The Canadian Press has a video interview with Robert J. Sawyer about FlashForward, the TV sereis based on his novel of the same name, over at the website for The Globe and Mail: Canada’s National Newspaper. You can watch it online here.
(Interview recorded at CTV‘s Queen Street facility in Toronto on August 11, 2009, and posted on the Globe‘s site on September 24, 2009.)
ABC did a squeeze-and-tease on the ending credits of FlashForward, the TV series based on my novel of the same name, devoting most of the screen to a promotion for future episodes of the series. But CTV’s /A\ in Canada ran the credits full screen. Here are screen captures from the streaming-video version of the first episode (which Canadian viewers can watch on the CTV.ca website). This will presumably be the DVD/Blu-Ray version of the credtis, as well.
Yesterday’s National Post — a major Canadian daily newspaper available coast-to-coast — ran a great interview with Robert J. Sawyer about FlashForward (accompanied by a great photo!)
You can read the article online here; the author is Mark Medley and the photographer is Peter J. Thompson.
Below is how the article appeared in the printed newspaper.
Cool call-out above the fold on page 1 of the Ottawa Citizen, the largest-circulation newspaper in Canada’s capital city:
Even nicer article inside by Tom Spears, the Citizen‘s science reporter inside. The article begins: “That there’s fiction in science fiction is pretty obvious. But Canadian author Rob Sawyer also wants you to remember the science half, especially with one of his 20 novels coming out as a televised series.”
Today’s National Post — a major Canadian daily newspaper, available coast to coast — interviews me about tonight’s debut of the TV series FlashForward, based on my novel of the same name.
The terrific photo above, taken by Post photographer Peter J. Thompson, accompanies the article, which was written by Mark Medley.
FlashForward premieres tonight — Thursday, September 24, 2009 — at 8:00 p.m. / 7:00 p.m. Central on ABC in the US and CTV’s /A\ in Canada.
Those darned timezones! Thin Air: Winnipeg International Writers Festival, in conjunction with CTV, is hosting a public viewing of the pilot episode of FlashForward, the TV series based on my novel, as it airs on Thursday, September 24, 2009. The event will be held at McNally Robinson Polo Park in Winnipeg, with me doing commentary before the show, during the commercial breaks, and afterwards.
But the start time for this event is 6:30 p.m. (not an hour later as previously announced), because FlashForward airs at 7:00 p.m. Central Time — including Winnipeg. D’oh!
It doesn’t get much better than this! TIME.COM — the website of Time magazine — has just posted a 6-minute video profile of me and the science behind my novel FlashForward.
(Indeed, right now, it’s promoted on top of the the main page of TIME.com, which is as close as I’ll ever get to being on the cover of Time!)
The interview with me was done Thursday, August 27, 2009, in Los Angeles, at a location shoot for FlashForward. It’s terrific!
The interview is hosted by Brian Malow. Special thanks to Nicole Marostica of ABC Studios for facilitating the shoot.
The list of broadcasters for FlashForward, the TV series based on my novel of the same name, just keeps growing. The show has now sold to broadcasters in 44 territories around the world including:
Flashing back to April 1999, when my novel FlashForward received a starred review — denoting a book of exceptional merit — from Publishers Weekly, the US trade journal of the book-publishing industry.
The review concluded: “This first-rate, philosophical journey, a terrific example of idea-driven SF, should have wide appeal.”
The full review of the novel (which has a few spoilers for the book) appeared in the April 19, 1999, edition of PW:
A science experiment that unwittingly shuts down all human consciousness for two minutes is the catalyst for a creative exploration of fate, free will and the nature of the universe in Sawyer’s soul-searching new work (after Factoring Humanity)
In April 2009, Lloyd and Theo, two scientists at the European Organization for Particle Physics (CERN), run an experiment that accidentally transports the world’s consciousness 20 years into the future. When humanity reawakens a moment later, chaos rules. Vehicles whose drivers passed out plow into one another; people fall or maim themselves.
But that’s just the beginning. After the horror is sorted out, each character tries desperately to ensure or avoid his or her future. Trapped by his guilt for causing so much destruction and driven by a need to rationalize, Lloyd tries to prove that free will is a myth. Theo discovers that he will be murdered and begins to hunt down his killer — tempting fate as in the Greek dramas of his ancestors. Some people start on their appointed roads early, others give up on life because of what they’ve seen.
