So says TV By The Numbers, which has the whole ABC fall schedule, as announced yesterday, here.
THURSDAYS:
8:00 p.m.: “Flash Forward”
9:00 p.m.: “Grey’s Anatomy”
10:00 p.m.: “Private Practice”
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The whole review is here.
Some excerpts:
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.
More than that, Sawyer is an author who’s not afraid to make his readers think. The topics invoked in this book cover a wide range, from math to theories of intelligence, from what it’s like to be blind, to cutting edge technology. 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. There’s quite a lot to consider, and Sawyer’s good at making it accessible to the average reader.
Sawyer has delivered another excellent tale.
More about Wake
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One of them says:
I finished reading Wake and I wanted to tell you that your book and your ending are superb. I was wondering (without knowing it) as I read the book how you would end it, how it could be “self-contained” yet leave us at a place ready for the middle W in the trilogy. You pulled it off as if it were easy! Congratulations. I thoroughly enjoyed Wake including the ending and am eager to read the next book.
W00t!
And the other says:
01001000 01100101 01111001 00100000 01010010 01101111 01100010 00101100 00001101 00001010 01011001 01101111 01110101 01110010 00100000 01101110 01100101 01110111 00100000 00100000 01100010 01101111 01101111 01101011 00100000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01100010 01100101 01100001 01110101 01110100 01101001 01100110 01110101 01101100 01101100 01111001 00100000 01110111 01110010 01101001 01110100 01110100 01100101 01101110 00101110 00100000 01001001 01110100 00100000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01100001 00100000 01110111 01101111 01110010 01101011 00100000 01101111 01100110 00100000 01100001 01110010 01110100 00100001 00001101 00001010 01011001 01101111 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100110 01110010 01101001 01100101 01101110 01100100 00101100 00001101 00001010 00101101 00101101 01001100 01100101 01110011
Sweet!
I have the coolest fans … ;)
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Sacramento Book Review reviews Wake by Robert J. Sawyer right here, saying in part:
From an author who has written many books and has won just about every award a science fiction author can comes one of the most original and fascinating novels to be published in a long time. It’s one of those books that has just as much right to be on a fiction shelf with other literature classics.
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Craig Rintoul of Bookbits came by yesterday and recorded an audio interview with me about Wake, which he’s now whipped into a nifty book trailer for the novel. You can watch it on YouTube. Many thanks, Craig! (Runtime: 6 minutes.)
(Penguin Canada’s trailer — of a very different sort — for Wake is also on YouTube; it runs 70 seconds.)
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Morley Walker, the long-time books editor of The Winnipeg Free Press, has a major, lengthy profile of Robert J. Sawyer on page 1 of today’s (Thursday, May 14, 2009) Entertainment section.
(The Free Press, a major Canadian daily newspaper, is the largest-circulation paper in Manitoba.)
You can read it online right here.
An excerpt:
Robert J. Sawyer [is] Canada’s most successful science-fiction author. In the last decade, as his own career has exploded, Sawyer has become one of Canada’s go-to guys for science explanations and prognostications.
As the author of novels that synthesize and dramatize the latest scientific thinking, he is often called Canada’s answer to Michael Crichton, the late American author of such books as Jurassic Park and The Andromeda Strain.
“I like that analogy, except for one thing,” Sawyer says. “Crichton had a pessimistic view of science and technology. I am very pro-science.”
Winnipeg novelist David Annandale praises Sawyer for creating engaging characters and setting them in fast-paced narrative that contains accessible scientific speculation.
“He has, I think, one of these enthusiasms for science that is genuinely joyful,” says Annandale, who teaches English and film at the University of Manitoba.
“And this translates into a drive to pass on to the reader a similar passion.”
The article ends with me saying: “I love my job. In the best atheist sense of the word, I feel blessed.”
And then there’s the sidebar, which says:
Close Encounters of the Sawyer Kind
Robert J. Sawyer was born April 29, 1960, in Ottawa. Raised in Toronto, he resides in Mississauga with his wife, poet Carolyn Clink.
In the last 20 years, he has sold 20 science-fiction novels to U.S. publishers, and his books have been translated into 14 languages.
He is one of only seven writers in history — and the only Canadian — to win all three of the world’s top science-fiction awards for best novel of the year: the Hugo (in 2003 for Hominids), the Nebula (in 1996 for The Terminal Experiment), and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award (in 2006 for Wake).
He has also won a record 10 Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Awards (Auroras), as well as an Arthur Ellis Award from the Crime Writers of Canada.
He’s also won the top science-fiction awards in China, France, Japan and Spain; in total he has received 41 national and international awards for his writing.
In 2008 was named one of the “30 most influential, innovative, and just plain powerful people in Canadian publishing” by Quill & Quire, the Canadian publishing trade journal.
