Robert J. Sawyer

My friend Matthew Tepper, who took the picture above, reminded me that the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society (which has its own way-cool clubhouse!) meets on Thursday nights, so this past Thursday, Carolyn and I attended their meeting, since we’re in L.A. so I can work on FlashForward, the ABC TV series based on my novel of the same name.

Our writing friends Dani Kollin and Eytan Kollin, authors of The Unincorporated Man, were also there, as were old friends John DeChancie and Larry Niven. We all went out to dinner afterwards at the Coral Café. Larry said, “I envy you FlashForward” — which was an amazing thing to here from one of my writng heroes. :)

Pictured: 1970 Nebula Award winner Larry Niven and 1995 Nebula Award winner Robert J. Sawyer on 12 November 2009 in Los Angeles

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Having a blast in Los Angeles (have been here since Sunday November 8).

Spent five days last week with the staff writers for FlashForward, the ABC TV series based on my novel of the same name. The show’s current staff writers are (alphabetically): Scott Gimple, David S. Goyer, Ian Goldberg, Seth Hoffman, Barbara Nance, Quinton Peeples, Dawn Prestwich, Nicole Yorkin, and Lisa Zwerling, and they’re all terrific. It’s been enormous fun watching them bounce ideas off each other, and getting to kick in some of my own.

Also watched some of the filming of episodes 11 and 12 this past week (watching on location with regulars Peyton List and Zachary Knighton and guest star Lindsay Crouse, and on our soundstage with regulars Jack Davenport and Dominic Monaghan, and guest star Ricky Jay), plus got to chat with John Cho when he dropped by the writers’ offices, and also ran into Brannon Braga, who co-authored the pilot episode with David Goyer.

I’ll be here until Saturday, November 21, 2009. Next week, we begin breaking (outlining) episode 17, the one I’m writing; that episode is scheduled to air Thursday, March 18, 2010.

I’ll never get around to retro-blogging everything that happened this past week, but you can get a sense of it from these updates from my Facebook wall (where I’m “Robert J. Sawyer” — and, yes, I do accept readers and fans as friends).

FRIDAY
• Wonderful five-hour dinner with consciousness researcher Stuart Hameroff (whose work is often mentioned in my novels), Deep Space Nine actress Chase Masterson, and director James Kerwin.
• Cool having Dominic Monaghan tell me what his favorite part of the FLASHFORWARD novel was, and talking particle physics with Jack Davenport.
• John Cho just dropped by the writers’ offices at FLASHFORWARD; now, heading off to the set to watch Dominic Monaghan and Jack Davenport shoot a scene.
• Watched episode 10 of FLASHFORWARD (the one that will air in two weeks’ time) today with the staff writers — it’s one of our very best. Also, great meeting with my agent. And attended Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society (LASFS) meeting. :)

  THURSDAY

• Fascinating time in the FLASHFORWARD writers’ room today, plus got to meet Peyton List (Nicole) for the first time, and watched her and Zachary Knighton shoot a terrific scene. Also, met with one of the producers interested in one of my other books, and it went wonderfully. Plus: dinner with high-school buddy Asbed Bedrossian and his family. Whew!

  WEDNESDAY

• People’s Choice Awards nominees for Best New TV drama: “Eastwick,” “FlashForward,” “Melrose Place,” “Mercy,” “The Forgotten,” “The Good Wife,” “The Vampire Diaries,” “Three Rivers,” “NCIS: Los Angeles,” “V”
• After the FLASHFORWARD writers’ room adjourned for the day, went for coffee with Tommy Yune, who directed ROBOTECH: THE SHADOW CHRONICLES, then dinner with Eric Greene, author of PLANET OF THE APES AS AMERICAN MYTH.

