Robert J. Sawyer

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:

Film Options

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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Literary agent Ralph Vicinanza, 60, died peacefully Sunday night, September 26, of a brain aneurysm.

He was my agent for the past fifteen years, and one of the executive producers of FlashForward, the TV series based on my novel of the same name.

I remember, years ago, when I was looking for a new agent calling many of his clients — the biggest names in the business — and asking if they’d recommend him. Every single one sung his praises, and I was thrilled when Ralph took me on — it was very rare for him to take on a new client personally.

I never for one second doubted I’d found the right person — but, of all our interactions, I think nothing made that clearer than a conversation we had one day about the smallest contract he ever negotiated for me.

The worst-selling category of science-fiction books is single-author collections. Because of that, I’d decided I wanted my first collection to be done only in hardcover and only in Canada (so that the poor sales it was doubtless going to get would never show up in Barnes & Noble’s or Borders’ computers).

The little Canadian publisher I’d arranged to sell it to (long since defunct) had a boilerplate contract that Ralph didn’t like at all, and he spent days negotiating the various clauses. The advance was piddling (I’ve sold short stories for more than I got for the entire book), meaning Ralph’s commission was minuscule. I kept apologizing to Ralph for all the work he was having to do for such a tiny commission, and finally he said to me, “Don’t ever apologize for making me work, Rob. This is what I do, and I enjoy it. Besides, I never think about the commission on a specific contract; I only think about my client’s overall career.”

He did indeed enjoy negotiating, almost always getting me what I wanted, and doing so without ever ruffling publishers’ feathers. I remember several years ago an author who was with the same publisher I was saying he had a suspicion his agent wasn’t doing as good a job for him as Ralph was for me. He asked me to black out the dollar figures on one of my contracts and let him compare the contractual terms his agent had gotten for him with the ones Ralph had gotten for me.

We laid the two contracts side-by-side, and it was clear by the strikeouts and additions that Ralph had worked much, much harder for me than my friend’s agent had for him; in almost every clause of the contract, I had materially better terms, thanks to Ralph.

Eight years ago, I worked on the TV series Charlie Jade, and executive producer Robert Wertheimer met with Ralph in New York to hammer out details of my involvement — and for months afterwards, every time I saw Bob, he went on about what a great afternoon of conversation he’d had with Ralph.

Recently, before Ralph had passed on, I had the pleasure of meeting Isaac Asimov’s daughter Robyn; for many years, Ralph had represented the Asimov estate. Robyn and I hit it off immediately — spending the first half-hour we were together trading stories about what a great guy Ralph was. Indeed, in all the years I knew Ralph, I never once — never once — heard anyone say a negative word about him.

I don’t have any professional concerns: Ralph M. Vicinanza Ltd. will continue in the able hands of Ralph’s associates, including Chris Lotts and Christopher Schelling in New York and Vince Gerardis and Eli Kirschner in Los Angeles. But personally, I’m devastated. Ralph was a gentleman of warmth, wit, and compassion, a raconteur, a truly nice guy, and an absolutely terrific agent.

I’m very sad that I won’t be able to attend the memorial service in New York on Friday; I’m Guest of Honor at a convention in San Diego this weekend, and head there Thursday afternoon. But I will take some time during my programming space at the convention to share some reminiscences about Ralph — who I will miss for the rest of my life.

Robert J. Sawyer online:
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I recently had cause to introduce a publicist to my current trilogy of Wake, Watch, and Wonder, and created the cheat sheet below so he could quickly come up to speed the books:

First, you should watch the three book trailers:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QB2nt-Oqjt4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3A4aetrhs4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XI-PTTSjJw

Here’s a synopsis of the first book, Wake:

http://sfwriter.com/syw1.htm

And a press release for it:

http://sfwriter.com/prw1tech.pdf

And the opening chapters:

Wake: http://sfwriter.com/scw1.htm
Watch: http:http://sfwriter.com/scw2.htm

And review excerpts:

Wake: http://sfwriter.com/rew1.htm
Watch: http://sfwriter.com/rew2.htm

We have a Facebook account for Caitlin Decter, the main character of the books:

http://www.facebook.com/caitlin.decter

And a book-club discussion guide for Wake:

http://sfwriter.com/rgw1.htm

And a good recent radio inteview (Dallas NPR):

https://sfwriter.com/blog/?p=2548

And a video lecture given at Google on the science behind the novels:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5z-UqsF5HYY

Robert J. Sawyer online:
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When I was in Dallas on Wednesday, September 15, 2010, to give a major public address for the Center for Values in Medicine, Science and Technology at the University of Dallas at Texas, I was interviewed for an hour on KERA-FM, the local NPR affiliate, for a wonderful program called Think, hosted by Krys Boyd. You can listen to the whole interview here (MP3 file). The interview touches on a lot of issues that are also explored in my novels Wake and Watch.

