Robert J. Sawyer

Sponsored by Ad Astra, Toronto’s SF convention:

FlashForward Pub Night

Celebrating the Success of our Guest of Honour Robert J. Sawyer

Type: Party – Movie/TV Night
Date: Thursday, March 18, 2010
Time: 7:00pm – 11:00pm
Location: Scruffy Murphy’s
Street: 225 The East Mall
Etobicoke (Toronto), Ontario, Canada

So you *think* you know what the future holds?

FlashForward, based on Rob’s book of the same name, returns for the Part 2 of Season 1

On March 18th, at 8pm

Join us for a special pub night around the big screen.

Admission – No charge

Scruffy Murphy’s
225 The East Mall
Etobicoke, On
M9B 6J1

Map

Pre-Reg Convention Memberships will also be available.

Robert J. Sawyer online:
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I’m in Los Angeles, on the sound stage for FlashForward, the ABC TV series based on my novel of the same name, and they’re filming the episode I wrote. Woohoo!

My episode, entitled “Course Correction,” airs Thursday, May 6, 2010. Above, that’s me with Christine Woods, who plays FBI agent Janis Hawk.

Pictured: Christine Woods and Robert J. Sawyer

Robert J. Sawyer online:
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A suggestion for Barnes and Noble re the nook ebook-reading device:

The very first Palm Pilot going back all the way to 1996 and the original Rocket eBook from 1998 allowed you to do handwriting recognition (on Palms, using the Graffiti or Graffiti 2 system, the former of which used simplified characters, the latter of which recognized fully formed characters; on the Rocket, using the similar Allegro system).

I know in these post-iPhone days it’s supposed to be old-fashioned to use a stylus, but for inputting short notes or words to look up, it’s much faster to use a stylus than a tiny pop-up keyboard.

The handwriting recognition on these devices turned the characters you drew into text, just as if you’d typed them. Since the nook (unlike the Kindle) does NOT have a physical keyboard, why not take full advantage of the touch-screen interface and allow Graffiti-style handwriting input (as well as the on-screen keyboard)?

The idea that ONLY allowing fingertip input instead of optionally also allowing the fine control of a stylus is like only allowing finger painting instead of using a brush. It’s fine for kids the first time they’re doing it, but for adults who actually do need to frequently enter text (for annotations, searches, and so forth), it’s a clumsy method — and one to which the nook could easily offer an alternative.

Robert J. Sawyer online:
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The nominees for Canada’s 2010 Aurora Awards are as follows. Winners will be announced at KeyCon 27/Canvention 30 during the May 21-24 weekend.

BEST NOVEL IN ENGLISH

The Amulet of Amon-Ra, by Leslie Carmichael, CBAY Books

Druids, by Barbara Galler-Smith and Josh Langston, Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy

Wake, Robert J. Sawyer, Penguin Canada

Steel Whispers, Hayden Trenholm, Bundoran Press

Terra Insegura, Edward Willett, DAW Books

MEILLEUR ROMAN EN FRANÇAIS (Best Novel In French)

Le protocole Reston. Mathieu Fortin, (Coups de tête)

L’axe de Koudriss. Michèle Laframboise, Médiaspaul

Suprématie. Laurent McAllister, (Bragelonne)

Un tour en Arkadie. Francine Pelletier, Alire

Filles de lune 3. Le talisman de Maxandre. Élisabeth Tremblay, (De Mortagne)

BEST SHORT-FORM WORK IN ENGLISH

“Pawns Dreaming of Roses”, Eileen Bell, Women of the Apocalypse. Absolute Xpress

“Here There Be Monsters” Brad Carson, Ages of Wonder, (DAW)

“Little Deaths” Ivan Dorin, Tesseracts Thirteen

“Radio Nowhere” Douglas Smith, Campus Chills

“The World More Full of Weeping” Robert J. Wiersema, ChiZine Publications

MEILLEURE NOUVELLE EN FRANÇAIS (Best Short-Form In English)

«Ors blancs» Alain Bergeron, (Solaris 171)

«De l’amour dans l’air» Claude Bolduc, (Solaris 172)

«La vie des douze Jésus» Luc Dagenais, (Solaris 172)

«Billet de faveur» Michèle Laframboise, (Galaxies 41)

«Grains de silice» Mario Tessier, (Solaris 170)

«La mort aux dés» Élisabeth Vonarburg, (Solaris 171)

BEST WORK IN ENGLISH (OTHER)

Women of the Apocalypse (the Apocalyptic Four) Editor, Absolute Xpress

Ages of Wonder Julie E. Czerneda, & Robert St. Martin, Editors, DAW Books

Neo-Opsis Magazine, Karl Johanson, Editor

On Spec Magazine, Diane Walton, Managing Editor, The Copper Pig Writers’ Society

Distant Early Warnings: Canada’s Best Science Fiction Robert J. Sawyer, Editor, Robert J. Sawyer books

MEILLEUR OUVRAGE EN FRANÇAIS (AUTRE) (Best Work In French (Other))

Critiques. Jérôme-Olivier Allard, (Solaris 169-172)

Revue. Joel Champetier, éditeur, Solaris

Le jardin du general, Manga. Michele Laframboise, ,Fichtre, Montréal

Rien à voir avec la fantasy. Thibaud Sallé, (Solaris 169)

Chronique «Les Carnets du Futurible». Mario Tessier, (Solaris 169-171)

ARTISTIC ACHIEVEMENT

Kari-Ann Anderson, for cover of “Nina Kimberly the Merciless”,Dragon Moon Press

Jim Beveridge, “Xenobiology 101: Field Trip’” Neo-opsis #16

Lar de Souza, “Looking for Group” online Comic

Tarol Hunt, “Goblins”. Webcomic

Dan O’Driscoll, Cover of Steel Whispers , Bundoran Press

FAN ACCOMPLISHMENT (Fanzine)

Jeff Boman, The Original Universe

Richard Graeme Cameron,WCFSAZine

Dale Speirs, Opuntia

Guillaume Voisine, éd. Brins d’Éternité

Felicity Walker, BCSFAzine

FAN ACCOMPLISHMENT (Organization)

Renée Benett, for “In Spaces Between” at Con-Version 25

Robbie Bourget, and René Walling, Chairs of “Anticipation”, the 67th WorldCon

David Hayman, organization Filk Hall of Fame

Roy Miles, work on USS Hudson Bay Executive

Kirstin Morrell, Programming for Con-Version 25

FAN ACCOMPLISHMENT (Other)

Roy Badgerow, Astronomy Lecture at USS Hudson Bay

Ivan Dorin, “Gods Anonymous” (Con-Version 25 radio play)

Judith Hayman and Peggi Warner-Lalonde organization, Filk track @Anticipation

Tom Jeffers and Sue Posteraro, Filk Concert, Anticipation

Lloyd Penney, Fanwriting

Now that the first 10 episodes of FlashForward are out on DVD, I have a favour to ask. Could somebody please send me high-resolution screen captures of my two credits from the ending credits (from any of the 10 episodes)?