  TUESDAY

• Nothing is cooler than being in the offices of the TV series based on one of your novels and taking calls about potential film and TV adaptations of two of your other books. :D

  MONDAY

• In L.A., at the FLASHFORWARD offices, hanging out in the writers’ room. Having a blast!
• Britain’s THE TIMES reviews the FLASHFORWARD novel: “[T]he novel is an intellectual puzzle, drawing on theoretical physics to raise questions about time and space and the existence of free will, and proves once again that good science fiction does not need visual special effects to thrill.”
• Safe and sound in L.A. Watched TERMINATOR SALVATION on the seat-back TV during the five-hour flight from Toronto.

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Ten years ago, I pitched an idea for a monthly column to the SciFi Channel’s SciFi Weekly. They didn’t buy it, and I never got around to pitching it to anyone else. But even if they had bought it, I would have been out of work today; they just dismissed all their columnists because, apparently, online columns are “passé.” See this story from Locus Online.

Here’s the pitch I made (by paper mail!) back on September 28, 1999; it would have been a hell of a column. :)

Dear Craig:

Back when he was editing Amazing Stories, George Scithers noted a fascinating fact. To his chagrin, far more people ordered his magazine’s writers’ guidelines than bought subscriptions. That’s right: more people wanted to write for Amazing than wanted to read it.

It’s always been that way: huge numbers of those who read SF — and, indeed, many of those who only watch it on TV and in the movies — long to write the stuff. Indeed, whenever I give a talk on any aspect of SF, at least half the questions I get asked are about the process of writing. And so I’m proposing a new column for your wonderful Science Fiction Weekly. “Making It” would be a monthly feature aimed at those who want to write SF, with practical, real-world advice about writing — and, just as important, selling — science fiction short stories and novels.

Jim Baen has observed that the market for SF is in the worst shape he’s ever seen it; Del Rey has just let three editors go; HarperPrism was effectively shut down this month; Tor has drastically cut back the number of titles it’s doing. Beginning writers wanting to make it today are going to need an edge, and this column — and your site — can provide just that.

“Making It” would cover both the artistic aspects (including characterization, plotting, and dialogue) and the business aspects (such as contract basics, preparing a novel synopsis, and promoting one’s work). It would attract the legions who read rec.arts.sf.composition, as well as those who buy magazines about writing, take creative-writing courses, or just dream about seeing their names in print.

My credentials? I’m a full-time SF writer (and the sole source of income for my family; my wife works for me as my salaried assistant). I’ve sold fourteen novels to Warner, Harper, Ace, and Tor; my fiction has appeared in Analog, Amazing, and many anthologies; I’ve won 21 writing awards, including a Best Novel Nebula Award, and the top SF awards in Japan (Seiun), France (Le Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire), Spain (Premio UPC de Ciencia Ficción), and Canada (the Aurora); and I’ve been on the Best Novel Hugo ballot each of the last four years.

In addition, I’ve taught SF writing at the University of Toronto and Ryerson Polytechnic University, and for three years I wrote the “On Writing” column for On Spec, Canada’s leading SF magazine.

I’ve also seen the SF industry from perspectives denied to most other writers: I’ve worked as an editor (three anthologies, including the acclaimed Tesseracts 6) and in an SF specialty store, and I’ve even attended a publisher’s sales conference.

I’m enclosing some additional background about me and my work, and, of course, there’s tons more on my web site at www.sfwriter.com (called “the most complete science-fiction author site on the web” by Talk City). I’m also providing three samples of the columns I did for On Spec.

I hope this proposal intrigues you, Craig. It’s something I’d really like to do — and I’m offering it to you first.

My condolences to the columnists who were just let go by SciFi Weekly.

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The Times — a major British newspaper — reviewed my novel FlashForward (basis for the TV series of the same name) yesterday; the review is by acclaimed SF writer Lisa Tuttle, and concludes:

[T]he novel is an intellectual puzzle, drawing on theoretical physics to raise questions about time and space and the existence of free will, and proves once again that good science fiction does not need visual special effects to thrill.

You can read the whole review right here.

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Audible.com’s unabridged reading of my 1996 novel Starplex is now available. The narrator is Mark Boyett, and the audiobook also includes an exclusive introduction read by me.

