Robert J. Sawyer

Hugo and Nebula Award-Winning Science Fiction Writer

That crazy Amazon.com notice about FlashForward

by Rob - July 18th, 2009

I can’t be the only one who received this from Amazon.com this morning:

Dear Amazon.com Customer,

As someone who has purchased or rated books by Robert J. Sawyer, you might like to know that Flashforward will be released on August 1, 2009. You can pre-order yours by following the link below.

Flashforward
Robert J. Sawyer
Price: $59.99
Release Date: August 1, 2009

Who in the what now? Almost sixty bucks for FlashForward?

Although it doesn’t say it anywhere in the Amazon.com email, the link above is for an unabridged audio version of FlashForward. The paperback is still US$7.99, folks!

Visit The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
and WakeWatchWonder.com

Alessandro Juliani narrates Rollback for CBC

by Rob - July 17th, 2009


Montreal-born actor Alessandro Juliani, who played Mr. Gaeta on the new Battlestar Galactica, will be narrating CBC Radio One’s twenty-five part serialization of my Hugo Award-nominated novel Rollback.

The serialization will air in fifteen-minute installments weekdays at 1:30 p.m. Eastern time (10:30 a.m. Pacific Time) on CBC Radio One (and Sirius Satellite Radio channel 137) from Monday, September 7, to Friday, October 9, 2009, as part of CBC’s Between the Covers series.

Using Alessandro Juliani was one of my suggestions; I’m delighted CBC agreed!

“While Rollback is, on the surface, a book about reaching out to those across the universe, it is at its heart an investigation of our very humanity, and how relationships are a fundamental key to defining who we are. Sawyer’s crisp and accessible writing style allows for this interweaving of the personal and the scientific. The characters feel real, and their emotions and responses genuine. Beyond the SF trappings, Rollback is a story about love and commitment, about humanity at its most basic — a novel to be savoured by science-fiction and mainstream readers alike.” — The Globe and Mail: Canada’s National Newspaper

Visit The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
and WakeWatchWonder.com

Launch Pad coverage in Mike Brotherton’s blog

by Rob - July 17th, 2009

Mike Brotherton is the leader of the Launch Pad astronomy workshop in Laramie, Wyoming; Carolyn and I are attending this year, and Mike has links to more videos from the conference in his blog.

Visit The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
and WakeWatchWonder.com

Phyllis Gotlieb and Kelly Gotlieb

by Rob - July 17th, 2009


Phyllis Gotlieb, the mother of Canadian science fiction, as I remember her, with her husband C.C. “Kelly” Gotlieb, the great Canadian computer scientist, at my home on December 18, 2006. Photo by Carolyn Clink.

Phyllis passed away on Tuesday, July 14, 2009, at the age of 83.

Visit The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
and WakeWatchWonder.com

Wake #2 Locus Bestseller

by Rob - July 17th, 2009


W00t! My novel Wake is #2 on the Locus Hardcover Bestsellers’ List. And #1 is a fantasy novel, which makes mine the top-selling SF novel in the stores Locus surveys.

Locus is the trade journal of the science-fiction field. Here’s the list, published in the July 2009 issue (for the data period April 2009); the numbers at the end of each line are “months on list” and “position last month.”

1) Turn Coat, Jim Butcher (Roc) [1,-]
2) WWW: Wake, Robert J. Sawyer (Ace) [1,-]
3) Rides a Dread Legion, Raymond E. Feist (Eos) [1,-]
4) The Host, Stephenie Meyer (Little, Brown) [12,3]
5) The Mystery of Grace, Charles de Lint (Tor) [2,7]
*) The Revolution Business, Charles Stross (Tor) [1,-]
7) The Temporal Void, Peter F. Hamilton (Ballantine Del Rey) [1,-]
8) Bone Crossed, Patricia Briggs (Ace) [3,5]
9) Imager, L.E. Modesitt, Jr. (Tor) [2,8]
*) Storm from the Shadows, David Weber (Baen) [2,1]

The full list is at Locus Online.

Wake hit #1 on the Amazon.com Technothrillers Bestsellers List, #1 on the Winnipeg Free Press Bestsellers List, #2 on the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix Bestsellers List, and now #2 on the Locus Bestsellers List. Not too shabby!

