — in both senses of the word “curious” — is the most wonderful thing of all.You can see other novelists’ choices here.
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I agreed some time ago to give a general science and science fiction talk. The organizer sent me this proposed description for my talk today:
The Future Isn’t What It Used to BeBut that didn’t work for me. I wrote back to say:
What did science fiction writers get right … and wrong … about “the future?”
I’m actually not keen on the topic you’ve suggested. It implies that the job of science fiction is to predict THE future, and it isn’t; the job is to suggest a smorgasbord of possible futures, so that society may choose the one it wants. The scorecard approach — oh, look, science fiction suggested flying cars; aren’t those SF writers so silly! — does a disservice to the genre, and misrepresents its purpose.Instead, I’d like to propose:
They Synergy Between Science Fiction and Science Fact
Science-fiction writers are able to speculate about future directions for scientific research and explore possible ethical ramifications in ways that working scientists, who are at the mercy of funding bodies, simply can’t: whereas controversy is good for fiction, it’s bad for continuing to get research grants, and yet the public has a right to know where new developments might lead. Join Hugo Award-winning Canadian science-fiction writer Robert J. Sawyer for an exploration of the ways in which science fiction helps set the research agenda for working scientists, and how the genre helps prepare us for the real social impact that scientific breakthroughs will have.
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The New York Times will be adding an ebook bestsellers’ list to its prestigous weekly book-review section, according to this article.
I think that’s wonderful. Services like BookScan (in the States) and BookNet (in Canada) have given us reliable pictures of paper book sales for several years now, but all we’ve had is hype about how well ebooks are doing.
In many areas — and especially in ebooks — Amazon has sadly made the notion of “bestseller” meaningless — there are so many hyperspecialized lists there, it’s easy to be in the top 100 SOMEWHERE. So real rankings for eb…ooks would be useful
Yes, I’m proud that my The Terminal Experiment in 1996, after it won the Nebula, made it to the Top 100 storewide of all titles for THE ENTIRE YEAR at Amazon.com. And I’m proud that FlashForward spent over 60 days in the top 100 storewide at Amazon.co.uk last year.
But I’ve also hit #1 on the technothriller bestsellers list at Amazon.com (for a couple of days, with Wake) and know that that’s pretty darn meaningless. Means I sold maybe 20 hardcovers in 48 hours — big whoop. ;)
But in ebooks, everyone claims to be a bestseller. Finally, we’ll have a reliable barometer, and that’s all to the good. I’m a huge ebook evangelist, but I’m an even huger believer in hard data.
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Twenty years ago today — November 15, 1990 — I received my very first copy of my very first novel. Golden Fleece was a mass-market paperback original from Warner Questar. It was technically a December 1990 title, but books trickle into stores a bit in advance of the publication month.
A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then. Brian Thomsen, who was my editor, has since passed away, and Warner wrapped up the Questar line shortly after publishing my book (a few years later, they launched their new SF imprint, Aspect).
I’m delighted that after 20 years, Golden Fleece is still in print: Tor has a lovely trade-paperback edition of it (and it’s also available as an ebook).
Here’s Orson Scott Card writing in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction about Golden Fleece:
Sawyer gives us something rare in this age of the quotidian hero: a genuine tragedy. It is no accident that he invokes Greek myth in the title of the book. Sawyer is willing to play on the same field as Aeschylus and Euripides, and he proves himself equal to the task.
JASON is, in my opinion, the deepest computer character in all of science fiction. And Aaron is, in my opinion, one of the most well-drawn, fallible, human detectives I’ve encountered in mystery fiction — in a league with, say, [Ruth] Rendell’s Inspector Wexford.
You might as well buy two copies in the first place — one to read and keep, and one to shove at your friends, saying, “Read this! Now!”
How good is Golden Fleece? A friend of mine — an English professor — used to ask, whenever he saw me, `Why are you still writing that spaceship stuff?’ Now I can answer. Because this is possible.
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The amazing new official photograph of science-fiction writer Robert J. Sawyer, author of Wake and FlashForward.
Click on the photograph for a high-resolution version.
Photograph taken 12 November 2010 by Christina Molendyk.
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Interesting article here about a little app that helps you monitor your mood. As the article says, there’s no sophisticated psychological model at work — but I think that doesn’t really matter.