Robert J. Sawyer online:
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I’ve been a regular at Calgary’s science-fiction convention Con-Version since 1996, including seven stints as an honoured guest there:

• Guest of Honour at Con-Version 25 (last year)
  
• Guest of Honour at Con-Version 21.5
  
• Guest of Honour at Con-Version 20
  
• Toastmaster at Con-Version 19
  
• Special Guest at Con-Version 15
  
• Guest of Honour at Con-Version 14
  
• Special Guest at Con-Version 13

Many people expect me to be at Con-Version this year, and so I have to publicly address this: I cannot in good conscience have people making travel plans based on the assumption that I’ll be present. I won’t be attending this year.

My contributions to Con-Version in the past were always well received, and I’d been hoping to make a similar contribution this year. The following comments, from past Con-Version attendees, were all unsolicited:

People spend too much time talking about others when they do something wrong, and never enough time talking about them when they do something RIGHT. Watching you at Con-Version is a prime example, I think, of how to do something RIGHT. You are quite remarkable. You treat each and every person with respect and attention. You answer each and every question with respect and intelligence. If you had an off moment over the weekend, I didn’t see it. You say ‘thank you’ often and with sincerity. You are generous with your time and your quite considerable store of knowledge. You have a wonderful public presence, and I don’t know how often people tell you that, but really, they should.

–Robyn Herrington

---

Rob is a convention-goer’s delight. You’ll spot him prowling the hallways mingling with anyone and everyone. He is always smiling, jovial and — in the best Canadian sense of the word — polite.

–Tony King

---

I first met Mr. Sawyer at the Ask-A-Pro-Anything and signing session. I’ve navigated through ministers, corporate presidents, lesser authors, and even the odd student government official but this was the first time I deliberately sought out someone with celebrity status. I only knew of him through his Discovery Channel appearances and occasional articles in national magazines so I didn’t know what to expect when I asked him to autograph a book for someone else. Knowing I was not yet a fan he obliged anyway.

Dinner with Rob — everyone called him that — was quite interesting. I feared a holier-than-thou author, but he was just a normal science fiction guy with a very genuine sense of honesty.

We broke the ice with cordial chatter and garlic bread. “What we need is chairs on a conveyor belt,” Sawyer remarked, “so everyone could see everyone.”

As people became comfortable, the usual debates about politics and society ensued. What surprised me most was that Rob strained to hear the regular people as much as we tried to listen to him. He was another normal guy, who ate the same spaghetti we did. This casual Rob was perfectly consistent with the one who gave [the] opening remarks [at the convention — I was toastmaster that year].

— Ben Li, in The Gauntlet, the University of Calgary student newspaper

Next to Toronto’s Ad Astra, Con-Version has long been my favourite convention. Yes, the fact that previous Con-Version concoms made me Guest of Honour, Special Guest, or Toastmaster a total of seven times certainly helped, but I’ve also often attended in other years at my own expense with no featured role — and had planned to do the same this year.

Some of my past involvement with Con-Version:

• I’ve repeatedly judged the Con-Version short-story contest (for free)
  
• I’ve attended several Con-Version board meetings over the years (and took the entire attending concom out to lunch after one meeting in 2004)
  
• I’ve often helped the convention contact potential guests of honour (and encouraged those people to accept the invitations)
  
• I’ve printed out flyers promoting Con-Version and distributed them at other conventions
  
• I’ve let flyers for the con be distributed at my Calgary book-signing events
  
• I’ve promoted the con in my blog and on Facebook
  
• I’ve given gift memberships to Con-Version, and
  
• I’ve repeatedly led gallery tours of the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology for their guests of honour.

Indeed, my commitment to the con was so strong that in 2007, I spent my birthday helping man the Con-Version table at the Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo (having come to Calgary at my own expense).

In the words of Phil Bacon, long-time Con-Version team member and Fan Guest of Honour at Con-Version 21.5, “I can’t think of a better friend that Con-V has had than you.”

For those who’d been hoping to see me at Con-Version this year, my apologies. But I will be at a convention in Alberta next month: I’m attending Pure Speculation in Edmonton, October 22-24, along with Author Guest of Honour Tanya Huff and Media Guest Liana K.

Among many other fun things, we’ll be doing a staged reading there of Virginia O’Dine’s play based on my Hugo Award-nominated novel Rollback on Friday night starring me, Tanya, Randy McCharles, and Val King, which should be a blast — come join us!

Robert J. Sawyer online:
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Terence M. Green and I are either in booth FB12 or WB12 today at Toronto’s Word on the Street — not sure which. The stuff we got from the organizers says FB12, but today’s Toronto Star says WB12. FB stands for “Fringe Beat,” and WB for “Writers’ Block” — so the latter makes more sense, but who knows? Anyway, we’ll be at one or the other! Look for the “Sci-Fi and Fantasy Writers’ sign!