Visit The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site and WakeWatchWonder.com

Wake press release

by Rob - July 16th, 2009

[Wake Press Release]

Here’s a press release I wrote for my new novel Wake; this press release was aimed mostly at techie publications.

Visit The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
and WakeWatchWonder.com

Launch Pad workshop on YouTube

by Rob - July 16th, 2009

Up on YouTube: video of the Wednesday, July 15, 2009, session of the Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop at the University of Wyoming in Laramie. Carolyn and I are having a blast here. Check it out!

Visit The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
and WakeWatchWonder.com

Jawing with Jawbone.tv

by Rob - July 15th, 2009


The fine folks at Jawbone.tv phoned me a while ago, and we did a long, discursive telephone interview — and they’ve very kindly transcribed it and put it online. You can read the whole thing here. The interviewer was Todd Denis.

Visit The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
and WakeWatchWonder.com

Phyllis Gotlieb, R.I.P.

by Rob - July 15th, 2009


My friend and inspiration Phyllis Gotlieb, the only Canadian to be in SFWA at its founding, the mother of Canadian science fiction, passed away yesterday at the age of 83 from complications related to a ruptured appendix.

Phyllis was proof of concept that you could live in Toronto and still be a science-fiction writer for major American publishing houses; if I hadn’t had her as a role model, I’m not sure I ever would have embarked on the career path I took.

We’d been friends for 30 years — I met her in 1979 when my high-school science-fiction club had her as guest of honour at a little convention we put on at Northview Heights Secondary School. She was feisty and opinionated and passionate then, and she was still all those things the last time I saw her, not that long ago. One of my greatest professional thrills was getting to publish her final novel, Birthstones, in 2007, under my Robert J. Sawyer Books imprint for Markham’s Fitzhenry & Whiteside.

From a profile of Phyllis by Brian Bethune in Maclean’s in 2002:

“That’s when she became the grandmother of us all,” says Robert Sawyer, the most prominent author in a now-flourishing national scene. “She was the one — till the ’80s, the only one — who proved you could sit in Toronto and write major science fiction and sell it to major American publishers.” Sunburst, which has given its name to an award for the best Canadian sci-fi book of the year, marked a final change of course for Gotlieb, who eventually no longer had “poem-shaped ideas.” (Since then, she says, “my aliens write poetry.”)

Visit The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
and WakeWatchWonder.com

The Adolescence of P-1

by Rob - July 15th, 2009


In the summer of 1980, Carolyn and I moved to Waterloo, Ontario, for four months, to share an apartment with our great friends Lynn Conway and Fraser Gunn. (Their previous roommates, students at the University of Waterloo, had moved out at the end of the academic year.)

That summer, I did a few things that had a profound impact on my career.

First, I outlined my very first novel, End of an Era.

Second, because he was to be Guest of Honour that summer at the very first Ad Astra — Toronto’s now-venerable science-fiction convention — I read James P. Hogan‘s Inherit the Stars, which, to this day, is still one of my favourite science-fiction novels (and doubtless an influence on the watch-the-science-puzzles-go-snick-snick-snick aspects of End of an Era).

And third, at Fraser’s suggestion, I read The Adolescence of P-1, by Thomas J. Ryan — because it was a science-fiction novel set in part in Waterloo.

Flashforward (heh heh) 29 years, and I find myself in Boston at Readercon 20, and my friend Judith Klein-Dial has a mass-market paperback of The Adolescence of P-1 for sale for a buck at her table. I own a hardcover of P-1, but it’s up in Toronto, and I need something to read on the flight home, so I make peace with my usual compunctions about buying used books, purchase the copy, and start reading it.

Like my current novel WWW: Wake, Ryan’s The Adolescence of P-1 could easily pass for mainstream: it’s set in the then-present of 1977 (the book was first published that year).

And, like my Wake, it was published (in mass-market at least) by Ace (the hardcover had been from Macmillan, and the most-recent reprint is from Baen).

And, like my Wake, as I said, it’s set in part in Waterloo, Ontario.

And, most of all, like my Wake, it deals with the emergence of consciousness in networked computers (in P-1, networked by phone lines; in Wake, of course, via the Internet and the supervening World Wide Web).