He is “by any reckoning, among the most successful Canadian authors ever,” according to Maclean’s.
He has made almost 500 radio and TV appearances, including Canada AM, NPR’s Science Friday, and Rivera Live with Geraldo Rivera.
His award-winning website,
sfwriter.com, was the world’s first science-fiction author website and has been called “the best author’s page on the Internet.”ABC-TV has just purchased 13 episodes of a new sci-fi series called Flash Forward, based on Sawyer’s 1999 novel. It stars Joseph Fiennes (Shakespeare in Love) and John Cho (Star Trek).
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W00t!
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Nick DiChario has written a new bonkers novel, Valley of Day-Glo (Robert J. Sawyer Books, trade paper, $15.95, 240 pages, ISBN 978-0-88995-415-1), which channels the proud and seminal shades of Robert Sheckley and George Alec Effinger into a vivid and unique tale of some outrageous and bizarre post-apocalypse doings involving a handful of hapless survivors. DiChario’s dry wit and antic imagination propels this weird odyssey at an unflagging pace, and carries the reader effortlessly along.
You can read the whole review right here.
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Lesley, by the way, is an author in her own right; her new novel is the great YA fantasy Wondrous Strange.
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A FEW WORDS FROM ROBERT J. SAWYER
A posting to the blog of Waterloo’s Words Worth Books
I’ve long known that Waterloo was a special place. I lived there in the summer of 1980 — has it really been almost 30 years? — and was immediately aware of how much intellectual excitement there was in your city. Of course, the fact that there were two universities helped a lot.
Still, even I, a science-fiction writer, didn’t predict a future in which one of the world’s top high-tech companies (Research in Motion), or the world’s leading physics think-tank (The Perimeter Institute), or one of the planet’s top quantum-computing facilities (Institute for Quantum Computing) would all soon be there.
But now, as a science-fiction writer, I can think of no better place to set a novel than Waterloo, and that’s precisely where my new book Wake is set.
Wake is the story of Caitlin Decter, a 15-year-old math genius whose father works on quantum gravity at the Perimeter Institute. It’s the first volume of a trilogy; I’ve already finished the second book, Watch, and in it some CSIS agents tell Dr. Decter not to leave town, to which he replies: “Where would I go? This is the centre of the universe.”
It certainly is in a very real sense for me. In fact, I got some of the biggest news I ever had while I was in Waterloo last Friday: I’d come there to help my friend Marcel Gagné celebrate his birthday by going to see the (way cool) new Star Trek movie with him, and after, back at his place, I checked my email, and received the wonderful news that ABC — the most-watched television network in the United States — had just ordered 13 episodes of a TV series based on my novel Flash Forward. As my character Caitlin would say, “Sweet!”
I spend a lot of time in Waterloo (and not just because my novel Hominids was the Waterloo Region “One Book, One Community” choice a couple of years ago), and I will be back again next week, on Thursday, May 21, doing a reading and talk at the Waterloo Entertainment Centre, 24 King Street North, starting at 7:30 p.m. Admission is free if you buy Wake at the start of the event or in advance from Words Worth Books; otherwise, admission is $10 to defray facilities rental. Please came out and say hello!
“Wildly thought-provoking. The thematic diversity — and profundity — makes Wake one of Sawyer’s strongest works to date.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review, denoting a book of exceptional merit)
“Sawyer’s erudition, eclecticism, and masterly storytelling make Wake a choice selection.” —Library Journal
“Clashes between personalities and ideologies fuel Wake‘s plot, but they’re not what the book is about. It’s about how cool science is. Sawyer has won himself an international readership by reinvigorating the traditions of hard science fiction, following the path of such writers as Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein in his bold speculations from pure science.” —National Post
“A fast-paced and suspenseful story full of surprises and humour.” —The Saskatoon StarPhoenix
“It’s refreshing to read a book so deliberately Canadian in a genre dominated by Americans, and it’s easy to see why Sawyer now routinely wins not only Canadian science fiction prizes but also international accolades. His fans won’t be disappointed, and readers picking up his work for the first time will get a good introduction to a writer with a remarkable backlist.” —Winnipeg Free Press
And it’s with considerable delight and pride that I note that the Flash Forward TV series is the first time in over a quarter of a century that a big-four US network has based a TV series on a Canadian novel.
The last — and, I believe, only previous — time was in 1983, with the series Hotel, based on Arthur Hailey‘s novel of the same name (although Hailey was not born in Canada, and he left Canada for good in 1965, he was a Canadian citizen).