Robert J. Sawyer online:
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I was Special Guest at the wonderful science-fiction convention FenCon in Dallas last weekend, and there Glenda Boozer debuted her new filk song Math Geek Love, based on my novel WWW: Watch. I think it’s absolutely charming, and with Glenda’s kind permission, I’m sharing the lyrics here:

by Glenda Boozer

Math geek, math geek, Calcu-lass,
Talking in the back of the algebra class
With a nice guy, Though he’s a tad shy.

Math geek Caitlin, math geek Matt
Down in the basement with the calico cat
She can see now,
Feeling so free now,

And they whirl and they twirl in Dad’s work chair;
Wonder if Mom knows they’re down there.
Webmind gets an eyeful thereof:
Looks like math geek love.

Caitlin tells Matt; Matt says, “Wow!
My girlfriend knows Webmind
&#151 what did I say now?”
But it’s all right:
Caitlin holds him tight,

Now there’s someone attacking,
and Matt is to blame,
But they can forgive him; it’s a game
They can win now.
They won’t give in now.

And they whirl and they twirl in Dad’s work chair;
Wonder if Dad knows they’re in there?
NSA is fretting above,
Looks like math geek love.
 

Robert J. Sawyer online:
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Come see me at Toronto’s Word on  the Street this Sunday, September 26, in booth FB 12 (“Fringe Beat 12”) along with Terence M. Green. (Our booth is on Queen’s Park Crescent East, north of Wellesley Street.)

I’ll be at our booth all day, except 4:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m., when I’ll be at the Penguin Canada booth.

Robert J. Sawyer online:
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Sci Fi Writer to Explore Fear of Human Obsolescence

Center for Values Offers Program as Part of ‘Incite Your Curiosity’ Lecture Series

As smartphones get smarter and computers get faster, humans, who err and just get slower with age, seem to be almost superfluous at times.  But award-winning science fiction novelist Robert J. Sawyer isn’t overly worried.

The winner of Nebula and Hugo Awards for best science fiction writing will explore the issue of human obsolescence in a lecture at UT Dallas. The program, “Forget About Killer Robots: How Humanity Will Continue to Prosper After the Advent of Super-Intelligent Machines,” is scheduled for Wednesday, Sept. 15, at 7:30 p.m. in the Conference Center.

This event is part of UT Dallas’ “Incite Your Curiosity: Exploring Human Enhancement” lectures, presented by the Center for Values in Medicine, Science and Technology. The lecture is free and open to the public.

Sawyer is the only writer in history to win the top science fiction awards in the United States, China, Japan, France and Spain. He has written more than 20 sci fi novels, including Hominids, The Terminal Experiment and Mindscan.  His latest, Watch, is the second in his “WWW” trilogy, which began with Wake. The TV series FlashForward was based on his novel of the same name.

Sawyer will also be participating in a special One-Day University at UT Dallas on Saturday, Sept. 18, from 9 a.m. – 5 p.m. Attendees will attend writers workshops, geared toward science fiction. The cost to attend is $125 per person.

For more information on both of these events, visit values.utdallas.edu.

Robert J. Sawyer is the only writer in history to win the top science fiction awards in the United States, China, Japan, France and Spain.

A very nice article about the treatment of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence in my novels including Rollback and Factoring Humanity is online at Discovery News here.

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I’ll be Guest of Honor at Conjecture in San Diego from 1-3 October 2010. Come on out and see me! Conjecture is bing put on by the same group that’s hosting the 2011 World Fantasy Convention — so you know it’s going to be a good con! All the details are here.

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Nick DiChario interviews Robert J. Sawyer in the August-September 2010 issue of Philosophy Now, a glossy newsstand magazine out of the UK. The interview is online here.

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Over at Lightspeed magazine, Andrea Kail — herself a very fine SF writer — interviews me about the WWW trilogy, FlashForward, and my new project; it’s a nice, meaty piece. Check it out.

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The mass-market paperback of my novel WWW: Wake is currently #2 on the bestsellers’ list published in Locus, the US trade journal of the science-fiction field — and I just missed getting the #1 spot. A note accompanying the list says: “The Lost Fleet: Victorious by Jack Campbell just nudged ahead of WWW: Wake by Robert J. Sawyer in the paperback category.”

Meanwhile, the hardcover of WWW: Watch — the second volume of the trilogy — is currently at #7, in its second month on the list.

The full lists are here.

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In honor of a California judge overturning Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriages, I present the following scene from WWW:Watch, the second volume in my WWW trilogy (published by Ace in the US, Penguin in Canada, and Gollancz in the UK).

Shoshana Glick is a 27-year-old primatology grad student in San Diego. She works with a chimpanzee-bonobo hybrid named Hobo. Hobo is unique among apes in that he makes representational art — indeed, often portraits of Shoshana in profile.

Here’s an excerpt from Watch, which deals with Proposition 8 (and no, this isn’t all just tangential — it’s thematically important to the book). The first line of dialog below is spoken by Dillon, a male grad student, who works with Shoshana and Hobo.