As a science-fiction writer who often explores artificial intelligence (for instance in Wake, Golden Fleece, and Factoring Humanity), it seems to me the psychology behind this is nothing new. It’s really not much different than the classic chatbot Eliza, but done as a graphical interface. We project onto fairly meaningless responses what we actually want to see.
It’s like the classic conundrum of deciding in advance what price you’re going to accept. Normally, we can’t — until we hear a price named by someone else. Then a whole different set of evaluative neural nets kick in in our brains, figuring out what to make of this input coming from outside; we need an app, or a chatbot, or a placebo, to get us thinking in such ways — and almost ANY such thing will do (which is probably why there is a placebo effect, and why we so often hear claims of the Turing test being passed by truly mindless pieces of software).
So, even if there was a sophisticated psychological paradigm behind this app (and there apparently isn’t) the results probably wouldn’t be much better; its mere existence is enough to trigger the sort of thinking required for evaluation of oneself. Or, to put it in McLuhanesque terms, the medium is the message; the actual content doesn’t much matter at all.
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As The Guardian reports, the estate of James Bond creator Ian Fleming has chosen to withhold ebook rights from Penguin, his UK publisher, and instead market the electronic editions directly themselves.
I’m a proud Penguin author myself (in the US and Canada; my UK publisher is Orion), but I’m not surprised by this development. Back when I was president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 1998, I was talking about the “post-publisher economy,” and the disintermediation between authors and readers.
Traditional publishers bring enormous value to the production and distribution of physical paper books. But there really needs to be an honest assessment on the part of all stakeholders about whether they also are in a position to bring value to the electronic marketplace, and, if they do, how the money generated should be fairly split. Not a lot of publishers have engaged with this. I had dinner recently with two editors from a major New York publishing house (not Penguin), and neither of them had any idea at all that Amazon was offering authors 70% royalties if the authors published directly for the Kindle platform; these editors thought the 25% of net proceeds their publishing company was offering as ebook royalties was fair and competitive.
The Fleming estate does make valid a point about the value of the James Bond brand. For those who have sometimes observed that I, and some of my colleagues, are perhaps a bit too awards-conscious, I’ll point out that winning awards (such as the Hugo and Nebula in my own field of science fiction) makes an author into a brand name; those wins trump any publisher’s logo that might appear on a paper book’s spine.
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My novel FlashForward, the basis for the ABC TV series of the same name, is set at CERN, so I’m always interested when scientists associated with CERN speak up about the fundamental nature of reality. And Russell Stannard does that today in the Huffington Post.
I’ve posted a comment there, but here’s a longer version of my thoughts on what he has to say:
Well, the opposite formulation is equally valid: “What justification can there be for thinking that there are questions that can’t be comprehended by the human brain?”
And the answer — assuming we include not just the individual biological brain but the collective wisdom of all our brains and the augmentation of their abilities by computers and artificial intelligence — is none.
Stannard goes on to a tricky bit of legerdemain, saying, “Nevertheless I do get concerned when I hear some of my colleagues making outrageous claims that some day science will have the answer to all questions — that there are no limits to the scientific endeavor, and all other forms of thought and discourse, such as philosophy and theology, are to be discounted. Such misguided arrogance does science a disfavor.”
The first part of the statement he attributes to others is that science (and for “science,” read rational inquiry) can answer all questions; I fervently believe that is true.
The second part, though, is a very slippery slope. Science often embraces philosophy; there’s nothing antithetical about the two. Indeed, I gave a keynote this year at the Toward a Science of Consciousness conference in Tucson; the other speakers were evenly divided between scientists and philosophers — there’s much mutual respect and synergy between those two disciplines precisely because they really aren’t separate fields: both are attempts at rational investigation.
But then Stannard slips in “theology” — which is the study or contemplation of supernatural processes. So basically, what he’s saying is this: there’s only so much of the creator’s handiwork that brains made by that creator can comprehend. It’s an interesting argument, but a flawed one, and it appears to gain its validity through humility, but it’s actually arrogant, for what he’s really saying is, “How could you be so arrogant is to believe that I’m wrong?”
But Stannard is wrong, as I outline in a book of my own, the Hugo Award-nominated science-fiction novel Calculating God. It is not arrogance to reject the supernatural: it is, in fact, an embracing of one of the core scientific realities — indeed, the principle fruit of the scientific enterprise. Science’s end may be a long way off, but its beginning — the founding principle that the universe is comprehensible and is subject to rational investigation — has stood the test of time, and will stand for all time.