My first credit is the first one in the ending credits, and says “Based on the Novel by Robert J. Sawyer.” My second one is about half-way through the end credits and is a shared card with three other people; my part of the card says, “Consultant: Robert J. Sawyer.”

For some reason, my own attempt at capturing the credits has failed (watching the DVD on my PC, and hitting Ctrl-PrintScreen, which normally copies the screen contents to the Windows Clipboard, just gets me an all-black rectangle).

I’m frankly delighted to see the DVDs, because ABC squeezed-and-teased the end credits into oblivion during broadcast (grrrr!).

(“Squeezed and teased” means they pushed the credits down to the bottom — or sometimes on other shows to one side — and ran a promo for something else (in our case, our next episode) on most of the screen; the credits appear full-screen on the DVDs.)

Many thanks to anyone who can help!

Robert J. Sawyer online:
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I’m delighted and thrilled to be on the 2010 Aurora Award ballot twice: in the “Best Long Form English” category for Wake, published by Viking (Penguin) Canada, and in the “Best English Other” category for Distant Early Warnings: Canada’s Best Science Fiction, which I edited for Red Deer Press.

The full list of nominees is here.

Robert J. Sawyer online:
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ABC remains totally committed to FlashForward, the TV series based on my novel of the same name, and we’ll be having a massive relaunch in March:

On Tuesday, March 16, 2010, at 10:00 p.m. Eastern, right after Lost, ABC will be airing a one-hour clip show summarizing our first ten episodes.

Two days later, on Thursday, March 18, 2010, at 8:00 p.m. Eastern, two new episodes are airing back-to-back in a two-hour block.

Two days later, on Saturday, March 20, 2010, at 8:00 p.m. Eastern ABC repeats those episodes

That’s five prime-time hours devoted to FlashForward in one week. It’s a a major relaunch, folks. :)

Why the clip show? Easy.

• Because it’s been three months since we were last on the air and we want to remind our loyal viewers of what’s happened to date in the storyline;
• Because we’re hoping to entice some of Lost‘s audience, who might not have yet given us a try, to see what we’re all about;
• Because we’re hoping that those who haven’t watched us before because we’re an 8:00 p.m. show and they’re 10:00 p.m. viewers will discover us;
• Because we want to herald the arrival of new episodes, starting just two days later, as effectively as possible;
• Because this, and the fact that ABC is also repeating our first two new episode justs two days after they first air, signals to the industry that ABC is still 100% behind, promoting, and supporting FlashForward, and that we all intend to be back for a second year.

Still can’t wait until March? Read FlashForward, the Aurora Award-winning novel that started it all.

Robert J. Sawyer online:
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I’m giving a keynote at this upcoming conference, my great friends James Kerwin and Chase Masterson will be on hand to talk about their quantum-physics noir movie Yesterday was a Lie, and Chase will be singing songs from Star Trek on Wednesday night. Join us!

Toward a Science of Consciousness 2010

April 12-17, 2010

Tucson Convention Center and Hotel Arizona, Tucson, Arizona

Sponsored by the Center for Consciousness Studies, The University of Arizona

www.consciousness.arizona.edu

The program for the ninth biennial interdisciplinary conference ‘Toward a Science of Consciousness 2010’ is complete. Held in even-numbered years since 1994, the Tucson conferences are the major world gatherings on a broad spectrum of approaches to the fundamental question of how the brain produces conscious experience, a question which addresses who we are, the nature of reality and our place in the universe. An estimated 700 scientists, philosophers, psychologists, experientialists, artists and others from 43 countries on 6 continents will participate in 400 presentations included in 17 Pre-Conference Workshops, 12 Plenary or Keynote sessions, 21 Concurrent Talk sessions, 2 Poster Sessions, 3 Art-Tech interactive sessions and special evening performances. Abstracts for all presentations will be posted at www.consciousness.arizona.edu

Plenary Program Overview

Highlights of the 2010 Plenary Program will include Keynote speaker Antonio Damasio, the esteemed neurologist and best-selling author on how the Self arises from layers of processes from brainstem to cortex. Other Keynotes include psychiatrist/neuroscientist Karl Deisseroth on new technologies revealing brain circuits of the conscious mind, and Robert J. Sawyer, award-winning science fiction writer whose works (FlashForward, Mindscan, Hominids, etc.) feature various science-based aspects of consciousness.

Twin Keynotes by two prominent neuroscientists will present opposing views of an essential question arising from functional brain imaging: how does brain activity measured in the absence of sensory inputs relate to consciousness? Marcus Raichle describes this brain Dark Energy (see his cover piece in the March 2010 Scientific American) as default networks mediating thinking and daydreaming, toggling back-and-forth with stimulus-related processing and tasks. Robert G. Shulman contends that the underlying activity is a foundational substrate for all conscious processes which require critical levels of brain energy. A related Plenary Session is Mindwandering, conscious activity independent of sensory stimuli (Jonathan Schooler, Malia Mason, Jonathan Smallwood).

In Bodily Consciousness, Henrik Ehrsson will discuss and extend his well-known work on inducing out-of-body experiences in normal subjects, while Frederique de Vignemont

will distinguish different forms of conscious body awareness. Multi-Modal Experience will include synesthate and author Patricia Lynne Duffy describing her personal experience with fused and cross-wired senses, as well as how synesthesia affects and enables artists, writers, performers and scientists. Other speakers (Barry Stein, Casey O’Callaghan, Michael Proulx) will address the neuroscience and philosophical analysis of synesthesia, and how clinically-induced cross-modal perception can help blindness and other sensory defects.

Consciousness and Transformation will review long-term changes induced by meditation (Cassie Vieten), and analyze claims of enlightenment, mystical and transcendental experience (Jeffrey Martin). The session concludes with Za Rinpoche, a Tibetan Lama recognized in 1984 by the Dalai Lama as the sixth reincarnation of Zachoeje Lama. Author of Backdoor to Enlightenment, Za Rinpoche will discuss Buddhist perspectives on consciousness, enlightenment and reincarnation.