“So, um, maybe this calls for a drink.”

Shoshana could see where this was going. “Well, I can ask Dr. Marcuse to pick up some champagne on his way back …” she replied, looking away.

“I mean,” Dillon said, and he paused, then tried again: “I mean maybe we should go out for a drink … you know, um, to celebrate.”

“Dillon …” she said softly.

He unfolded his arms and raised his right hand, palm out. “I mean, I know you sometimes go out with a guy named Max, but …”

“Dillon, I live with Max.”

“Oh.”

“And Max isn’t a guy; she’s a girl. Maxine.”

He looked relieved. “Ah, well, if she’s just your roommate, then …”

“Max is my girlfriend.”

“Your girl friend, or your, um, girlfriend?”

“My girlfriend; my lover.”

“Oh, um — ah, I didn’t … you never …”

Dillon had come to the Marcuse Institute in May; he’d missed the Christmas party, which, now that she thought about it, was the last time she’d brought Maxine around. “So,” said Shoshana, “thanks for the interest, but …”

Dillon smiled. “Can’t blame a guy for trying.”

“Thanks,” she said again. “You’re sweet.”

He crossed his arms again. “So, how long have you been with Maxine?”

“Couple of years. She’s an engineering student at UCSD.”

“Heh. Good that one of you is eventually going to make some money.”

Sho leaned back in her chair and laughed. Neither she nor Dillon was ever likely to get rich.

“And, ah, I take it it’s serious?” Dillon said tentatively.

She suppressed a grin; hope springs eternal. “Very much so. I’d marry Max, if I could.”

“Oh.”

“You know I’m from South Carolina, right?”

“I do declare!” he said, in a really bad Southern accent.

“But Max is from L.A. — South Central. Her family’s all there, and, well, it’s not like they can afford to travel to Boston or up to Canada. She wants to get married here in California, but …” She lifted her shoulders a bit.

“It used to be legal here, didn’t it?”

Sho nodded. “Got overturned the same day Obama was elected. A bittersweet night, I can tell you, for a lot of us. I was simultaneously elated and crushed.”

“I bet.”

“It should be legal here,” Shoshana said. “It should be legal everywhere.”

“I guess it’s against some people’s religions,” Dillon said.

“So what?” Sho snapped. But she put a hand to her mouth. “Oh, I’m sorry, Dillon. But I just get so tired of arguing this. If your beliefs tell you that you shouldn’t marry someone of the same sex, then you shouldn’t do it — but you shouldn’t have the right to impose your views on me.”

“Hey, Sho. Chill. I’m cool with it. But, um, there are those who say marriage is a sacrament.”

“There’s nothing sacred about marriage. You can go to city hall and get married without God once being mentioned. That issue was settled long ago.”

“I guess,” said Dillon.

But Sho had worked up a head of steam. “And gay people getting married doesn’t take anything away from anyone else’s marriage, any more than, say, the addition of Alaska and Hawaii made the people who were already Americans any less American. What we do doesn’t affect anyone else.”

Dillon nodded.

“And you’re a primatologist,” she said. “You know that homosexuality is perfectly natural. Homo sapiens practice it in all cultures, and bonobos practice it, too — which means the common ancestor probably practiced it, as well; it’s natural.”

“No doubt,” said Dillon. “But — playing devil’s advocate here — a lot of people who accept that it’s natural still don’t think that a union between two people of the same sex should be called a marriage. They’re leery of redefining words, you know, lest they lose their meaning.”

“But we have already redefined marriage in this country!” Sho said. “We’ve done it over and over again. If we hadn’t done that, black people couldn’t get married — they weren’t allowed to when they were slaves. And as recently as 1967, there were still sixteen states in which it was illegal for a white person to marry a black person. Max is black, by the way, and if we hadn’t redefined marriage, I couldn’t marry her even if she were a guy. We also long ago gave up the traditional definition of marriage as being `until death do us part.’ Nobody says you have to stay in a bad marriage anymore; if you want out, you can get divorced. The definition of marriage has been a work-in-progress for centuries.”

“Okay, okay,” said Dillon. “But …”

“What?”

“Oh, nothing …”

She tried to make her tone light. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to take your head off. What is it?”

“Well, if they do repeal the ban here, so you and Maxine can get married, um, how does that work? Do you, you know, have two maids of honor …?”

“People do it different ways. But I’ve already decided I’m going to have a best man.”

“Oh? Anybody I know?”

“Yep.” She glanced at the monitors that showed the feeds from the cameras on the island. “Oh, and look — he’s painting another picture!”

An excerpt from Watch by Robert J. Sawyer

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I’m thrilled to be making my third trip to Japan! I’ll be Guest of Honor at HAL-Con 2011 in Tokyo, April 9-10, 2011. Woohoo!

My other upcoming appearances are listed here.

Robert J. Sawyer online:
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When I was twelve, I was blind for six days.