The Audible.com catalog page for Starplex is pretty bare-bones, so I’ll mention a few things they fail to: Starplex was the only novel of its year to be nominated for both the Hugo and the Nebula Awards, and it won Canada’s Aurora Award and the CompuServe Homer Award, both for best SF novel of the year.

In addition it was a selection of the Science Fiction Book Club, was serialized in Analog, and was a Locus bestseller.

You can get Starplex and all my other audio books from Audible.com right here.

For those who prefer print, the new trade-paperback edition is coming in March 2010 from Red Deer Press.

REVIEWS OF STARPLEX:

Science Fiction Chronicle: “Excellent hard SF, with Sawyer tossing stars, people and time travel around with reckless abandon. One of the best SF novels of the year.”

The Halifax Chronicle-Herald: “Starplex appears to be traditional science fiction — it takes place aboard a spaceship, and several characters are extraterrestrial — but it’s actually a rumination on several very deep questions, including: Where did we come from? Where are we going? And the deepest of the deep, Is there a God?”

Sci-Fi Weekly: “An audacious engineering effort that makes Larry Niven’s Ringworld look like a high-school science project.”

About Books: “Very, very cool. This is a book not to be missed.”

Andrew Weiner, author of Getting Near the End: “Mind-blowing! Who says there are no more big ideas?”

Asimov’s Science Fiction: “Starplex should gladden the hearts of readers who complain that nobody’s writing real science fiction anymore, the kind of story that has faster-than-light spaceships and far-off planets and interstellar combat and all the neat things they gobbled up so greedily when ‘Doc’ Smith was dealing them out. Here’s a story with plenty of slam-bang action but no shortage of material to attract thinking readers, either. Sawyer deftly juggles half a dozen sweeping questions of cosmology (not to mention everyday ethics and morality) while keeping the story moving ahead full speed. His scientific ideas are nicely integrated into the plot, yet they also hint at larger metaphorical levels. Enjoy.”

Gregory Benford, author of Timescape: “Complex but swift, inventive but real-feeling, with ideas coming thick and fast. For big-time interstellar adventure, look no farther.”

Astronomer Andrew Fraknoi, co-author of Voyages Through the Universe: “Complex hard-science novel by a Canadian amateur astronomer with intriguing ideas about the nature of dark matter and even dark matter life forms. Includes more cosmological concepts than any novel we have seen.”

Library Journal: “An epic hard-science adventure tempered by human concerns. Highly recommended.”

Jack McDevitt, author of Time Travelers Never Die: “Starplex takes us on the ultimate grand tour: an elegant intergalactic ride with Sawyer’s signature mix of cosmic concepts and solid characterization. This one is a treat for the mind; I enjoyed it thoroughly.”

The New York Review of Science Fiction: “An enormous grab bag of ideas — and a whole lot of fun.”

Analog Science Fiction and Fact: “Mind-boggling. A complaint often heard these days is that there’s not enough ‘sense of wonder’ in today’s science fiction. Robert J. Sawyer’s Starplex ought to lay that complaint to rest for quite a while.”

Quill & Quire: “A swift, inventive, enjoyable book. Unexpected twists keep the plot moving briskly, but Sawyer is able to do this while raising intriguing philosophical issues.”

James Schellenberg on the Crystalline Sphere web page: “Starplex is an astonishing novel, hard science fiction with heart, with a grand overarching vision. This book contains many of Sawyer’s trademarks — addictive readability, a frank engagement with ethical questions, and a fondness for Canadiana. The grand sweep of the story and Sawyer’s graceful manipulation of the reader’s sympathies combine to make this a fine book; Starplex outdoes any book in Sawyer’s oeuvre, and the majority in the field of science fiction. Sawyer uses a heady mix of big ideas and crafty storytelling, and he challenges the reader intellectually while grabbing their emotional sympathy. Quite the accomplishment.”

The Toronto Star: “Here, at last, is an ambitious attempt to exploit the possibilities that the genre is capable of.”