Machine Consciousness will feature IBM researcher Dharmendra Modha on efforts to simulate the brain through neuron-by-neuron reconstruction, and philosopher David Chalmers discussing prospects for a technological Singularity, the idea that human-level artificial intelligence (AI) will rapidly spiral to superintelligence. AI researcher Ben Goertzel will describe mobile bubbles of executive function moving through computer architectures.

Theories of Consciousness features Sid Kouider summarizing and critiquing prevalent neurocognitive theories, and Marc Ebner with simulations of consciousness as a mobile zone of synchrony moving through the brain. Philosopher Galen Strawson will address philosophical theories of consciousness, focusing especially on panpsychism.

New Directions in Neural Correlates of Consciousness (NCC) Research is a panel of fresh ideas from young researchers. In the context of default networks, Michal Gruberger will discuss the use of deep trans-cranial magnetic stimulation inhibiting prefrontal cortex in human subjects, with alterations in measures related to the sense of self. Philosophers Adrienne Prettyman and Stephen Biggs will analyze the claim that default networks represent the baseline state of the brain. Moran Cerf will report on recordings from single neurons in conscious human subjects, showing how activity in medial temporal lobe can regulate sensory entry into conscious awareness. Finally, Anirban Bhandyophadyay will discuss molecular ‘nanobrains’, and new experimental results suggesting microtubules are the missing fourth circuit element.

The William James Centennial session will open the Plenary Program as a tribute to the father of American psychology and philosophy who died in 1910. Eugene Taylor will discuss James in the context of modern approaches, Bernard Baars will describe how James’ disillusionment led to behaviorism which banished consciousness from science for seven decades. Bruce Mangan concludes with what James termed the fringe, cognitive information just outside consciousness which, Mangan argues, illuminates insight and mystical experience.

For further information, see www.consciousness.arizona.edu

Robert J. Sawyer online:
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That’s the cover for the Hungarian edition of FlashForward, my novel that’s the basis for the TV series of the same name, published by Galaktika. I think it’s terrific.

For more about the Hungarian edition, see the publisher’s website.

Robert J. Sawyer online:
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The first ten episodes of FlashForward, the ABC TV series based on my novel of the same name, are now available on DVD.

W00t!

Robert J. Sawyer online:
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The weekend of May 28-30, 2010, at the Banff Centre, it’s the 49th annual Banff Book Discussion Weekend, this year featuring Robert J. Sawyer and his Aurora Award-nominated novel Wake, with Rob in attendance, plus discussions of three other books. Banff is a gorgeous ski-resort town in Alberta (although skiing season will be long over — but it’s lovely in the spring!).

See the website here and the PDF brochure here.

Robert J. Sawyer online:
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It’s bad enough that the Barnes & Noble nook forces text to be fully justified left and right, whether the user wants that or not, but it does an atrocious job of producing that justification — among the worst I’ve ever seen on any e-reading device (and I’ve been using such devices for nine years now).

To justify properly, you first have to break the line properly. And when deciding where to break a line of text (wrapping what follows to the next line), the rules are simple. Lines should wrap at these characters:

1. after a space (with the space itself disappearing beyond the right margin);
2. either before or after an em-dash (the long dash—like this—often used in typesetting);
3. after an internal hyphen in a word.

The nook obeys only the first of these rules (the bare minimum for wrapping text at all), producing aesthetically awful pages (Figure 1):

Look two-thirds of the way down the above page. See that line that says “antecedents of particular” with gigantic spaces between each word? That’s a result of the nook failing to apply rule 2: the break should have been either before or after the em-dash in the following line (so that “behaviors—” stayed on the previous line). Instead, the nook treated all of “behaviors—especially” as a single word.

(If only “behavior,” but not the em-dash, would have fit on the line above, then just “behavior” should have been retained on that line, and the em-dash should have wrapped around to start the next line.)

Note, too, by the way, that the last line of the page is short: it isn’t quite fully justified, but instead stops about a half-character-width shy of the right margin. We’ll see that error on every page we look at; it’s yet another flaw in the nook’s rendering of justified pages.

Let’s look at another example (Figure 2):

See the second last line, the one that says “about it. Shortly after the,” with massive spaces between each word? That’s the result of the nook failing to apply rule 3, breaking words at embedded hyphens.

Now, as it happens, in this example, the phrase “big-mammal-scavenging” is really three words strung together to form a compound adjective, but the nook makes the same mistake with single words that have an embedded hyphen (such as the way some people spell “micro-organism” or “co-operation”). The text should wrap after the last hyphen that will fit on the line: if all of “big-mammal-” would have fit, that should have stayed on the line above; if only “big-” would have fit, it should have stayed on the line above.

Oh, and above we see the em-dash wrapping problem again: just below the middle of page, the text should have wrapped after the em-dash in “wise—emerged,” which would have eliminated the huge spaces in the preceding line.

As before, the final line on the screen (which is not the final line of a paragraph; yes, it’s true that you don’t fully justify the last line of a paragraph, but that’s not what’s going on here) comes up a short of the right margin.

And we discover yet another bit of nook-fail here: see the “the” at the end of the line “sapiens sapiens—wisest of the”? Note that the “e” is slightly clipped; its right-hand edge is trimmed off. We’ll see that error repeatedly, too: the cause is that the nook’s justification algorithms don’t take into account the slanting of italic text, and the italics earlier in the line (“sapiens sapiens”) have pushed the final “e” off the active part of the screen.

The “e” is only slightly clipped above, but we’ll see that same flaw more egregiously in the next example (Figure 3):

Look at the fifth line up from the bottom of the screen (starting with “Homo”). That line, and the next two, all contain italics, and all three show the clipping of the final character in the line because of it: the “l” in the first line; the “g” in the second, the “e” — which is missing half of it width — in the third.

We also on this page see the failure to wrap at an embedded hyphen, resulting in huge gaps between words: the line “Homo), omnivore plus preferential” should have also included “meat-” from the following line.

Now, just fixing the errors pointed out here (the failure to wrap properly before or after em-dashes; the failure to wrap properly at embedded hyphens; the failure to properly justify the final line on the screen) still wouldn’t be enough to give the nook decent full justification, because to do that properly, avoiding huge swathes of white space between words, requires the intelligent insertion of hyphens into words.

Look at any printed, typeset book from a commercial publishing house. It will almost certainly have hyphens inserted at syllable breaks in some words at the ends of lines on each page, so that the words can be broken and wrapped over two lines. That is, words of more than one syllable that fall at the end of a line should frequently break after one of the syllables, with a hyphen added just before the break. This is done so that the spacing between words ends up being approximately the same even with full justification.