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Tomorrow night, Friday, October 22, 2010, come to the Pure Speculation Festival in Edmonton and see a live public reading of Virginia O’Dine‘s stage-play adapation of Robert J. Sawyer‘s Hugo Award-nominated novel Rollback.
The play will have its formal debut in British Columbia next spring, but this reading will star me, Tanya Huff, Randy McCharles, and Val King, with Virginia O’Dine narrating and serving as director. Come join us!
(Virginia is also the publisher of Bundoran Press, one of Canada’s leading SF&F houses.)
Photograph: novelist Robert J. Sawyer and playwright Virginia O’Dine:
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E-ink devices are not backlit, so if you want to read in the dark, you need a light source. Lightwedge’s Verso ebook light is one option.
The “technical specifications” for this light, as listed on the Amazon catalog page, include: “Flexible neck adjusts to eliminate reflection or glare.” So it’s ironic that the flexible neck is made out of highly reflective metal: the single biggest source of glare and visual distraction while reading is the light reflecting off of its own supporting neck. Yes, you can spend time fiddling so that the neck is out of view, but making the neck out of flat black material, or sheathing it in rubber tubing, would have avoided the issue altogether.
Also, obviously, a light like this will often be used in bed, and the goal is not to disturb one’s partner. All well and good WHILE you’re using the light — but when it comes time to shut it off, your partner will be disturbed by the loud mechanical CLICK the on/off switch makes. Again, there’s no need for this; a silent, soft-action switch would have done the trick.
Finally, it would have been nice if the clip were a bit wider. It *precisely* covers the “Amazon Kindle” logo at the top of the device if you position it EXACTLY dead center; otherwise, the logo is only partially covered, and it makes the whole thing look a bit slapdash. The catalog page says this device is specifically designed for the Kindle, but in fact it’s a generic ebook light, as this final little design flaw makes clear (and as the retail packaging plainly states — it lists a bunch of compatible readers).
The light otherwise serves its purpose well.
Amazon.com doesn’t stock this light in graphite (gray/black), but I recommend you get that version. It perfectly matches the color of the new graphite Kindles, and, even if you don’t have one of those, better to have a dark-colored clip so that light isn’t reflecting off it into your eyes. You can get the graphite-colored lamp (with only one set of batteries, instead of the two Amazon advertises) on eBay. Search for “Lightwedge Verso eReader Light for Sony Reader PRS-600” and you’ll find the one that matches the color of graphite Kindles.
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The new jetBook mini ebook reader from ECTACO comes bundled with my short-story collection Iterations and Other Stories for free. Included are 22 stories and my notes on each one. Here’s the table of contents.
For more on the jetBook mini, see here, here, and the ECTACO site here.
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Fourteen years ago today — October 6, 1996 — in Houston, Texas, a girl named Caitlin Doreen Decter was born to parents Barbara and Malcolm Decter.
Sadly, mom and dad soon discovered that young Caitlin is blind. But my flashforward — an appropriate thing to have on October 6! — tells me that in just a couple of years, Caitlin will be recognized as a mathematical genius, and that she will change the world.
Her story is told in the books Wake, Watch, and the forthcoming Wonder, and you can get your own glimpse of her future in this short film.
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An email I just sent:
Thank you for your latest phone call and follow-up email. I should be frank, though. Optioning film and TV rights to my works for up-front money is a major part of how I make my living. When we first spoke on the phone, you offered me as full compensation 15% or 20% of whatever the script you might write based on my work might ultimately make you, if it ever makes you anything. That’s just not how I — or other established writers — do business. You might find this blog post of mine of interest:
If a feature is being made, I’m always looking for a six-figure purchase-price floor (regardless of the length of the source material), and it’s never tied into the scriptwriter’s fee (nor would it normally be paid by the scriptwriter; rather, the studio would pay it).
Options fees, on the other hand, are paid by whoever is interested in developing a project: an actor, a scriptwriter, a producer, or a studio. But we never do options, even for short stories, for less than four figures per year, and five figures is common for novels. So, before you invest a lot more of your time into thoughts about developing screenplays based on my work, please make sure you’re in a position to actually acquire the rights under industry-standard terms. :)
I truly wish you the best of luck!
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