Using a third-person omniscient narrator, Sawyer shifts seamlessly among the perspectives of his many characters, anchoring the story in small details. This first-rate, philosophical journey, a terrific example of idea-driven SF, should have wide appeal.
The Dragon Page interviews me about the differences between writing for print and writing for television and film. It’s a good, meaty interview, and you can listen right here.
We talk about the current adaptation of The Time Traveler’s Wife, about Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, about House, about The Simpsons, about the new Battlestar Galactica, and of course about FlashForward. And at the end, we talk about my new novel Wake.
I come in at the 16 minutes 0 seconds mark, and go to almost the end of the show, 43 minutes 8 seconds mark.
Symmetry Breaking: Extra Dimensions of Particle Physics — a joint publication of Fermilab and SLAC — interviews Robert J. Sawyer about his novel FlashForward, and the novel’s setting at CERN. You can read the article right here. The interview is by Fermilab’s Katie Yurkewicz.
FlashForward, the ABC TV series based on my novel of the same name, debuts (as I write this) in three days — on Thursday, September 24, 2009, at 8:00 p.m. Eastern and Pacific and 7:00 p.m. Central. In the United States, it’s on ABC and in Canada it’s on CTV’s /A\ Channels.
Things to watch for:
MY CAMEO:
I have a small, non-speaking cameo in the first episode about halfway through (blink and you’ll miss me!).
Sonya Walger plays Dr. Olivia Benford, a surgeon; there’s a scene in which she’s walking down a long hospital corridor while talking on her cell phone to her husband, FBI agent Mark Benford, played by Joseph Fiennes.
Behind her, in the same blue shirt I’m wearing in the photo above, talking on his own cell phone is … me! My thanks to director David S. Goyer (on the right in the above photo) for cheerfully including this little bit of business for me; it was fun!
My CREDITS
My credits appear at the end of the episode. The very first card in the closing credits says:
Based on the Novel by Robert J. Sawyer
and a bit later in the closing credits I also share this card:
Consultant Robert J. Sawyer
Costume Designer Kathleen Detoro
Costume Supervisor Robyn Williams
[Screen captures taken from the 17-minute preview at abc.com; actual closing credits may have different background images]
The back cover of the new TV-series tie-in editions of my 1999 novel FlashForward proudly proclaims “The Aurora Award-winning novel that started it all!”
And indeed, FlashForward did win the 2000 Prix Aurora Award — Canada’s top honour in science fiction and fantasy — for “Best Long-Form Work in English” (yes, the award category names were decided by a committee; it’s de facto the Best English Novel Award — “English,” because Auroras are also given for work in Canada’s other official language, French).
Canadian SF&F readers from coast to coast nominate and vote for the Auroras, and they are presented at a ceremony at the annual Canadian National Science Fiction Convention (or “CanVention”).
The awards given in 2000 were for work first published in 1999. That was a very strong year for Canadian SF&F, I must say, as the list of nominees in the Long-Form English category attests:
Beholder’s Eye by Julie E. Czerneda, DAW Books
Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson, Warner Books
AMCtv.com — the website of AMC (originally, “American Movie Classics”), a US cable channel — recently phoned me up and interviewed me about my novels FlashForward and Wake, and the TV adaptation of the former. You can read the interview, by Clayton Neuman, right here.
(And, I must say, there is lots of other good SF-related material on this site in their “SciFi Scanner” section — including, recently, an interview with Dune author Brian Herbert, and columns by Mary Robinette Kowal and John Scalzi. Start here, and keep scrolling.)
Not the TV series (although it undoubtedly is), but the book.
Back in December 1999, Barnes and Noble released a list of its picks for the best science fiction and fantasy novels of that year: Robert J. Sawyer‘s FlashForward was listed third, with the following review:
Robert J. Sawyer consistently makes intelligent, mind-blowing science fiction accessible to the mainstream reader with his efficient, easy-flowing prose, his exciting ideas, and his superior character development.
Over the past several years, Sawyer’s stunning thrillers have produced multiple Hugo and Nebula nominations, enough for most to recognize him as the leader of SF’s next-generation pack.
His newest novel, the near-future FlashForward, is every bit as good, if not better, than his previously recognized high-tech whirlwinds.
Today’s Winnipeg Free Press — the major daily newspaper in Winnipeg, Manitoba — has a great article about the upcoming Thin Air: Winnipeg International Writers Festival, which begins next week. The article, by Books section editor Morley Walker, observes, “The star attraction this year is arguably science-fiction novelist Robert J. Sawyer.”