Hyphenation is a tricky thing to do right. Mobipocket’s original attempt to stake out territory in the ebook marketplace was in part based on their claim to successfully hyphenate words — but they simply used an algorithm that often got the breaks wrong (putting them within syllables, or between pairs of letters in consonant blends). A quick glance at the first Mobipocket book I opened just now showed these incorrect hyphenations within the first few pages: “sta-gnant,” “remai-ned,” “silen-ce,” “wal-ked,” and “deadli-nes.”

The only really good way to do it is by having the algorithm hand-coded with the correct syllabification points of many common words, and having it consult a dictionary interactively for uncommon ones. As it happens the Chicago Manual of Style, which is the most commonly used reference for the niceties of preparing text for the printed page, recommends Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate for this purpose, which is the dictionary already built into the nook.

Finally, please note that one of the big sales points for ebook devices is that they can be used by those who need large print. But the larger the print gets, the worse full justification looks. By forcing it on at all times you take one of the great strengths of ebooks (user-selectable type sizes) and turn it into one of the great weaknesses (aesthetically ugly pages).

Fixes I’d suggest:

Dear Barnes & Noble, first and foremost, make full justification a user-selectable option; let us turn it off if we don’t like it. This already is an option in many versions of the eReader software that underlies the nook, including the Palm version, the Windows versions (both eReader for Windows and BN Reader), the iPhone version, and more. Don’t force those of us who dislike full-justification to have to look at it.

Second, if you are going to do justification, do it properly.

What we have here is a classic example of what’s wrong with many ebook platforms: a failure to actually look at how it’s done in printed books. If you’re doing it a different way than it’s done in print, ask yourself why. There are millions of guides — millions of printed books — you can consult as samples of how it should be done. Please do consult them; please do get it right.

Robert J. Sawyer online:
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My first-ever YouTube video, recorded Saturday, February 20, 2010: a survey of nine different devices I’ve used over the years to read ebooks.

“You’re looking at in aggregate at about $3,000 worth of ebook-reading hardware here, and my own personal use almost nine years now of using devices to read ebooks. I’m an absolute convert to the concept of electronic-book readers. I just hope that we actually get the ideal hardware device, a decent price point, and the ability to share the content [between devices].” — Robert J. Sawyer

Devices shown and discussed (with the dates I acquired them and the price I paid):

• October 19, 2001: Handspring Visor Neo (Cdn$299)
• October 20, 2001: Franklin eBookman 911 (US$229)
• December 20, 2001: RCA REB 1100 (US$249?)
• January 22, 2003: Sony Clié PEG-SJ20 (Cdn$269 — not shown in the video))
• September 7, 2004: Sony Clié PEG-TH55 (US$259)
• September 26, 2006: eBookwise 1150 (US$115 with 64MB SmartMedia card)
• May 3, 2008: iRex iLiad (a gift, list US$699)
• December 18, 2009: ECTACO jetBook – Lite (U$149)
• December 19, 2009: Foxit eSlick (US$259)
• February 13, 2010: Barnes & Noble nook (US$259)

You can watch the video here.

Robert J. Sawyer online:
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I’ve had seven different new mass-market paperback releases in the last decade. Here they are, in Canadian besteller order (from most copies sold to least):

1. FlashForward (published in mass-market 2000)
2. Rollback (2008)
3. Mindscan (2006)
4. Hominids (2003)
5. Calculating God (2001)
6. Hybrids (2005)
7. Humans (published 2004)

Of course, FlashForward — the oldest book on the list — is an outlier, because it’s had a huge boost in sales in the last six months thanks to the TV series based on it.

Setting it aside, this is pretty much exactly what one would hope for: my sales have risen steadily with each new standalone book over the past decade: Rollback (my most-recent mass-market paperback) did better than Mindscan, which did better than Hominids, which did better than Calculating God.

Humans and Hybrids suffered a bit from being the second and third volumes of a trilogy — not everyone who read the first book (a Hugo winner) came back for the other two. I suspect Humans, the second volume, showing lower sales than the third is an artifact of Tor foolishly letting it go out of stock for an extended period (but it’s back in print in mass-market now).

And now on to the mass-market paperback for Wake, which comes out at the end of next month.

Robert J. Sawyer online:
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I’m getting tired of high-priced ebook readers that are brought to market without anyone who knows anything about book layout and design having vetted the software they use.

Have a look at this photo, which shows a Foxit eSlick ebook-reading device displaying a .PDB eReader book from Barnes and Noble’s Fictionwise.com under the new 2.0.1 build 0205 firmware. The eSlick retails for US$259, the same as the Kindle and the nook.

Every line shows the same error: instead of justification putting an equal amount of space between each word on a line, there is always more space just before the last word on each line.

It’s not a LOT of extra space — but it’s enough to be visually irritating. You can clearly see it on this line: “purpose of this book, then, is to educate. It is a.”

There is way more space between “is a” than there is between “It is.”

Or look at the last line: again, there’s way more space between “reality the” than there is between “in reality.”

This happens with every eReader DRM format (.PDB) commercial ebook I’ve tried.

I’ve already complained to Foxit that there should be an option to turn justification off altogether, but when the device does fully justify lines, it needs to do it properly.

On why users should have the option to turn justification off: One of the big sales points for ebook devices is that they can be used by those who need large print, but the larger the print gets, the worse right justification looks. By forcing it on at all times you take one of the great strengths of ebooks (user-selectable type sizes) and turn it into one of the great weaknesses (aesthetically ugly pages).

Robert J. Sawyer online:
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Often, Amazon’s recommendations are reasonably useful, but this one isn’t even close. Come on, guys! If the recommendation feature decays into nothing but noise, it’s self-defeating. I’m sure someone said, “Hey, if we make the recommendations more general, we’ll sell more books.” Nope; if I get a few more like this, I’ll just turn on an email filter that deletes Amazon recommendations unread:

Dear Amazon.ca Customer,

As someone who has purchased or rated “Deke!: An Autobiography” by Donald K Slayton or other books in the Engineering > Aeronautical Engineering category, you might like to know that “Multi-Sensor Data Fusion with MATLAB: Theory and Practice” is now available. You can order yours at a savings of 20% by following the link below.

Multi-Sensor Data Fusion with MATLAB: Theory and Practice by Jitendra R. Raol

List Price: CDN$ 160.95
Price: CDN$ 128.76
You Save: CDN$ 32.19
(20%)

For those who don’t know, Deke Slayton was a key figure in the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs.

Robert J. Sawyer online:
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I’ve been telling other writers about Canada’s Public Lending Right system for 18 years now, and it always amazes me that some Canadian authors still haven’t bothered to register.

The Public Lending Right compensates (to some degree) Canadian authors for the loss of royalty income they have because their books are in public libraries. Most Western countries have a variant of this system, but, as in so many things, conspicuously not the United States.