Now, let me say this: I loved The Adolescence of P-1 as a 20-year-old, and I still find a lot to like about it as a 49-year-old. But it is a classic example of what actually compelled me to write Wake in the first place. As I’ve said in interviews about my book, previous SF treatments of the ramping up of intelligence by computers either have the big event happening off stage (as in Neuromancer) or simply skip over the hard bits, as in, well, The Adolescence of P-1:

The System had an idea.

An idea?

Sounds absurd out of context. A computer program with an idea. This, of course, was the computer program that snookered John Burke and the entire Pi Delta/Pentagon security arrangement — bypassed, in fact, every security system on every computer in the US. This was also the program that daily read the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post and the New York Times. All those publications were computer typeset and quite available for The System’s perusal.

Computer typesetting also made available Howl, Tales of Power, The Idiot, Little Dorrit, The History of Pendinnis, Summerhill, Amerika, Stranger in a Strange Land, the complete works of Shakespeare, Conan Doyle, Twain, Faulkner, and Wodehouse. The System might have been called an avid reader.

[Ace August 1979 mass-market paperback, page 109]

Hello? How does this AI read anything? How does it comprehend even a single word of English?

As SF Site observed in its very kind review of Wake:

Now, the idea of a digital intelligence forming online is not a new one, by any means. But I daresay most of the people tackling such a concept automatically assumed, as I always did, that such a being would not only have access to the shared data of the Internet, but the conceptual groundings needed to understand it.

And that’s where Robert J. Sawyer turns this into such a fascinating, satisfying piece. In a deliberate parallel to the story of Helen Keller, he tackles the need for building a common base of understanding, before unleashing an education creation upon the Web’s vast storehouse of knowledge.

He incorporates the myriad resources available online, including Livejournal, Wikipedia, Google, Project Gutenberg, WordNet, and perhaps the most interesting site of all, Cyc, a real site aimed at codifying knowledge so that anyone, including emerging artificial intelligences, might understand.

He ties in Internet topography and offbeat musicians, primate signing and Chinese hackers, and creates a wholly believable set of circumstances spinning out of a world we can as good as reach out to touch. Sawyer has delivered another excellent tale.

So, as my character of Caitlin would say, “Go me!” :)

Or, if I may be so bold, as Stanley Schmidt, the editor of Analog Science Fiction and Fact (where Wake first appeared as a four-part serial), observed:

Robert J. Sawyer has a way of taking familiar ideas, looking at them from new angles and in greater depth than almost anybody before him, and tying them together to create extraordinarily fresh and thought-provoking stories.

It’s often said that science fiction is a literature in dialogue with itself (the classic example is Robert A. Heinlein‘s Starship Troopers as opening remark and Joe Haldeman‘s The Forever War as response).

A number of reviewers have mentioned that Wake is clearly in dialogue with William Gibson‘s Neuromancer (“If books were movies, I’d suggest this [Wake] on a double bill with Neuromancer” — SFRevu), but it should be noted that it’s also a response to Arthur C. Clarke‘s “Dial F for Frankenstein”, D.F. Jones‘s Colossus (filmed as The Forbin Project), David Gerrold‘s When HARLIE was One, and, most certainly, to Thomas J. Ryan‘s seminal The Adolescence of P-1.

And if I have, in any way, seen a little further than those who went before me, it is, as always, because I stand on the shoulders of giants.

Visit The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
and WakeWatchWonder.com

Taking off for Launch Pad

by Rob - July 14th, 2009


Carolyn and I are leaving Saskatoon today for a week (then return to finish off my residency at the Canadian Light Source synchrotron).

We’re both attending the NASA-sponsored Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop for Writers in Laramie, Wyoming, 14-21 July 2009.

I was given early acceptance to the workshop (along with my friend Andy Duncan, a World Fantasy Award winner), but I’m very proud of Carolyn, who applied on her own, and was accepted on her own merits, based on her poetry in such places as Analog.

The particpants this year are:

Pat Cadigan
Carolyn Clink
Andy Duncan
Tara Fredette
Owl Goingback
N.K. Jemisin
Julie V. Jones
Marc Laidlaw
Ed Lerner
Brian Malow
Robert J. Sawyer
Gord Sellar
Scott Sigler

Workshop leader: Mike Brotherton

Guest instructors: Joe Haldeman and Phil Plait (of Bad Astronomy fame).