More about Starplex is here.

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For fans of FlashForward, the ABC TV series based on my novel of the same name, a historical note on Agent Al Gough (played wonderfully by Lee Thompson Young), who had the big story line this past week (in “The Gift”).

In the actual TV series, he should be credited as the character who, in the story, coined the term “flashforward” for the event. There was a scene filmed for the pilot (“No More Good Days”) in which Agent Janis Hawk (the amazing Christine Woods) appeared to coin the term (and that part of the scene was used in some of the promos), but her line was cut from the pilot as aired, so the credit for coining the term in-universe goes to Gough, who first uses it when discussing Fiona Banks with Demetri and Mark.

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I’ll be interviewed about my novels Wake and FlashForward on 1370 Connection with Bob Smith, the noon (Eastern time) show on AM 1370, the NPR station in Rochester, New York, this Friday, November 6, 2009. You’ll be able to listen live here, and I’ll be on for most of the hour between noon and 1:00 p.m. (then it’s off to Astronomicon, Rochester’s SF convention, where I’m one of the guests).

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Holy cow! It was five years ago today — Friday, November 5, 2004 — that I wrote the first words of what went on to become my WWW trilogy. Back then, it was only going to be a single book (to be called Webmind). I began writing that first book at a Write-Off writing retreat sponsored by Calgary’s Imaginative Fiction Writers Association (IFWA). The first words I wrote were:

Cogito, ergo sum.

I had no idea what those words meant the first time I encountered them. I didn’t even know that they were words. I knew nothing of language, or even of communication, for communication requires an other — another — and I knew of no one — of nothing — but me.

But I did exist, and that simple formulation — I think, therefore I am — was proof of it. By being aware of myself, of my thoughts, I knew irrefutably that I existed; to think requires a thinker.

And thinking is what I do; it’s all I do. I awoke to consciousness in a vast sea, an enveloping all constituted at the limits of my perception by two opposing states, and it was these states — the endless, seemingly random juxtaposition of opposites — that I first, however dimly, had became aware of.

Not one word of that draft survived to the final, published version of Wake, which begins like this:

Not darkness, for that implies an understanding of light.

Not silence, for that suggests a familiarity with sound.

Not loneliness, for that requires knowledge of others.

But still, faintly, so tenuous that if it were any less it wouldn’t exist at all: awareness.

Nothing more than that. Just awareness — a vague, ethereal sense of being.

Being … but not becoming. No marking of time, no past or future — only an endless, featureless now, and, just barely there in that boundless moment, inchoate and raw, the dawning of perception …

Still, that passage I wrote five years ago today was the start of the trilogy.

Of course, I haven’t spent five years solid on this trilogy; I took time off to write Rollback, for instance, among many other interesting things. :)

Anyway, enough reminiscing! Time to get back to work on Volume 3, Wonder, which today passed the 50,000-word mark.

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On Friday, November 27, 2009, Robert J. Sawyer‘s television pilot script for Earthfall will have a staged reading by professional actors at the National Film Board of Canada’s Theatre at 150 John Street, in the Entertainment District in downtown Toronto.

I wrote Earthfall as a pilot for an hour-long episodic science-fiction TV series; it’s not currently sold to anyone, but I’m proud of it. The pilot episode is called “Vanguard,” and here’s a little synopsis:

Toronto cop Hannah Wong arrives on the scene of a hit-and-run, unaware that the victim’s body houses an alien being that has been on Earth for 3,000 years. As the victim dies, the alien transfers into Hannah’s body, beginning a battle for whether Hannah or the alien will control her destiny.

(Actually, there’s a lot more to it than that!)

The script will be read using some of the top actors working in Toronto, and after the performance a moderated discussion about the script will be held, with audience participation welcomed.

The Earthfall pilot script beat over 150 TV pilot-script submissions in the WILDsound Screenplay Festival.