Here’s my report for 2010, which arrived in today’s mail along with a cheque for Cdn$3,486.00, the maximum amount an author was entitled to this year. (If there had been no maximum imposed, my share would have been Cdn$5,840.54.)

(The 1992 article linked to above says that they survey 10 libraries; that’s an old figure — the current figure is 7 libraries.)

For all my posts about the PLR, see here, and the PLR website is here.

Robert J. Sawyer online:
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(This entry has been deleted due to formatting problems.)

An interesting exchange took place on my Facebook wall recently (starting on 8 February 2010). Facebook content scrolls away and is very hard to access after a few days, so I thought I’d reproduce some of it here. There were 109 messages posted in the exchange, but the first two were the first two below, and the rest of the ones quoted here were interspersed in the remainder; they are a conversation between me and a self-published author, hereafter referred to as SPA [slightly redacted, out of kindness, to obscure SPA’s identity]:

RJS: You know, the mindless cheerleaders for self-publishing who say “Oh, go ahead and do it — spend your money that way; it’s a GOOD idea!” never seem to be around when the poor sap ends up heartbroken at the end with a book that no one has read.

SPA: Unless the poor sap is savvy enough to avoid vanity publishers, uses POD technologies, with excellent distribution, hires the services of an excellent editor, and markets the hell out of the book.

RJS: Not to be mean, and I know you’re a big advocate of doing it this way, but what do you mean by “with excellent distribution”?

I happen to know that you’re a Canadian author. Canada’s largest bookstore chain is Chapters/Indigo, and Canada’s largest city is Toronto. So I just popped over to Chapters.ca, looked up your latest book and asked for a display of store stock in Toronto.

The site served up 25 locations, and every single one — all 25 — shows “Quantity available: 0” for your book.

There may come a day when the vast majority of books are not sold in retail outlets, but that day is a ways off yet, and until then anything that doesn’t include getting physical books into bookstores can’t be meaningfully called “excellent distribution.”

[SPA then replied to some other people, repeatedly using the term “legacy publishers” to refer to the traditional publishing houses.]

RJS: “Legacy publishers.” *snort*

You know, we started calling serial and parallel interfaces on computers “legacy ports” when people stopped using them; when they no longer represented the dominant, current paradigm; when they had fallen out of fashion.

To call — as an example — Penguin Canada, my own current Canadian publisher, which is a $100,000,000 (one hundred million dollar) per-year operation, with books in thousands of retail outlets coast-to-coast PLUS all the other places you’ve referred to, a “legacy publisher” is to reduce the debate to precisely the kind of mindless cheerleading I was decrying in the post that started this thread. You may want established publishers and the existing business models to fall out of fashion, but they have not.

The number one publicity source for books: being on bookstore shelves. All this talk about disintermediation ignores the fact that most people buy books because they can reach out and touch them, leaf through them, and carry them away.

Publicity is, in many ways, the easy part (if by publicity you mean online promotion); distribution is the hard part. So the flaw in the argument that “if you have to do your own publicity anyway, then why not do the rest” is the assumption that you CAN do the rest.

You’re a case in point: despite all your hard work, and the fact that you are a good writer, you haven’t been able to do the one thing that so-called legacy publishers would consider an absolute necessity for being a publisher: getting books into the big bookstore chains.

SPA: Some of you may find this blog post of interest.

[In response to which, Jim C. Hines chimed in on the truth about Amazon rankings, to which I added:]

RJS: To add to Jim’s very cogent analysis, the big flaw with Amazon numbers is that they give the impression of an ordered array from best selling to worst selling. But in fact Amazon doesn’t move enough physical units of most books for the rankings to be meaningful once you get down the list a bit.

You might think that the book that’s ranked 200,000 sold better than the book ranked 200,001 — but in fact they almost certainly sold identically. Indeed, rank 200,000 and rank 800,000 might all have sold equally well, which is to say hardly at all, and rank 1,000,000 to 6,000,000 might very well have never sold a single copy on Amazon (and almost certainly didn’t in the last year).

I always get antsy when people touting new paradigms refuse to cough up hard numbers. They say, oh, look, my free online book had XXX,XXX downloads and now it’s in its nth printing — see?

Yeah, well, even in mass-market a printing might only be 2,500 copies these days [and the most-frequent-citer of the “printings” statistic has never had a book in mass market], and in trade it could be 1,000 copies or much fewer (and of both those, perhaps half the copies will actually sell).

And now we have a case of, look see!, these Amazon ratings prove my point.

Marcello Truzzi said (and Carl Sagan frequently quoted): “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.”

The people making the claims have access to or can find out the numbers of copies sold (and printed); they know precisely how many copies their print publisher actually sold or how many they shipped of their self-published book to Amazon.

But they don’t tell us; they instead have us look at numbers that could mean just about anything while crowing, “See! See!” Sorry, but those numbers don’t prove a thing.

[SPA was not heard from again.]

Robert J. Sawyer online:
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An email I received this morning from my colleague Jamie Todd Rubin:

I ran into the same problem with the Kindle that you reported with the Nook regarding hyphenation. They implement full justification without adherence to any hyphenation rules and that makes some lines look awkward (4 words, widely spaced).

The other thing I’ve noticed, and I don’t know if this is Amazon or the publisher, but in numerous books that I’ve read on the Kindle, there are substantial typos that appear to be the result of some kind of OCR import. The word “t-u-r-n” appears as “t-u-m” from time-to-time, but it’s not consistent. There are other minor errors that I don’t find in the printed text and I wonder if copyeditors look at the eBook text before it goes live.

Those are the three great scandals of the ebook industry:

1) The people designing the way pages are presented on screen seem to know nothing at all about typography. This ranges from the outrageous (the eSlick until last week’s firmware update thinking that it was okay to break lines at the embedded apostrophe in words, or before the closing quotation mark) to the merely incompetent: the insistence on right justification (“because that makes it look like a book, see!”) without understanding or doing any of the work required to make right justification aesthetically appealing.

2) The complete lack of proofreading or even spot-checking of ebooks before they are put up for sale. For example, I recently bought the eReader-format ebook edition of The Mind and the Brain by Jeffrey M. Schwartz and Sharon Begley, a book published by a major publisher (HarperCollins), and every line on every page throughout the book was centered — no one had so much as glanced at the book after converting it.

3) The use of OCR as a way to get books into ebook format. For instance, Tor Books offers my Golden Fleece for the Kindle and the nook. For the print edition they typeset from my computer files, but for the ebook edition, they used a scan of the printed pages, and ran it through optical-character recognition. Page one proudly lists other books by “Rohert J. Sawyer.”