I live in Toronto. Back then we got a lot of snow in winter, and kids had a blast making snowballs. But, as the saying goes, it’s all fun and games until some loses an eye — and I came darn close. A snowball hit me smack in the eye, causing a severe hyphema. I had to lie flat on my back for six days with patches over both eyes, in hopes that the damage would heal.

And it did: I’ve long since forgotten which eye was injured, and my current ophthalmologist can’t tell which one it was. But, still, that period of blindness has stuck with me: ever since those six days, I’ve been fascinated by the notion of sensory deprivation. I knew I was going to get my sight back when the patches came off (even in the worst case, I’d still have sight in one eye). But what, I wondered, would it be like to have always been blind? What view — and I used that term advisedly — of the world would one have if one couldn’t see?

And that, in many ways, was the seed from which my novel Wake grew. The main human character is Caitlin Decter, a 15-year-old math genius who has been totally blind since birth.

But there’s another character in Wake who can’t see, either: a nascent consciousness that’s emerged in the background infrastructure of the World Wide Web. It thinks — and maybe even feels — but cannot perceive. It is utterly alone and isolated.

Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness. I had neither will nor intellect. My inner life, then, was a blank without past, present, or future, without hope or anticipation, without wonder or joy or faith.

I wish I could take credit for that poetically beautiful bit of writing, but I can’t. The author is Helen Keller, in her 1904 book The World I Live In. She was blind and deaf from her 18th month, and had descended into an abyss. The teacher she alludes to was Annie Sullivan, a young woman who herself had spent much of her life almost blind. Annie reached down into that abyss and brought Helen out, uplifting her.

And perhaps Caitlin Decter — who understands in a way very few others possibly can what it’s like to live without light — can uplift the nascent consciousness she’s stumbled upon, too.

Of course, I drew on my own boyhood taste of blindness in writing Caitlin, and also on my experience of having had a blind grandfather. But, in a fitting move given that I was writing about the World Wide Web, I also received enormous help online from members of the BlindMath mailing list — a group for visually impaired people who do the kind of sophisticated math my Caitlin revels in. Five members of the list read the entire book in manuscript (using refreshable Braille displays to work from an electronic file), and their input was invaluable.

Caitlin has a fascinating journey in Wake, and so does the consciousness she’s discovered. But that book is just the beginning: their story continues in Watch and concludes in Wonder, making this — yes — the WWW trilogy. Although these are my 18th, 19th, and 20th novels, they’ve proven to be the most difficult — and most rewarding — ones I’ve ever written. I hope you enjoy them.

Robert J. Sawyer is one of only seven writers in history to win all three of the world’s top awards for best science fiction novel of the year: the Hugo, the Nebula, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. His physical home is just outside Toronto; in webspace, it’s sfwriter.com.

Robert J. Sawyer online:
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Check out this awesome book trailer for my novel Watch — it’s like a mini-movie, with a full cast. Way, way cool! (Also available on YouTube.)

Robert J. Sawyer online:
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In April 2009, I was asked by Cosmos, Australia’s leading science magazine, to contribute to their “Bookmark” column. Normally, that column has scientists recommending books; for the first time ever, they asked a science-fiction writer to do it instead. My suggestions appeared in issue 27:

Robert J. Sawyer is a Hugo and Nebula Award-winning science-fiction writer in Toronto. His latest novel Wake is the first of a trilogy about the World Wide Web gaining consciousness; his website is sfwriter.com.

The book I’m reading right now:

Rapture for the Geeks: When AI Outsmarts IQ by Richard Dooling (2008)

A glib take on Vernor Vinge’s concept of the Singularity — the end of the human era when machines become more intelligent than us. Given that Dooling heavily mines science fiction for his ideas, he takes a few too many cheap shots at the genre, but he does provide a good overview of the issues.

My most influential books: Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond (1985)

A masterpiece that explains more about the inequalities in our world than any dozen other books; a brilliant tour of topics ranging from the origins of language to the domestication of animals. Diamond manages to be simultaneously both humbling and uplifting.

Gateway by Frederik Pohl (1978)

For my money the best science-fiction novel ever written, because it pays wonderful respect to both halves of the term, dealing with the weird physical phenomena that occur near a black hole — and spinning a very human story of guilt that arises from them.

Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness by Roger Penrose (1996)

Mathematical physicist Penrose is probably wrong that microtubules in the cytoskeletons of brain tissue are the seat of consciousness, but that doesn’t matter: his book is an amazing tour de force of ideas, and is far more emotionally and intellectually satisfying than other books that attempt to dismiss consciousness as meaningless or an illusion.

The book I want to read next:

Lucy’s Legacy: The Quest for Human Origins by Donald C. Johanson and Kate Wong (2009)

As a science-fiction writer, my job is thinking about where we’re going, but the only way to effectively extrapolate forward is by knowing where we came from. Johanson discovered the australopithecine Lucy in 1974, and 35 years on he tackles the vexing questions that still ignite passionate debate among paleoanthropologists.