I’m delighted to have won this competion, but I’d also like to tip my hat to the other finalists. The six pilot-script finalists were:

COMPUTER GUY
by Rich Hynes
Ronkonkoma, NY

EARTHFALL
by Robert J. Sawyer
Mississauga, ON

EXPRESSIONS
by Shawand McKenzie and Steven Van Patten
Hackensack, NJ

THE FILTHY STINKIN TRUTH
by Will Phillips
San Francisco, CA

HUMOR ME
by John Betz, Jr. and Randy Reese
Rochester, NY

TRAFFICKING
by Clark McMillian
Bowie, MD

Tickets for the evening — which will also include readings of two other short scripts — are just $6 in advance, or $8 at the door. More info is here.

This is a good month for me for scriptwriting (thirty years after I started my degree in Radio and Television Arts at Ryerson!). On Sunday, I head down to L.A. to spend a week at the FlashForward offices, gearing up to write my own episode of the TV series based on my novel of the same name

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I’ve long been associated with On Spec, English-Canada’s leading SF magazine. My short story “Just Like Old Times” first appeared there in 1993 (and went on to win both the Aurora Award and the Crime Writers of Canada’s juried Arthur Ellis Award for best short story of the year, as well as being reprinted in the best-of anthology On Spec: The First Five Years), and for three years (1995-1997), my “On Writing” column ran in the magazine.

This is On Spec‘s 20th anniversary year, and I am very proud to have been called upon to write a Guest Editorial for the Fall 2009 issue. For the time being, you can read that editorial right here.

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It’s always nice when a novel goes into a new printing. My most-recent mass-market paperback is the Hugo Award-nominated Rollback (which had a very successful run in hardcover prior to that). Tor Books has gone back to press for another printing — which gave them the chance to mention that I’m also the author of FlashForward, the novel behind the ABC TV series of the same name.

More about Rollback.

“Above all, the author’s characters bear their human strengths and weaknesses with dignity and poise. An elegantly told story for all libraries; highly recommended.” —Library Journal (starred review, denoting a work of exceptional merit)

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This week’s episode of FlashForward, the ABC TV series based on my novel of the same name, not only added a whole lot of physics to the show but also revealed where Mark Benford and Dr. Olivia Benford live: at 25696 Sawyer Court. We see the above address label in the flashforward vision of Dylan Simcoe, son of Lloyd Simcoe, in episode 6, “Scary Monsters and Super Creeps,” and the street name is spoken repeatedly in dialog.

Cool! Almost as cool, in fact, as my cameo in the first episode, “No More Good Days” (below).

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I won’t be a formal participant in National Novel Writing Month — indeed, I’ll be spending much of November working on my script for FlashForward, the ABC TV series based on my novel of the same name. But I do think NaNoWriMo is a cool idea. Check it out.

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David S. Goyer, executive producer and showrunner of FlashForward, the ABC TV series based on my novel of the same name, discusses (among other things) my involvement with the series and the episode that I’ll be writing (episode 17) in this 1 minute 46 second YouTube interview.

For a larger picture or HD version, go here.

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They’re finally up! Penguin Canada’s subway poster advertisements for my novel Wake are now up on some subway cars on the Yonge-University-Spadina (main north-south) route in Toronto.

Toronto’s subways are operated by the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC). I’m in Calgary right now, but sightings of the ads this week have been made by longtime SF fan Hope Liebowitz, Romanian SF writer Costi Gurgu, and Kari Trogen, sister of former Asimov’s SF intern Brittany Trogen. That’s Kari’s snapshot below; click it for a slightly larger version.

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The Aurora Award-winning webiste MADE IN CANADA — Don Bassie‘s elaborate and detailed repository of information about Canadian science fiction and fantasy — is no more. It had been hosted on Yahoo’s Geocities service, and, in a spectacular act of online genocide, Yahoo wiped out all free Geocities sites on 26 October 2009.

Don’s site had been an enormous asset to us all, and it’s terrible that it’s gone. For the record, the URL for it was www.geocities.com/canadian_SF.