And, why, yes, thank you, I do have the coolest job in the universe. :)

Visit The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
and WakeWatchWonder.com

Charles N. Brown, R.I.P.

by Rob - July 13th, 2009

I’ve been subscribing to Locus, the trade journal of the science-fiction field, since 1982. Its editor in chief, Charles N. Brown, passed away yesterday, on his way home from Readercon 20. He was 72. We ran into each other for the final time on Saturday afternoon, I think, in the Green Room.

He was on his scooter, and called out, “Hi, Rob.” I replied, “Hi, Charles,” then added, “You look well.” He replied with a cheery, “As well as can be expected,” or words to that effect, and was off.

I’m sorry to see him go.

Visit The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
and WakeWatchWonder.com

FlashForward and Kant’s Third Conundrum

by Rob - July 13th, 2009

In 2000, my Italian editor, Sergio Fanucci of Solaria, asked me to write an introduction to the Italian edition of my novel FlashForward. Here’s what I had to say . . .

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant claimed that the three fundamental problems of metaphysics are “Is there life after death?,” “Does God exist?,” and “Do we have free will?”

Without it really being a conscious plan, I’ve ended up writing novels on each of those themes. My 1995 book The Terminal Experiment (for which I was fortunate enough to win the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America’s Nebula Award) dealt with a biomedical engineer who discovered scientific proof for the existence of the human soul. And my 2000 novel Calculating God attempts to use science to answer the question of whether or not God exists.

As for Kant’s third conundrum, that’s the province of FlashForward. There’s no doubt that here in the western world most people do believe they have free will … and yet many of us, myself included, are familiar with the experience of making a commitment, for example, to lose weight, only to find ourselves falling off our diets a few days or weeks later. Despite our best conscious intentions, our fate turns out differently than we intended, almost as if we really didn’t have free will after all.

I’ve long been interested in classical Greek drama; Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex is one of my favorite plays, and I had the privilege in 1977 of standing on the stage at Epidaurus and shouting Agamemnon’s name toward the heavens. But Greek tragedy takes exactly the opposite underlying assumption: it believes that our futures are foreordained, that our destiny is unavoidable. My experience with dieting seems, on a smaller scale, like Oedipus’s utter failure, despite his devout wish, to avoid fulfilling the prophecy that he would murder his father and marry his mother: regardless of either his or my best intentions, we ended up doing exactly what we’d vowed not to do.

Which worldview is correct? That of the Greeks, who believed our destinies were inescapable, or that of people today who insist that we are the masters of our own futures? I certainly find the modern idea more appealing, but mere appeal is hardly sufficient enough reason for a rational person to believe it to be true. Is there really any valid reason to accept our belief in free will as more valid than the Greek belief in predetermination?

As a science-fiction writer, I began to wonder what physics and quantum mechanics had to tell us about this age-old question. And, to my surprise, the answer is a great deal, and most of it, building on the work of Hermann Minkowski, points to the unsettling notion that the future is just as fixed as the past.

You’re about to begin reading my novel … but the ending of that novel is already fixed, typeset immutably on the last page of this book. You don’t yet know how it’s going to end, and, hopefully, the journey will surprise you along the way, but the conclusion is inevitable. Are our lives like that — a book that’s already been written, with a happy or tragic ending already set in stone? Is “now” simply the page all of our minds happen to be contemplating? If so, what would happen if suddenly our minds jumped ahead a hundred pages or so, looking at a scene out of sequence, a chapter yet to come?

That’s the premise of FlashForward — and I hope you enjoy reading it. Just do me a favor and don’t peek ahead at the ending . . .

Visit The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
and WakeWatchWonder.com

Thirteen hours, forty-five minutes

by Rob - July 13th, 2009

Door-to-door from Readercon in Boston to the house I’m renting in Saskatoon.

Ugh.

Visit The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
and WakeWatchWonder.com

Oh, joy

by Rob - July 13th, 2009

Flaps failed on my plane from Toronto to Saskatoon; had to return to Pearson, and will board a new aircraft shortly.

Frustrating: I’ll have spent a total five hours here at Pearson, 15 minutes from the home I haven’t been to since June 1st. Sigh.

Visit The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
and WakeWatchWonder.com

Readercon reflections

by Rob - July 12th, 2009

Random thoughts on Readercon 20:

I’m at Pearson — Toronto’s airport — changing planes on my way back to Saskatoon from Readercon 20 in Boston.