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An op-ed piece by Robert J. Sawyer first published in The Ottawa Citizen, the largest-circulation newspaper in Canada’s capital city (first published under the headline “The Future Disappoints”).

Science: Ten Lost Years

by Robert J. Sawyer

Ten years ago, in 1999, I published a novel called FlashForward; ten years later, it’s a (cough, cough) hit TV series for ABC.

Ten years ago, I set that novel’s opening at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN with my characters undertaking an experiment to find the Higgs boson — the particle believed to endow other particles with mass. Ten years later, after a comic series of delays, that experiment is finally running in reality.

If only all my other sunny predictions about science and technology from a decade ago had come true! Back at the end of the 1990s, all of us who trade in futures were being interviewed about what we thought the next decade would hold. My colleagues and I blithely spoke about the promise of nanotechnology, the miracles of stem-cell research, the revitalization of the manned-space program.

And now the decade we described is coming to an end, and, well, the same pundits are making the same predictions for the next decade. What went wrong?

An easy, and not untrue, answer is to say: George W. Bush. After all, it was his administration that put the skids on embryonic stem-cell research; it was he who called for humanity to go to Mars but earmarked no money for the venture; and it was he who embarked on a pointless war that beggared the federal coffers, leaving little for fundamental research.

(I’m hardly the first to make such observations, and I commend to your attention the book The Republican War on Science by Chris Mooney.)

But it would be facile to just blame governments — including our own, which has certainly not been as friendly as it should have been to pure science.

Thank goodness that BlackBerry co-inventor Mike Lazaridis stepped up to the plate and provided the initial private financing — not to mention a couple of major booster shots along the way — to fund the world-class Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, which just celebrated its tenth anniversary. It’s the kind of project our tax dollars should have paid for on their own.

Also, to put it all down to politicians would be to ignore a harsh reality of the past decade: the promise of science has, too often, been derailed by the scientists themselves.

Why is stem-cell research faltering? In part because greedy scientists falsified data and used unethical techniques in gaining embryonic tissue. Most famously, in 2006, South Korean stem-cell researcher Hwang Woo-suk was indicted for fraud, embezzlement, and violations of his country’s bioethics laws, after announcing bogus breakthroughs.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, the single most important scientific issue of the decade — whether climate change is human-caused — was dealt a huge blow in November. E-mails leaked from Britain’s Climate Research Unit showed that scientists there apparently cooked the books to prove that humans are at fault for climate change.

Sadly, the two cases are crucially similar: stem-cell research really does hold the key to curing diseases, regenerating organs, and prolonging life. And, I’m convinced, human activity has contributed hugely to changes in our weather. But in a world in which it’s mainstream to claim that the moon landings were a hoax, that 9/11 was an inside job, and that evolution is “only a theory,” this sort of irresponsible activity undermines public faith in science, and lets the politicians tighten the purse strings with impunity.

Lazaridis’s largess is, in fact, more typical than not of the nature of science and technology advancement in the last decade. It’s those in the private sector who gave us the BlackBerry and the iPhone, Google (and Google Earth and Google Maps and Google Books), Facebook and Twitter, electronic-ink devices like the Amazon Kindle and the Sony Reader, tiny and cheap netbook computers, and more.

Of course, there’s fundamental science behind all those things. But for a decade now, most of the best US grads in math and computer science either went to work for the National Security Agency, where they labour on classified projects, or to private-sector firms such as Google, Microsoft, or Electronic Arts, where everything they do is covered by nondisclosure agreements. God knows what they came up with in the last decade; it’ll never be published in journals.

We’ve ended up with a broken system in which the best science is hidden away, and even the top journals are suspect (Hwang Woo-suk’s fabrications appeared in Science, the world’s leading scientific journal).

Still, as in everything, the most powerful force is the economy. Ten years ago, the economy was bright, and those of us who dream for a living could suggest that enormous strides would be made. Ten years later, the economy is in tatters, and hundred-billion-dollar space voyages and new supercolliders are off the agenda.

Did the aughts, the zeros, or whatever term we end up using for this now-completed decade, live up to my hopes for scientific advancement? No. Will the next decade? Perhaps — but if we want it to, we should take two lessons from the ten years that just ended.

First, we have to let our governments know that science is important to us. Second, we have to let our scientists know that absolute honesty is the only acceptable course.

Whether either faction will get these messages, only time will tell. Let’s compare notes again at the end of 2019.

Robert J. Sawyer‘s Nebula Award-winning science-fiction novel The Terminal Experiment has just been reissued by Penguin Canada.

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Eleven months ago, at the beginning of August 2009, I did a by-email interview with a reporter for a genre magazine who was doing an article about FlashForward, the ABC TV series based on my novel of the same name. Only brief snippets were used int he article, and while cleaning my hard drive today I stumbled across the original by-email interview, which has some good stuff in it, and so I’m posting it here. Enjoy.