That’s why I love being a science-fiction writer in Canada. In the US, a science-fiction writer is lucky to be allowed to buy a ticket to attend a literary festival; in Canada, we’re celebrated as the stars of such festivals.
Morley Walker did a major profile of me in the Free Press earlier this year; you can read it here.
YouTube has video of the panel on this topic from the 2009 World Science Fiction Convention in Montreal. Panelists (left to right): Hayden Trenholm, John Park, Robert J. Sawyer.
… including the list of books David S. Goyer has the staff writers read (beside my novel FlashForward, of course!). See the article here.
I visited the writers’ room for FlashForward earlier this month, but didn’t feel comfortable blogging about it — but you can read what David Goyer has to say about the room in this article.
Paul Levinson — himself a very fine SF writer, and the author of The Plot to Save Socrates — interviews me for 36 minutes on his podcast Light On Light Through about FlashForward.
Received today, via FedEx, the actual production manuscript for my novel Wake, returned from Ace Science Fiction, my New York publisher. This manuscript is the one that was marked up (in various colors of pen and pencil) by the copyeditor and the book designer and me (and Carolyn, too). I now have 18 such master manuscripts in my files, one for each of my novels to date.
But this will be the last one. Ace is switching over entirely to electronic production (they’ve come a long way since 1991, when, after much pushing by me and my Ace editor back then, Peter Heck, my Far-Seer, was the very first novel they ever typeset from an author’s computer disk).
I now submit my manuscripts by email, and starting with Watch, the second WWW novel, they’re being copyedited electronically, too. It’s more efficient, yes, but it does signal the end of an era, and, of course, the kind of single, master marked-up manuscript that will no longer be produced was of considerable academic interest (I’m getting close to being ready to donate my papers to an institution). The times, they do change …
CTV is the Canadian broadcaster for the FlashForward TV series, and they’ve booked me on their flagship morning show Canada A.M. for this Tuesday, September 22, 2009 (because that’s the last day I’m in Toronto before the series premiere, two days later). I’m scheduled to go on at 8:40 a.m. Eastern time.
Not that anyone’s counting, but this will be my fifth appearance on Canada A.M.
Tuesday 22 September 2009, talking about FlashForward
(Yeah, it’s been a long hiatus; Dan Matheson, who used to co-host Canada A.M., is a big fan of my books, but now he’s anchoring newscasts for CTV. It’s nice to be back — although I have done 162 appearances on other shows in the interim!)
Henry Gibson died this week as well; people today probably knew him best for his recurring role as a virginal judge on Boston Legal, but to people my age or older, he was best known for his poetry on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, which I watched often with my parents in the 1960s.
Anyway, it astonishes me to learn from the obituaries that “Henry Gibson” wasn’t the comedian’s real name, and instead that it was a pun on the name of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen (as said with a southern-US accent). Few puns slip by me, but maybe because I was all of eight when I first encountered Henry Gibson, I can be forgiven. :)
(Yes, I know, my parents are sounding like hippies this week, what with my earlier talk of them enjoying the 60s’ protest folk songs of Peter, Paul and Mary, and now this discussion of Laugh-In.)
(And, yes, we never missed the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour — the must-see prime-time American TV show for liberal intellectuals in the 1960s, either; of course, it’s tame by today’s standards, but it was, in fact, where people like Pete Seeger finally got to return to TV after being blacklisted in the McCarthy witch hunt.)
(I also remember my parents taking all three of us boys to see the Beatles’ movie Yellow Submarine, and my parents leaving us at home so they could go see a nude production of the musical Hair …)
Pictured: actor Joseph Fiennes and author Robert J. Sawyer on the set of ABC’s FlashForward.
Adapting award-winning author Robert J. Sawyer’s revolutionary novel, executive producers David S. Goyer (co-writer of Batman Begins and The Dark Knight), Brannon Braga (24, Star Trek: Enterprise), Marc Guggenheim (Brothers & Sisters, Eli Stone), Jessika Borszicky (Revelations) and producer Mark H. Ovitz (October Road) invite you to embark on a journey to answer the question, “if you knew what your future held, what would you do?” — ABC.COM
Karl Schroeder, one of my SF writing colleagues here in Toronto, had first-hand experience with Canadian health care recently, and is blogging about it here.