Print publishers keep arguing that they have to charge high prices for ebooks in part because of the care and expense that goes into proofreading and laying out a printed book’s text, but if that’s just thrown out the window — if not one dime of the money spent for that is actually reflected in the ebook edition — then it’s a specious argument to say that those costs need to be reflected in the ebook’s price.

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I sent this suggestion to Barnes and Noble tech support today, and posted it on the nook discussion forum:

To my way of thinking, the page-forward and page-backward buttons are in the reverse of where they should be, given the weight and design of the nook.

If you hold the nook with your thumbs over the page-forward buttons (on either side), it’s top heavy, and has a tendency to fall backward, and I’m always afraid it will drop backward out of my hands.

But if you hold the nook with your thumbs over the page-backward buttons (which are higher up, near the device’s center of gravity), the nook is balanced nicely in your hands, but you have to reposition a hand every time you want to change a page.

Obviously, going to the next page in a book is a very common operation, whereas going to the previous page is something rarely done.

Because of this, I’d be grateful for an option to swap the function of the page-forward and page-backward buttons, so that the one labeled “>” went to the previous page, and the one labeled “<" went to the next page. (By the way, a decade ago, the old Rocket eBook and its successor, the RCA REB-1100, offered this very option; they called it “reverse paging”.) Thanks for considering my suggestion.

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A perfect example of why ebook readers are so crappy at formatting these days: the people who make them don’t even have a rudimentary familiarity with typography. As I observed in my review of the Barnes & Noble nook, the algorithms used to justify text there are atrocious, making for awful-looking pages.

The Foxit eSlick does a better job at justification, because at least it breaks words and compound phrases that have embedded hard hyphens in them at the embedded hyphens (instead of wrapping the all the text to the next line).

But on both devices, there should be an option to turn justification off, because on narrow lines and at large type sizes, many people find it hard to read.

But typographic niceties apparently aren’t even discussed by ebook makers. Here’s an exchange I had with Foxit tech support today:

RJS: Previously, eReader books on the eSlick had right-justification turned off. Firmware 2.0.1 changes that to right justification on — with no way to turn it off. This is not a trivial change; it should have been noted in the change log — but wasn’t.

I much prefer right justification to be off; a ragged right margin, with even spacing between the words, is easier for me to read than lines that have different sized spaces between words (and often ridiculously large spaces, especially at larger font sizes).

Please put in an option to turn right justification off (as is found in eReader implementations on many other platforms).

Foxit Tech Support: Do you mean the enlarged page margins on both side?

2.0.1 firmware does not turn right justification on, it only leaves 10 pixel margins on both side.

RJS: No, I do not mean that. I mean that for eReader books, prior to version 2.0.1, the text was flush left, ragged right; now it is justified (flush left and right). Please see this explanation in Wikipedia.

Please provide an option to select “flush left” or “unjustified” text, instead of forcing justified text; that is, please provide an option to provide a ragged right margin.

This has nothing whatsoever to do with the number of pixels that are not used at the left and right side of the screen; that’s a completely different issue.

Sheesh.

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It was ten years ago today, on Thursday, February 17, 2000, that I wrote the first words for what became Hominids, the first volume of my “Neanderthal Parallax” trilogy.

That day, I wrote the opening below — not one line of which made it into the final book — leading up to establishing the setting as Sudbury, Ontario, where the nickel mines exist because of an asteroid impact:

Everyone has heard about the asteroid that may have felled the dinosaurs, and how if it hadn’t hit, we might not be here.

But there have been many other asteroid impacts in Earth’s past, and when this one crashed into Earth, the dinosaurs weren’t yet even a twinkle in God’s eye. If it hadn’t hit, we would probably still be here, but they — the others — would not. This flying mountain, a hunk of detritus left over from the formation of the solar system that measured between one and three kilometers wide, brutally slammed into —

Into what? How to describe the rocks that bore this assault? Today, most of the world calls them the Canadian Shield, a vast horseshoe shaped region covering half the nation we refer to as Canada — but when the impact occurred, Canada, and every other human construct, was still 1.8 billion years in the future.

Of course, in Canada, where everything would naturally be Canadian-this or Canadian-that, these rocks are sometimes called the Precambrian Shield instead, but —

But everything was Precambrian back when this colossal boulder, moving at fifteen kilometers per second, slammed into our world, setting it ringing like a giant bell in space. Although Earth had hosted life for two billion years by that point, none of it was yet multicellular. The first worms were another billion years in the future; jawless fish, the first vertebrates, were still 1.3 billion years away; and the first mammals — ancestors to us, yes, and to them as well — wouldn’t appear for an additional three hundred million after that.

Carolyn didn’t like that much, and the next day, Friday, February 18, 2000, I completely revamped the opening:

The darkness was absolute, more obsidian than Hitler’s heart, darker than a rapist’s soul.

Two kilometers beneath the Earth’s surface, the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory waited patiently. At its core was a vast acrylic globe twelve meters across, its walls 2.5 centimeters thick, filled with 1,100 tonnes of heavy water, on loan from Atomic Energy Canada Limited; the globe was made up of XX curved pieces each measuring XXX — the largest size that could fit down the mine shaft leading to the observatory.

Surrounding that sphere was a geodesic of photomultiplier tubes — 9,600 of them, each cupped in a reflective parabola, each aimed inward toward the sphere. And surrounding that was a giant barrel-shaped container, ten stories tall, filled with ultrapure regular water.

The two kilometers of Canadian shield overhead protected the heavy water from cosmic rays. The shell of regular water absorbed the natural background radiation from the uranium and thorium in the granite gabbro, preventing any of it from reaching the heavy water. Indeed, nothing at all could penetrate into the heavy water except neutrinos; trillions passed through the Earth every second, and any one of them could travel through a block of lead a light-year thick with only a fifty-percent chance of hitting anything.

Heavy water is just like regular water in taste (or lack thereof) and appearance, and it behaves virtually identically in most chemical reactions.

Of course, that lacked any character or drama. The final, published version of Hominids, which came out in 2002, began thus:

The blackness was absolute.

Watching over it was Louise Benoît, twenty-eight, a statuesque postdoc from Montreal with a mane of thick brown hair stuffed, as required here, into a hair net. She kept her vigil in a cramped control room, buried two kilometers — “a mile an’ a quarder,” as she sometimes explained for American visitors in an accent that charmed them — beneath the Earth’s surface.