It was a great, great convention — and I made a point of telling both Eric Van (this year’s programming chair) and Bob Colby (who founded Readercon 20 years ago) that.

It was startling to see myself referred to as a “Readercon stalwart” in the program book — but, according to the chart in the book, I’d been to 10 of the 20 Readercons, and most of them in the past decade, so I guess I am.

I seemed to be the only person from Toronto present; highly unusual for Readercon.

Great catching up with old friends Michael and Nomi Burstein, Ian Randal Strock, Warren Lapine, Nick DiChario, Rick Wilber, Paolo Bacigalupi, Jacob Weisman, and Bernie Goodman.

The Senior Editor of the journal Neuron came to my kaffeeklatsch — how cool is that?

Catherine Asaro is looking amazingly hot. Just sayin’.

At the request of Cary Meriwether, who came all the way to Boston from San Diego, I read from Watch, the second WWW book, instead of Wake, the first one; it went over well.

Fitzhenry & Whiteside shipped down 10 copies of Distant Early Warnings: Canada’s Best Science Fiction, edited by me; it was the first I’d seen of the book. I gave a copy to Tor editor David G. Hartwell and to Pulitzer-Prize winning critic Michael Dirda, and sold the rest like that — boom! The book looks fabulous.

Also sold out our stock of The Savage Humanists, despite the absence of editor Fiona Kelleghan, and of our two Nick DiChario titles (thanks, I’m sure, to Nick’s smiling presence).

Bernie Goodman and Jacob Weisman from Tachyon Books made the con for me: I had more than half my meals with them. Despite them being much more experienced small-press publishers than I am, they treat me like a colleague, and we had a blast.

Friday’s dinner party included Nick DiChario, Allen Steele, and Rick Wilber — what a great time! We went, at Rick’s suggestion, to the Capital Grill (and a Nick’s suggestion, we walked there).

Saturday’s dinner party included Michael Bishop and Geri Bishop (two of the nicest people in the world) and SFScope editor Ian Randall Strock.

Tor editor Stacy Hague-Hill — who has been working very hard on my behalf at Tor — and her husband took my out for lunch on Saturday — w00t! Her husband is South African, and so I talked with him a bit about my work on Charlie Jade, a Canada-South Africa co-produced TV series.

I’m one of four judges for the Cordwainer Smith Rediscover Award, which is presented at Readercon. I introduced fellow judge Barry Malzberg to the crowd on Friday night, and he gave the award to A. Merritt (1884-1943). The other judges are Mike Resnick and Martin H. Greenberg.

I bought a paperback copy of Thomas J. Ryan’s The Adolescence of P-1 from Judith Klein-Dial in the dealers’ room, one of the seminal novels about computers gaining intelligence, and certainly an influence on me and my Wake. I own it in hardcover, and had read it back in the summer of 1980, but re-read a bunch of it on the long trip back to Saskatoon. Fun.

Visit The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
and WakeWatchWonder.com

Come to my Readercon Kaffeeklatsch

by Rob - July 9th, 2009

Tomorrow (Friday, July 10, 2009), at 5:00 p.m. in Room 458 (but you have to sign up in advance at the con, and space is quite limited): an opportunity to spend an intimate hour over coffee (or whatever) with me. Always one of my favourite parts of any convention that has them.

Visit The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
and WakeWatchWonder.com

Star Trek Viewmaster

by Rob - July 9th, 2009


Click picture for larger version

Over at TrekMovie.com, someone asked, about the Star Trek Viewmaster reels from the 1960s: “Always wondered why there was not a real shot of the Enterprise and the Exeter in the set … instead of a shot of two of the model kits in space. Anyone know?”

Yes, indeed. I do. :)

Only the Exeter in the background was the AMT model kit; the Enterprise in the foreground was the 33″ (“the three-footer”) model of the ship created for the TV series; the Viewmaster shot of it (above) is gorgeous.

And the reason it was done that way is simple: to get the Viewmaster 3D effect, they had to shoot with special stereo cameras. That was back when Sawyers (no relation) or GAF actually sent their own camerapeople onto the sets of TV shows they were making Viewmaster reels for (which is why it was “The Omega Glory” — not because it was the best episode, but because it was the one that happened to be filming the week the Viewmaster cameraman was in the studio).