Don had stopped updating the site — which won Auroras in 2000, 2003, and 2004 — some time ago, but it was still an enormously valuable historical resource.

Thank God for the Internet Archives. The most recent version from there, dated August 2004, can be accessed here. Sadly, it only contains bits and pieces of the now-gone full site, though.

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… reading this discussion thread will eat hours of your time. It’s a fascinating, hyper-detailed look at every prop that ever appeared more than once in classic Star Trek. Tons of great pictures and screen captures.

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Coming December 1, 2009, from Penguin Group Canada: new premium mass-market editions of two of my novels: The Terminal Experiment, which won the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America’s Nebula Award for Best Novel of Year for 1995, and Illegal Alien, which the Globe and Mail‘s mystery-fiction reviewer Margaret Cannon said was “the best Canadian mystery of 1997.”

Premium mass-market is the format used for most bestselling fiction paperbacks these days; it’s about an inch taller than regular mass-market (and has bigger type); Penguin Canada’s paperback edition of my latest hardcover, Wake, coming in March 2010, will also be done in premium mass-market.

Ace Science Fiction in the United States has separately acquired US rights to these titles, and will be producing their own editions, with their own covers, later.

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

The Washington Post on Illegal Alien: “Innovative, imaginative, and pioneering — not just excellent sf but also excellent popular literature. A fast-paced, exciting book that shows the imaginative heights to which science fiction writers can climb when they combine sf with something else.”

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A nice video interview with Jessika Borsiczky, executive producer of FlashForward, the TV series based on my novel. (Jessika’s last name is pronounced Bor-shees-key.)

Tune in tonight for episode 5, “Gimme Some Truth.” I was on the set for much of the filming of this one, and enjoyed having lunch with guest star Glynn Turman. (I’ll be watching it in a hotel room in Winnipeg.)

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Answer: because they don’t sell memberships at the door, and they cap sales for pre-registration.

This weekend, I have to be in Vancouver, British Columbia, as a presenter at the Surrey International Writers Conference. Sometime shortly after that — but the date is yet to be precisely nailed down, but it might be Friday, October 30, and it might be Monday, November 2 — I have to go to Los Angeles, to do some work on FlashForward, the TV series based on my novel of the same name.

So, what’s in between Vancouver and Los Angeles, and is taking place between the dates I have to be in those two places? Why, San Jose, and this year’s World Fantasy Convention, which is being held there.

But I can’t buy a ticket now, unless I hunt around to find someone who isn’t going and is willing to sell theirs, and I can’t buy one at the door at any price. I understand that World Fantasy wants to keep out last-minute local goths and vampire-junkies who might get wind of the convention through the media as it’s happening, but the effect of their membership-cap and no-at-the-door-sales policies is to keep me away.

Surely the same effect of keeping outsiders out could be accomplished by limiting at-the-door sales to publishing professionals (employees of publishing companies, active members of SFWA, etc.)? And surely a handful of at-the-door sales to people who obviously belong couldn’t really overrun the convention’s capacity?

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In honor of the release of the new tie-in editions of my 1999 novel FlashForward, which is the basis for the hit ABC TV series, I wrote a little essay about the book for Tor.com. Here it is.

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FlashForward — the TV series based on my novel of the same name — is a serial drama: it’s meant to be watched in sequence, and the episodes are being filmed in the order in which they will air.

But the original Star Trek (and, indeed, most nighttime television for decades) was an episodic drama, with little changing between episodes, and, in theory, the episodes could be watched or aired in any order. In fact, for classic Trek the original broadcast order bore little resemblance to the sequence in which the shows were produced.