How did the idea for the novel come about?

In 1995, my wife and I hosted a 20th-anniversary reunion party for our high-school science fiction club, which is where we met. And all evening long, people kept saying, “If I only knew then what I know now, things would have turned out better.” Some were lamenting bad marriages; others, bad career choices; others still, bad investments. Well, I got to wondering if that was really true: if certain foreknowledge of the future would indeed make one happier. And so I contrived a science-fictional thought experiment: an accident that causes the consciousness of everyone on Earth to jump twenty years into the future for a period of two minutes. Of course, shunting consciousness forward meant everyone blacked out in the here and now — millions of people die in car accidents, as planes crash, falling down stairs, and so on. My tidy little notion turned out also to be a great springboard for a disaster novel.

How did the series idea develop?

My Hollywood agent, Vince Gerardis, read an early draft of the book in 1998, back when I was calling it Mosaic — a term that figures prominently in the novel, as well as in the TV series. He loved it, and got it into the hands of his old friend Jessika Borsiczky, a very fine producer who happens to be married to David S. Goyer; David, of course, went on to write Batman Begins. David and Jess both loved the book, but weren’t in a position to do anything with it at that time. Still, Vince was convinced that David and Jessika were the right people to develop the project, and so he talked me into turning down a very sizable deal from a Hollywood studio while we waited for them to have time to work on it.

In 2005, David ended up working with Brannon Braga on the science-fiction TV series Threshold, and they were talking one day, and David mentioned that he was keen on this novel now called FlashForward by Robert J. Sawyer. Well, Brannon replied that he, too, was a fan of my work and they hit on the idea of collaborating on a script adapting my novel.

In 2007, I went down to Los Angeles and met with David, Jessika, and Brannon, and they outlined for me how they were planning to adapt my novel; they seemed genuinely concerned that I be happy with what they had in mind — and I was, and am; they had a very clever take on the material.

Brannon and David wrote the one-hour pilot script, entitled “No More Good Days.” That script immediately sold to HBO, but as Dave and Brannon mapped out what they intended for the project, it soon became clear that the show could run a hundred episodes or more; it was simply too big an idea to do under the handful-of-episodes-per-season model that HBO specializes in. And so, with HBO’s blessing, the property was offered to the big-four US broadcast networks, and ABC and Fox got in a bidding war for it, with ABC ultimately prevailing. HBO still retains a financial position in the series and ABC Studios is producing. Brannon Braga is tied up with his duties for 24 at Fox, but is still serving as an Executive Producer on FlashForward; meanwhile, Marc Guggenheim has come on board to join David as the showrunners.

My deal has me serving as creative consultant, and writing one of the first-season episodes myself.

After the development of the concept, was there a challenge to developing the story(ies) itself?

Yes, certainly. If you were to film every scene in a typical novel — including FlashForward — you might end up with 10 hours of film. Normally, adaptation is a paring down, a stripping away. We’re hoping to run for many seasons, maybe five — and that would be a hundred and ten hours of programming. And so it’s been a process of expanding the vision of novel, finding little bits of business from the book that can be elaborated, and adding whole new dimensions, as well. Each new “day” in the novel FlashForward begins with a “News Digest” — summaries of world reaction to the events, such as, “A massive sell-off of Japanese yen has precipitated yet another crisis in the Japanese economy, following indications from the Flashforward that the yen will be worth only half its current value against the U.S. dollar in the future.” Obviously, any one of those could suggest an episode.

What’s entailed in your role as consultant with the series?

Just that: to consult. At San Diego Comic-Con this year, David Goyer referred to me as the series’ “unofficial science consultant,” and certainly a lot of the conversations David and I have had have been about scientific issues — about keeping it all plausible. But we’ve also talked about long-term issues, how the series will develop season to season, and so on.

Whenever literature is brought to TV or film, there are adjustments that have to be made for the medium. Were there alterations to the story?

Yes, of course, and to find out what they were, you’ll have to watch the show. ABC is very concerned about spoilers, and about keeping surprises intact for people. If something’s the same as it is in my novel, that should be a surprise; if it’s different, that should be a surprise, too. None of us are providing information about how the adaption is being made, but I will say this: I’m thrilled by how many people involved have read the novel. Obviously, David Goyer, Brannon Braga, Jessika Goyer, and Marc Guggenheim — the executive producers — but also many of the actors (who, after all have no obligation to read anything but the scripts), including Joseph Fiennes, Sonya Walger, and Zachary Knighton, special-effects supervisor (and Cloverfield genius) Kevin Blank, and even the whole team of guys at Deluxe Entertainment Services Group, who are dubbing the show into other languages.

The script you’re working on … Has it been slotted into the series’ schedule? How far along is it?