The shots of the Enterprise and Exeter used in the actual episode weren’t new miniature footage, but rather recombinations of existing footage, and so there was no way to get the 3D effect from the existing opticals; Viewmaster redid the shot from scratch, and it actually is quite gorgeous. Think of it as the very first example of Star Trek Remastered. ;)

Later, Viewmaster reels were done on the cheap; the Star Trek: The Motion Picture set is an example. They’d use stills from the movie — two or three split-screened, so that the stills were at different focal depths, but weren’t themselves three-dimensional.

Googling around, I find that the blog My Star Trek Scrapbook has a great page devoted to the Classic Trek Viewmaster set.

Visit The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
and WakeWatchWonder.com

Aurora Voting deadline crunch

by Rob - July 7th, 2009

If you’re voting by mail, tomorrow — Wednesday, July 8, 2009 — is the postmarked-by deadline.

If you’re voting online, you have until Wednesday, July 15.

If you’re a member of this year’s Worldcon in Montreal (and a Canadian) you can vote for free; otherwise, there’s a $5 charge to help defray the cost of manufacturing trophies.

The online and paper ballots are here.

Many fine nominees this year, including — cough, cough — my own Identity Theft and Other Stories.

Visit The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
and WakeWatchWonder.com

Hangin’ with Saskatoon writers

by Rob - July 7th, 2009


Last night, Carolyn and I had dinner with some of the great writers here in Saskatoon.

Back row: Saskatchewan Book Award winner Brenda Barker, Governor-General’s Award winner Arthur Slade.

Front row: Books in Canada First Novel Award winner Geoffrey Ursell, Hugo Award winner Robert J. Sawyer, John W. Campbell Memorial Award finalist Barbara Sapergia.

Visit The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
and WakeWatchWonder.com

Dean Wesley Smith on "Life After Copyright"

by Rob - July 7th, 2009

Well said, and well worth reading. “Life After Copyright” by Dean Wesley Smith.

Visit The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
and WakeWatchWonder.com

Another thread at the Borders Science Fiction blog

by Rob - July 7th, 2009


I’m the guest blogger at Borders.com’s science-fiction blog Babel Clash right now. Here’s my latest post — but, as before, I’ve turned off comments here; come join the fun at Babel Clash, and share your views:

Does the Science in Science Fiction Matter?

Okay, I confess: tonight I’m off to see the new Star Trek movie for the fifth time. :)

But the science in the movie is just plain whacko. A supernova that threatens the entire universe? Creating singularities out of red matter, whatever the heck that is? Being able to look at a planet in another star system with the naked eye (Spock looking up at Vulcan looming in the sky of Delta Vega)? Come on!

Yes, we can all play the game of trying to come up with rational explanations for any of these howlers (that is, we can all try to do the work now that the scriptwriters should have done but didn’t). But let’s not do that here; there are plenty of other online places for that particular exercise.

Instead, let’s ask: Does the science actually matter in science fiction? As a novelist, I work enormously hard to try to get things right in my books. I found it funny that for the Star Trek, precisely one science consultant was listed for this hundred-million-dollar movie, whereas my latest novel, WWW: Wake, created, I assure you, on a much more modest budget ;), has more than a dozen science consultants listed in the acknowledgments.

But, if in the end, the only thing that matters — witness Star Trek or Star Wars — is whether we laughed or cried, cheered or booed, in the right places, does it really matter if the science is accurate in SF?

Certainly the general media thinks our science is all made up, anyway — “crazy science fiction,” “the stuff of sci-fi,” “not science fiction, but real science” are terms we’ve all cringed at often enough.

(I will say, in my consultations with David Goyer, who is heading up the adaptation of my novel FlashForward for ABC this fall, I’ve been enormously impressed by how scientifically literate, and how curious about science, he is. But, that said, he also is, in my experience with film and TV makers, very much in the minority.)

So, yeah, it’s called SF, but if the F is good, we demonstrably give a free ride on the S when it comes to movies. What about books? Do we hold them to a higher standard, and, if so, why?

Rob

Join the conversation at Babel Clash.