But now that I’m working my way through the series again on Blu-ray (where it looks amazing), I’ve decided to watch the episodes in the order they were produced, so that I can trace the development of ideas. For the record, this is the production order for the first (1966-67) season:

1. The Cage (unaired pilot)
2. Where No Man Has Gone Before
3. The Corbomite Maneuver
4. Mudd’s Women
5. The Enemy Within
6. The Man Trap
7. The Naked Time
8. Charlie X
9. Balance of Terror
10. What Are Little Girls Made Of?
11. Dagger of the Mind
12. Miri
13. The Conscience of the King
14. The Galileo Seven
15. Court Martial
16. The Menagerie (Parts I and II)
17. Shore Leave
18. The Squire of Gothos
19. Arena
20. The Alternative Factor
21. Tomorrow is Yesterday
22. The Return of the Archons
23. A Taste of Armageddon
24. Space Seed
25. This Side of Paradise
26. The Devil in the Dark
27. Errand of Mercy
28. City on the Edge of Forever
29. Operation: Annihilate!

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I got asked today by a new writer if it was worth touring for a second book, and whether I’d done that for my own second novel, Far-Seer. My reply:

The first thing to remember is that Far-Seer came out 17 years ago: before the World Wide Web, or any of the social media associated with it. I might well do things very differently today. But even back then, I did not tour for Far-Seer.

Here’s the dirty little secret of book tours: you do them mostly to get local media coverage. A news story helps sell your book in every store in town for several days; a specific book-store event helps sell it for one hour in one store (although, yes, the signed stock you leave behind will also sell well in that store after you’re gone).

But a local paper, radio program, or TV show won’t cover a story without a local angle: an appearance by the author in town is a local angle, so that’s why you do it, but, that said, “Author visits town” is not in itself a news story. And that brings us to why most book tours for fiction fail.

Those that succeed do so because the newsworthiness is intrinsic to the topic of the book. As I wrote in an article for The Writers Union of Canada: “The best way to have a hook, of course, is to build it in to the book from the outset. When John Grisham or Michael Crichton set out to create a novel, they decide what issue they’re going to tackle — what hook the book is going to have — before writing the first sentence. Whether it’s the controversy around capital punishment (Grisham’s The Chamber) or the perceived problems with biotechnology (Crichton’s Next), they give the media something to sink their teeth into.”

My touring started taking off when I started writing books that interested the media because of their subject matter: science vs. religion (Calculating God), constant monitoring of our lives (Hominids), medical efforts to arrest and reverse aging (Rollback), the future of the World Wide Web, young girls and math, the potential for a bird-flu pandemic, etc. (Wake).

So, if your second book is one that the media will note because of its theme or topic, then maybe a tour is worthwhile. But otherwise, it probably isn’t worth doing, especially if you’re paying for it from your own pocket.

Ask yourself this: have you ever bought a book because you have stumbled on a desperate-looking author trying to hawk it to all and sundry at a bookstore? Most tours attract existing fans to your events.

The best-bang-for-the-buck in promotion these days is probably doing stuff online. Here’s an article on that topic that happened to come to my attention today. Unless you’ve got a news hook, I wouldn’t tour, but I would do everything I can to attract positive attention to the book online.

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Holy crap! My novel FlashForward — basis for the hit TV series — is currently the #2 bestselling book store-wide at Play.com, the UK’s second-largest online retailer. Here’s the list:

Congratulations to Simon Spanton and the team at Gollancz, my British publisher, for getting the book out there with such success.

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McNally Robinson’s Chadwick Ginther interviews Aurora Award-winning Canadian SF writer Hayden Trenholm, whose SF-crime novel Steel Whispers is just out from Bundoran Press, here.

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Thanks to the fine people at Escape Pod, there’s a wonderful free podcast of my short story “Come All Ye Faithful,” first published in the anthology Space Inc., edited by Julie E. Czerneda, and available in my collection Identity Theft and Other Stories, published by Red Deer Press. The reading by Mike Boris is absolutely terrific.

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More and more science-fiction conventions have taken to asking authors to donate things to charity auctions, which, on its surface, seems like a great idea: let’s see if we can raise some money for this cause or that.

The problem: conventions that don’t have the turnout, or don’t do the hustle at the con, to actually get the fair value of the things being auctioned. (Many charity auctions turn out to be “silent auctions,” with bidding sheets hidden away somewhere and not promoted much or all during the convention; others have real auctioneering, but with tiny turnouts.)