The control room was next to the deck above the vast, unilluminated cavern housing the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory. Suspended in the center of that cavern was the world’s largest acrylic sphere, twelve meters — “almost fordy feet” — across. The sphere was filled with eleven hundred tonnes of heavy water on loan from Atomic Energy of Canada Limited.

Enveloping that transparent globe was a geodesic array of stainless-steel struts, supporting 9,600 photomultiplier tubes, each cupped in a reflective parabola, each aimed in toward the sphere. All of this — the heavy water, the acrylic globe that contained it, and the enveloping geodesic shell — was housed in a ten-story-tall barrel-shaped cavern, excavated from the surrounding norite rock. And that gargantuan cavern was filled almost to the top with ultrapure regular water.

The two kilometers of Canadian shield overhead, Louise knew, protected the heavy water from cosmic rays. And the shell of regular water absorbed the natural background radiation from the small quantities of uranium and thorium in the surrounding rock, preventing that, too, from reaching the heavy water. Indeed, nothing could penetrate into the heavy water except neutrinos, those infinitesimal subatomic particles that were the subject of Louise’s research. Trillions of neutrinos passed right through the Earth every second; in fact, a neutrino could travel through a block of lead a light-year thick with only a fifty-percent chance of hitting something.

Still, neutrinos poured out of the sun in such vast profusion that collisions did occasionally occur — and heavy water was an ideal target for such collisions. The hydrogen nuclei in heavy water each contain a proton — the normal constituent of a hydrogen nucleus — plus a neutron, as well. And when a neutrino did chance to hit a neutron, the neutron decayed, releasing a proton of its own, an electron, and a flash of light that could be detected by the photomultiplier tubes.

At first, Louise’s dark, arching eyebrows did not rise when she heard the neutrino-detection alarm go ping; the alarm sounded briefly about a dozen times a day, and although it was normally the most exciting thing to happen down here, it still didn’t merit looking up from her copy of Cosmopolitan.

But then the alarm sounded again, and yet again, and then it stayed on, a solid, unending electric bleep like a dying man’s EKG.

You can read more of the published opening here.

Hominids went on to win the 2003 Hugo Award for best novel of the year, and it was the first volume of a trilogy. I’m very proud of the finished book, and pleased to look back on its humble origins a decade ago.

Robert J. Sawyer online:
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My great friend Rick Wilber has a new novel out called Rum Point: A Baseball Novel.

Rick is well known in SF circles for (among other things) being the administrator of the Dell Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing, associated with Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine.

But he’s also a life-long baseball fan (and his father was major-league player Del Wilber) and an accomplished writer of mystery fiction, and he combines those two things wonderfully in this masterful novel. Check out the reviews:

“(Rick) Wilber has the kind of voice that makes the writing transparent, in that the reader connects directly with characters and emotions. His vibrant sense of wonderful locales is that much gravy.” —Tim Dorsey, author of Nuclear Jellyfish

“Rick Wilber is the sort of writer lots of us like to turn to at the end of a long day: relaxed, inventive, knowledgeable, good-humored, and honest right down to the core. This man tells you the truth, a quality that may be unsettling sometimes, but is never less than absolutely refreshing. Wilber knows how to do justice to the nuances of a complex story, and he deserves a huge readership.” —Peter Straub, author of Lost Boy, Lost Girl

“Set in hometown St. Petersburg and the Cayman Islands, Rick Wilber’s Rum Point is a taut thriller/mystery in which a brave young woman cop and her baseball manager father battle to stop a violent pair of CIA types from building a drug-smuggling empire. The characters are compelling, the plot intricate, and Wilber even tosses a little baseball into the mix. Don’t miss it.” —Peter Golenbock, author of George: The Poor Little Rich Boy Who Built the Yankee Empire

“Wilber will exhilarate, startle, and dazzle you.” —Michael Bishop, award-winning author of the baseball fantasy Brittle Innings

“With Rum Point, Rick Wilber has given us a police thriller with an intriguing heroine, a likable TV evangelist, and a rousing mix of curves and fastballs.” —Jack McDevitt, award-winning author of Time Travelers Never Die

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Over on my Facebook page, I noted the above fact, and someone popped up to say, “Anybody else remember when they sold whole seasons on DVD?”

My response:

Sure, but we’re competing now with Hulu and online viewing and the whole darknet, where episodes are available pirated the day they’re broadcast. There’s a market out there that doesn’t want to wait until the end of the season to get to watch shows — and if you do want to wait, you can; that market is served, too.

The half-season FlashForward set is $19.99 at Amazon.com — two bucks an episode, with the later ones on the disk available just two months after they were broadcast; I don’t see a gouge there.

And, if you want to wax all nostalgic, remember when shows were released one or two episodes at a time on pricey VHS cassettes? Or maybe, you’d like to wait until demand somehow magically rebuilds for a show that’s gone? The Gods are smiling on you, then: The Mary Tyler Moore Show, the complete sixth season, came out on DVD last week as a single set — thirty-four years after the episodes were first broadcast. So much better, right? ;)

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Last weekend, in Chicago, I bought a Barnes & Noble nook ebook reader. Since they’re not for sale in Canada, I probably have one of the very few units in all of Canada now — a nook of the north! (Yes, it was worth the US$259, just to get to make that pun.)

My initial thoughts:

The nook seems to have no trouble loading my content in eReader format from Fictionwise, and sampling and buying content wirelessly from Barnes & Noble seems to work fine.

The display is beautiful, but right-justification is forced to on, and the justification algorithms are terrible: even words with embedded hyphens (such as “middle-class”) don’t break at the hyphen (instead, the whole thing wraps to the next line), and em-dashes are treated as parts of words–frustratingly meaning that even if, in this sentence, “words,” or “words–,” would fit on one line, all of “words–frustratingly” wraps to the next line. That leaves huge gaps between words in the previous line. It is distracting and mars the aesthetics of an otherwise nice display.

(And the nook doesn’t do hyphenation of its own — which really is required if one is doing justification; look at any print book or magazine that has fully justified text, and see what a difference the hyphenation makes to the word spacing in the lines.)

Also missing is the ability to do a folder hierarchy (separate “Fiction, “Nonfiction,” “Biography,” or whatever you wish folders) in either main memory or on an expansion card, and the expansion card is very awkward to put in and remove; you won’t be using it as a standard way to add new content.

The page-forward and page-backward buttons are in the reverse of where they should be, given the weight of the device. If you hold it with your thumbs over the page-forward buttons (on either side), it’s top heavy, and has a tendency to fall backward; if you hold it with your thumbs over the page-backward buttons (which are higher up), it’s balanced nicely in the hands, but you have to reposition a hand every time you want to change a page.

But except for those things, it works quite nicely.