Visit The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
and WakeWatchWonder.com

It’s a different world

by Rob - July 7th, 2009


From TCON-News, the email newsletter of Toronto’s Polaris, a science-fiction media convention coming up this weekend (I won’t be there this year, but it is a very good convention):

Autograph fees per actor will vary, and you can expect guests to charge between $25.00 – $30.00 per autograph, as the market is leaning this way. In many cases, this is still a great deal as such notable actors as Edward James Olmos and Kate Mulgrew have charged as much as $50.00 to $65.00 for their signatures. Please note: Actors set their own fees for autographing, keep all funds, and accept cash only.

Authors, of course, sign books (or anything else) for free; it’s just part of what we do. We even sign used copies (for which we received no royalty from the bearer) for free. An author gets around $2.50 in royalties for a new hardcover and maybe 60 cents for a paperback, so a typical actor’s signature (which — ahem, is paid for in cash: wonder how many of these transactions are reported to the IRS?) is worth what an author earns for ten hardcovers or 40 paperbacks.

Above: the one and only autograph I ever bought — US$20 in 2007, including the photo — from Bob May, the man who was inside the Robot suit on Lost in Space.

Visit The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
and WakeWatchWonder.com

Penguin Canada appoints new genre-fiction editor

by Rob - July 6th, 2009


My new editor at Penguin Canada is Adrienne Kerr. Formerly a Penguin Canada sales representative for Southwestern Ontario, Adrienne won this year’s Libris Award from the Canadian Booksellers Association as Sales Rep of the Year.

Prior to joining Penguin in May 2006, she was a book buyer with HDS Retail (which operates airport bookstores in Canada). Before that, she was assistant manager at Nicholas Hoare Books in Toronto and marketing assistant with Groundwood Books.

Adrienne assumes her new editorial duties starting a week today, on Monday, July 13, 2009. Besides me, she will be the Canadian editor for such writers as John le Carré, Ariana Franklin, Pauline Gedge, and Rennie Airth.

Quill & Quire has a nice photo of Executive Editor Nicole Winstanley and Adrienne Kerr from 2007 here (3rd photo down).

Welcome aboard, Adrienne!

Visit The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
and WakeWatchWonder.com

RJS guest blogs in Boders SF blog

by Rob - July 6th, 2009


I’m the guest blogger for July 2009 in Borders Books’s science-fiction blog “Babel Clash,” co-sponsored by i09. My first post — my opening salvo, if you will — is over there, and also posted below, but I’m turning off comments on this topic here; come on over to Borders.com and chime in there!

Time has a way of catching up with you. My novel FlashForward was first published in 1999, and was set in the then-distant year of 2009 — starting in April, to be precise.

Well, now the future is here: reality has caught up with what I had to say. Some things I got right (the new pope did take the name Benedict XVI!) and some things I got wrong. Was it gutsy, or foolhardy, to set a book so close to the present day?

What about my current novel, WWW: Wake? That one is set only three years from now — surely I’m courting disaster with such a near-future setting? (And other books, such as my Hugo Award-winning Hominids, were set in the year they were published — 2002, in that case.)

I’ve heard some other writers say it’s impossible to write near-future SF anymore — because science and technology (not to mention the political and social landscape) change so quickly, you’re bound to be proven wrong. Those writers seem to prefer the far-future.

But I find that most modern far-future SF doesn’t interest me. When you wave nanotech like a magic wand, when you invoke the technological singularity as an excuse for anything-goes, when it’s all just a simulation (or a dream), I find I just don’t care.

I think science fiction’s greatest strength is its ability to comment on the here-and-now, and, well, for that, there’s no time — or setting! — like the present.

Okay, that’s where I’m coming from on this. What do you all think? Would you rather read about A.D. 2010 or A.D. 2100 — or maybe A.D. 21,000?

Rob

Join the conversation at Borders.com!

Visit The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
and WakeWatchWonder.com

CompuServe Classic: R.I.P.

by Rob - July 6th, 2009


I joined CompuServe sometime in 1987.

I used to be a sysop (system operator) of the WordStar Forum there, and I hung out a lot in the Science Fiction and Fantasy Forum (so much so that the command GO SAWYER at the CompuServe prompt would take people there).

On October 10, 1989 — almost 20 years ago — I was given a “sponsored account,” meaning I didn’t have to pay for my connect time (I remember one year prior to that my bill for CompuServe connect time was $700). It was a joy to be able to go anywhere and do anything on that service without getting charged — such was the online world back in the day.