It will be in the backorder: the final block of nine episodes to round out the first season, assuming we get renewed after our initial 13. David Goyer and I have had some conversations about where my script will fit in — we immediately both gravitated toward me working on the same sort of story — and I’m very excited.

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Happy 15th anniversary to my website —
it’s older than Amazon.com, was the first science-fiction author site on the web, has been giving away fiction since the first week, and has over 1,000,000 words of content. Check it out at sfwriter.com.

Robert J. Sawyer online:
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I was the only author invited to give a solo talk at this year’s Canadian Book Summit, which had the theme of “Hot New Models” — the implicit assumption being that new technologies and ways of doing business, such as ebooks and print-on-demand, were going to be the salvation of traditional publishing.

My talk was widely regarded as the most controversial of the day: I started by recounting how, a few months ago, I’d had fellow science-fiction writers Robert Charles Wilson and James Alan Gardner over for pizza; at that dinner, I’d told Bob and Jim that I feared there was only a decade left in which anyone could make a comfortable living writing science-fiction novels, and urged them to plan their careers and finances accordingly.

My talk at the Canadian Book Summit was given only a week ago, but in the interim I’ve had much cause to reflect on one of the core conceits behind the notion of “hot new models,” namely that authors will find some way other than royalties from books actually sold to make their livings, and that these opportunities will abound.

(At the conference, many people cited the band model now prevalent for successful acts in the music industry: give away your music and make money off of live performances and T-shirts. I debunked that at the event by pointing out that the venue we happened to be in — Harbourfront Centre in Toronto — is home to the the International Festival of Authors, the world’s best, most-prestigious literary festival, a festival which, if you’re lucky, you get invited to every four or five years, and that this top-of-the-line opportunity to perform in front of an audience pays around $300, and might, with real luck, sell 50 hardcovers, of which the author’s share of royalties might be another $150.)

So, in this last week, what hot new opportunities have come my way? Let’s see:

• A public library patron in Atlantic Canada wrote to me, lamenting that she’d already read the few books of mine her library had, and asking me to donate copies of all the others to the library, since, you know, with budget cuts, libraries can’t afford to buy many books themselves anymore.

• A request that I give the “keynote address” — for free — at a convention consisting entirely of used-book dealers; of course, I make no money when a used book changes hands, which would have meant that I’d be the only one at the convention making nothing.

• A request that I be guest of honor at a science-fiction convention, which was offering to pay “a portion” of my travel expenses to get there. In the good old days, sf conventions paid all the travel expenses for the guest-of-honor author and his or her companion. The last couple of years, the offer to cover the companion’s airfare has often disappeared. And now, even covering all the author’s airfare seems to be an open question. (Oh, yes, a few dozen copies of my latest paperback might sell in the convention’s dealers’ room, netting me maybe $25 in royalties, but there was no way I’d even break even over the short term by accepting.)

Other offers that have crossed my desk in the last few months include me teaching writing at an austere retreat for $3,000 — for ten full days, on-site (I make more than $300 a day normally, so this would be me subsidizing the cost of the event so that students could pay less); me speaking at a conference that’s charging $900 per attendee to get into, and I’d get no fee and have to pay my own expenses to travel to New York City for the event; an anthology contract that paid nothing at all for the story, but would let one buy copies at 50% off cover price; and so on.

Maybe there will be new ways to make money as a novelist. Certainly, I do make a lot of money each year from giving keynote addresses, and, of course, I was very lucky that ABC made FlashForward, a prime-time TV series based on my novel of the same name.

But for the former, really, I’m exceptional; most novelists are not good at public speaking, and few can spin what they write into something businesses and government agencies will pay thousands to hear you speak about.

And for the latter, that’s the sort of thing that almost never happens to anyone: rounded to the nearest percent, zero percent of members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America have ever had a major-network prime-time TV series made from their work.

(And, my, but my mother raised me well: she always says, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.” I just smiled each time someone told me how much they liked the FlashForward TV series, and how happy they were with themselves for finding some way to watch it that didn’t cost them anything and avoided having to see those pesky commercials. And now, of course, the series is gone.)

So, what does the future hold? It’ll be interesting to find out — but those who believe it’ll just all sort itself out in the end are, I think, being naive and self-deluding. Yes, as one person said repeatedly at the Canadian Book Summit, there have always been storytellers — but that doesn’t mean you can do it for a living.

Even David G. Hartwell — senior editor at Tor Books — recently wrote in an editorial in the New York Review of Science Fiction that we could all still be happy when the day of the full-time SF writer has passed. (I actually think the day of the full-time SF editor may pass first, but that’s another matter.)

Maybe we will all indeed still be smiling as writing SF shifts from a career to a hobby. Still, lengthy, ambitious, complex works — works that take years of full-time effort to produce such as, say, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy, or, if I may be so bold, my own WWW trilogy of Wake, Watch, and Wonder — aren’t things that could have been produced in any kind of reasonable time by squeezing in an hour’s writing each day over one’s lunch break while working a nine-to-five job.

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