It does not have a backlight for the main screen. Having the color LCD screen below the main screen (which is used for navigation and menus) light up in the dark (which it did once spontaneously on me last night) does starkly remind one of this lack.

Page turns (with the new 1.2 firmware, which came preinstalled on my unit) are fast; and the nook wakes up from hibernation very quickly, leaving you right at the page you were last reading.

It’s substantially heavier than the Foxit eSlick — the other e-ink device on the market that supports Fictionwise’s eReader format — and the eSlick does support folders. Also, the eSlick supports landscape mode, and the nook does not.

But the nook wins hands-down because you’re back to reading your book in 2 seconds after picking up the device if it’s hibernating (and only have to hit the power button to get there), versus 23 or so with the eSlick (and on the eSlick you have to re-select your book from a menu after powering up).

The nook does have a built-in dictionary (Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate — a very good one), but the interface for selecting a word on the e-ink screen is very awkward and time-consuming; the eSlick has no dictionary support.

The nook is a nice device, and I’m glad I bought it, but it needs at least one more firmware upgrade. The justification issue has to be fixed (first, it should be user-selectable whether it’s on or off; second, it should obey the rules of typography when on). A better interface for selecting words for dictionary lookup (and highlighting) needs to be devised. And I’d like to see the ability to swap the functions of the page-forward and page-backward buttons.

But it is a great example of what an e-ink device can be.

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Britain’s The Mail on Sunday (which has a circulation of 2.2 million copies) solicited a Letter to the Editor from me about the forthcoming Apple iPad and its science-fictional precursors. Here’s what I had to say in full; a shorter version appears in today’s (14 February 2010) print edition of the newspaper:

Once again, science fiction has become science fact. The Apple iPad brings us very close to the portable flatscreens on which the astronauts in the 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey watched the BBC World News — and read their documents.

Even before that, the original Star Trek had characters reading books and manuals on their computer screens, and in one episode Elisha Cook, Jr., guest starred as a Luddite lawyer who, much to Captain Kirk’s amusement, still used paper books.

But as the cover note on the most famous ebook of all — The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — proclaims, “Don’t panic.” Marshall McLuhan was wrong; the medium is not the message, and a book is a book even if it’s displayed on a Kindle, an iPad, a smartphone, or a desktop computer.

— Robert J. Sawyer, Toronto

Sawyer’s novel FlashForward — available in print and as an ebook — is the basis for the TV series of the same name.

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The new showrunning team at FlashForward, the ABC TV series based on my novel of the same name, is: Jessika Borsiczky, Lisa Zwerling, and Timothy J. Lea.

Jessika — who is from Montreal — was the person who first read my novel a decade ago, and pursued getting it made as a TV series; that’s her pictured above with Courtney B. Vance, who plays Stanford Wedeck. (Jess’s last name is pronounced Bor-shees-key.)

Let me underscore this: Jessika Borsiczky has been behind this series from the very beginning, and she’s been executive producer since day one; there is absolute continuity of vision here.

Lisa has been with the show since the beginning, too (and before that worked on ER). Tim joined the show in November (in fact, his first day was one of the days I was working in the writers’ room), and immediately brought wonderful insights to the room; he’s previously worked on CSI: NY and Law and Order: Criminal Intent.

They’re all terrific people, and the show is indeed in very good hands.

You can read more at Variety and Zap 2 It.

FlashForward returns with all-new episodes on Thursday, March 18, 2010.

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Toronto Life, a glossy newstand magazine devoted to the finer things in Canada’s largest city, profiles Robert J. Sawyer in the March 2010 issue; as a subscriber, I received my copy in the mail today.

It’s a terrific article; I’m absolutely thrilled with it. And it’s accopanied by an amazing photo of me in my office. The article is by Sheena Goodyear, and the photo is by Finn O’Hara.

An excerpt:

Sawyer’s fast-paced prose blends adventure and philosophical exploration, riveting readers to implausible narratives populated by talking space dinosaurs; dimension-shifting, bisexual Neanderthals; and six-legged aliens (who infiltrate the ROM). They’re also meticulously researched examinations of modern culture in the face of world-altering progress. He pits spirituality against pragmatism and shows characters at their most vulnerable, usually within recognizable Canadian settings. It’s like CanLit on meth, and he has made addicts out of thousands of middle-aged sci-hards.

“Like CanLit on meth.” I like that.

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It was five years ago today that I finished writing my last short story. That story, “Biding Time,” was written for the DAW Books anthology Slipstreams, edited by Martin Harry Greenberg and John Helfers.

I guess I went out with a bang. The story was reprinted in the prestigious Penguin Book of Crime Stories and (after some on-stage drama!) won the Aurora Award. And the film option on it (and its prequel, “Identity Theft”) was just renewed for a fourth year.

I had a nice little career as a short-fiction writer: 44 stories published (all now collected in two handsome volumes available from Red Deer Press), two Hugo nominations, one Nebula nomination, a Bram Stoker Award nomination, four short-story Aurora Award wins, plus winning France’s top SF award for best foreign SF story, as well as winning Analog magazine’s Analytical Laboratory Award, Science Fiction Chronicle‘s Reader Award, and the Crime Writers of Canada’s Arthur Ellis Award, all for best short story of the year.

I gave up writing short fiction because I just didn’t really enjoy writing it, and life’s too short to spend on things that aren’t fun.

I also gave up writing it, to be honest, because short fiction pays abysmally poorly. Six cents a word is a super rate for short science-fiction stories from the traditional SF markets (and those rates haven’t gone up in the 30 years since I sold my first short story), which works out to about $250 for a typical 4,000-or-so-word short story; a while ago, I did a treatment for a miniseries, which was also 4,000 words long, and was paid $25,000 — or six dollars (one hundred times as much) per word, and I had a blast doing the treatment.

And I gave it up because, frankly, after 19 years of publishing novels, I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of people who have ever said they first discovered me through my short fiction instead of my books.

All of which leads to a rather ironic announcement: I’ve just made my first sale ever to Canada’s venerable Tesseracts anthology series. I’ll be in Tesseracts 14, edited by John Robert Colombo and Brett Alexander Savory. Did I relent, you ask? Nope, not really. The work that’s appearing in that book, coming this fall, is not a story but a prose-poem (one I performed for a very appreciative audience last year the the World Science Fiction Convention in Montreal).

In the intervening five years since I finished writing “Biding Time,” I’ve turned down numerous commissions to write more short stories, including several dollar-a-word ones from glossy publications. I’m quite content about the decision; what I really enjoy doing is writing novels and scripts … and I should get back to that right now. Toodles!

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