I made my first online friends on CompuServe — including SF writers John E. Stith, Mike Resnick, Barbara Delaplace, and Roger MacBride Allen, and all sorts of WordStar users; many of them are still good friends to this day.

And now, it’s over: AOL, which acquired CompuServe some years ago, has finally shut down CompuServe Classic.

CompuServe was a very important part of my life from 1988 until the early 2000s. I made friends there, I learned things there, I did tons of online research there (using a service called Magazine Database Plus), I won awards there (the CompuServer Science Fiction and Fantasy Forum’s HOMer Award), I sold the one and only bit of shareware I ever wrote there (MICKEE: The Mouse Interface for the Control-Key Editing Environment, which gave mouse support to WordStar), I got my email there, I even hosted my webpage there for a while (with the ungainly address of ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/sawyer, and (long before anyone had heard of blogging) I began this online journal there (with entries starting back in 1999 salvaged here).

R.I.P., CompuServe. You were good to me, and you mattered, and I will always remember you.

Visit The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
and WakeWatchWonder.com

My Readercon programming

by Rob - July 6th, 2009

I’ll be attending Readercon 20, July 9-12, 2009, near Boston. Here’s the programming I’ll be on:

Friday 11:00 AM, Vineyard: Reading (60 min.) from his recently published novel WWW: Wake.

Friday 5:00 PM, Room 458: Kaffeeklatsch.

Saturday 10:00 AM, Salon F: Autographing.

Saturday 12:00 Noon, VT: Federations Group Reading (60 min.) John Joseph Adams (host) with K. Tempest Bradford, Robert J. Sawyer, Allen Steele, Catherynne M. Valente, Genevieve Valentine: Readings from the original and reprint anthology (cover blurb: “Vast. Epic. Interstellar.”) edited by Adams and published by Prime Books in January.

Saturday 1:00 PM, Salon E: Panel: Novels of Advocacy vs. Novels of Recognition. Paolo Bacigalupi, John Clute, Ken Houghton, Barry N. Malzberg, Robert J. Sawyer (Leader), Graham Sleight: At the keynote Thursday night panel at Readercon 18, our panelists stumbled upon a useful taxonomic distinction: novels that advocate for a particular future (a la Heinlein) versus novels that merely attempt to recognize and describe a possible one (a la Gibson). There was some debate as to just how strongly the field was moving from the former to the latter, and if there was such a trend, its relationship to others (optimism vs. pessimism, far futures vs. near futures, etc.) One of the panelists, Graham Sleight, has recently renewed the discussion online. We’ll explore the numerous possible directions raised by Sleight and others.

Saturday 3:00 PM, Salon E: Panel: Is Darwinism Too Good For SF? Jeff Hecht (Leader), Caitlin R. Kiernan, Anil Menon, James Morrow, Steven Popkes, Robert J. Sawyer: This year marks the sesquicentennial of the publication of The Origin of Species and the bicentennial of Charles Darwin’s birth. Considering the importance of the scientific idea, there has been surprisingly little great sf inspired by it. We wonder whether, in fact, if the theory has been too good, too unassailable and too full of explanatory power, to leave the wiggle room where speculative minds can play in. After all, physics not only has FTL and time travel, but mechanisms like wormholes that might conceivably make them possible. What are their equivalents in evolutionary theory, if any?

Visit The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
and WakeWatchWonder.com

Aurora Award banquet tickets can now be purchased online

by Rob - July 5th, 2009

… using PayPal. See here. Carolyn and I just bought ours.

Visit The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
and WakeWatchWonder.com

Cool YouTube promo for Calgary’s Con-Version

by Rob - July 5th, 2009

Con-Version is Calgary’s annual SF&F convention. Author Guests of Honour this year are Terry Brooks, Tanya Huff, and Robert J. Sawyer — and now there’s a nifty promo for the con on YouTube. Check it out.

See you in August!

Visit The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
and WakeWatchWonder.com

Book Banter podcasts Rob

by Rob - July 4th, 2009


Book Banter, a podcast produced by Alex C. Telander of Sacramento, interviews Robert J. Sawyer, talking about his novel Wake.

Visit The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
and WakeWatchWonder.com