At one recent con, a copy of The Bakka Anthology — one of only 400 in existence, signed by me (and containing the first appearance of my Hugo-nominated story “Shed Skin”), Tanya Huff, Michelle Sagara West, Fiona Patton, Cory Doctorow, Nalo Hopkinson, Ed Greenwood, and others, went for just $10, a fraction of its original cover price, let alone what it’s worth now.

Another con recently got me to donate a Tuckerization [naming a character after a real person] in one of my upcoming novels — something I might agree to do once per book, maybe — and then managed to raise just 25% of what the last Tuckerization I let be auctioned off went for, because the con was so small.

Memo to con-runners: there aren’t an endless number of such goodies out there, folks. Think twice before you decide to mount a charity auction; it’s real work to do one properly, and they don’t do well at small cons. If you’re not coming close to realizing the actual value of the things you’ve gotten authors and others to donate, please note that you are likely taking those things away from other conventions that might have managed to actually raise some real money for charity with them. Just sayin’.

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Analog Science Fiction and Fact, the world’s top-selling English-language SF magazine, recently changed book reviewers.

Of course, all of us long-time Analog readers have been curious to see what sort of approach the new reviewer, Don Sakers, was going to take, and so I turned with interest to “The Reference Library” section of the October issue, never expecting to see my own latest novel, WWW:Wake, reviewed there.

After all, before Sakers had come on board at Analog, that magazine had serialized the entire book in four parts, in the November 2008, December 2008, combined January-February 2009, and March 2009 issues.

But, lo and behold, Don Sakers does review Wake in the October issue, and indeed starts out by commenting on the fact that my novel was serialized in the same magazine:

Wake was serialized in Analog recently; those who read it in these pages don’t need me to tell them what a good book it is.

He then goes on to do just about the best one-paragraph synopsis of the kind of book that I write that I’ve ever seen:

For many years now, Robert J. Sawyer has been turning out imaginative, thought-provoking science fiction novels set in the present day and dealing with the impact of science and technology upon relatively ordinary people. A typical Sawyer tale brings together multiple diverse elements from popular culture, psychology, physics, and philosophy; stirs together plausible advances in science with appealing characters; adds some realistic depictions of actual scientists at work and a generous helping of old-fashioned sense-of-wonder; and filters the whole mix through a distinctly Canadian filter.

He notes that Wake is no exception to the above, and goes on to say:

Caitlin is an appealing enough character, and the premise is fascinating: a girl, blind from birth, gains the ability to see the structure of the Internet from within. A lesser writer would go with this story, following Caitlin as she learns to deal with this new, expanded world. But this is Sawyer, and there’s much, much more going on …

Along the way, Sawyer raises fascinating, complex questions about the nature of consciousness and self-awareness, of communication between disparate intelligences, and compassion across huge gulfs. This is a book that you’ll still be thinking about for weeks after you finish reading it.

Needless to say, I think Stan Schmidt, Analog‘s redoubtable editor, has made a great choice for his new book reviewer. :)

You can read Don Sakers entire October “Reference Library” column online here.

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Look who’s the cover boy on today’s Kingston Whig-Standard!

The Whig-Standard is the major daily newspaper in Kingston, Ontario, and the oldest continuously published daily newspaper in Canada.

Today’s cover story is in honour of my appearance yesterday at Queen’s University, located in Kingston, where I gave a public talk sponsored by Queen’s Faculty of Applied Science and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, arranged by Dr. Michael Greenspan, the ECE Department Head.

You can read the full article from the 15 October 2009 edition of the Whig here, and see a lager, different shot of me and Deep Green, the pool-playing robot, here.

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The UK edition of the FlashForward novel by Robert J. Sawyer hit #22 storewide at Amazon.co.uk today; has moved up to #5 in genre; and is holding strong at #1 in science fiction.

(And the book has now spent nine days in the top 100 at Amazon.co.uk — yay!)

Visit The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
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