Now, as it happens, two of my favourite ABC TV series when I was a teenager were based on novels, but by Americans: The Six Million Dollar Man was based on the novel Cyborg by Martin Caidin, and The Night Stalker was based on a novel by Jeff Rice. Having my novel become a series on ABC, of all places, is extra-special to me because of that.
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But, man, reading all the coverage of the Flash Forward TV series in the trades, it’s getting fatiguing to keep seeing ABC (three syllables) referred to as “the alphabet network” (six syllables), which is something Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, and othes seem to really like doing. :)
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As I’ve long said, the best spaceship captains are Canadians: Leslie Nielsen (J.J. Adams, Forbidden Planet), William Shatner (James T. Kirk, ST:TOS), Lorne Greene (Adama, the original Battlestar Galactica), and Douglas Rain (HAL 9000, effectively in charge of Discovery in 2001) — not to mention Keith Lansing in my novel Starplex. ;)
Now we can add to that list Bruce Greenwood, who plays Captain Christopher Pike in the 2009 movie version of Star Trek. He was born in Noranda, Quebec, in 1956, and studied philosophy and economics at the University of British Columbia.
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The review includes a quite lengthy and detailed plot synopsis, which covers pretty much right to the end of the book — a fair bit more synopsizing than most other reviewers would consider appropriate, so spoiler warning on reading it all. But he concludes:
Sawyer’s story-telling style is almost invisible to the reader; he doesn’t get in the way of his own story, and writes short, punchy chapters that keep the reader saying “just one more”. (It’s the type of book I love when I’ve finished, but hate while I’m reading, because I can’t put it down.) His characters are fully realized, and I always finish his books wanting more.
The whole review is here, but, again, spoiler warning on the synopsis; if you just want Strock’s analysis, read only the first and last paragraphs. :)
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Star Trek is playing at the Imax theatre a kilometre from my home, and so, what the heck, went to see the film for the third time today (and the first time in Imax). It is stunning on the big screen — the clarity and detail is amazing (in a real Imax theatre, at least).
I’m amazed by how good the makeup on the Vulcan ears is — it’s flawless, no matter how big you see it. But why are the computer displays at the Vulcan school in English instead of Vulcan? ;)
And, yes, the film is just as enjoyable on a third viewing as a first; this one will become a classic.
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Okay, yeah, I don’t live in B.C. (British Columbia), but I’m not complaining. :) Here’s the front page of the “Arts & Life” section of the Tuesday, May 12, 2009, edition of Canada’s National Post, a major daily newspaper distributed coast-to-coast:
The article ends with a mention of my current novel Wake (which the National Post separately reviewed here), and a photo — nice to see Carolyn getting a photo credit in a national newspaper!
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Curled Up With a Good Book has a lovely review of my Calculating God right here (and you can read more about the novel here).
The review, by Ray Palen, concludes:
Compelling to the final page, Robert J. Sawyer’s Calculating God is not to be missed by fans of science fiction, religious history, philosophy or even thriller fiction, an intelligent and challenging work that is quite comparable to Sagan’s classic Contact.
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My eBay store — through which I sell autographed copies of my books — will be closed for June and July 2009, because I’ll be off in Saskatoon being writer-in-residence at the Canadian Light Source. I’ll be fulfilling orders received through Friday, May 29, 2009 — and then won’t be taking new orders until August. Just FYI. ;)
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Mississauga, where I live, is Canada’s sixth largest city, with a population of 704,000; it’s eastern border is Toronto’s western border.
And the Mississauga newspaper is called The Mississauga News, and today they put online this nice piece about the Flash Forward TV series.
(The above photo is the Mississauga News‘s file photo of me, taken 27 November 2004.)
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Many thanks for the terrific article. A small clarification, if I may. The article says, “HBO was keen at first, but passed after reading the pilot.” In fact, HBO is still very keen, and retains a financial interest in the show.
It’s not that HBO read the pilot and lost enthusiasm; quite the contrary — they read the pilot, loved it, and said this could run for a hundred episodes. At HBO they tend to do just a handful of episodes of anything a year; they felt the scope of Flash Forward was something a broadcast network, doing 22 episodes a year and with bigger budgets per episode, could better do justice to.
Oh, and check out the National Post‘s review of my latest novel, Wake, right here.
(National Post is a major Canadian daily newspaper, headquartered in Calgary.)
Photo: series star Joseph Fiennes and Robert J. Sawyer on the set of Flash Forward
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This was my last duty on the series — it’s been a blast being part of it! We still are on the air into June (Tuesdays at 10:30 p.m. Eastern / 7:30 p.m. Pacific, coast-to-coast in Canada), so please keep watching! Our remaining episodes:
The Seducers
Tues., May 12, 2009, 10:30 PM ET / 7:30 PM PT
A journey into the secretive underworld of “the Seducers” — men who use a mysterious power known as NLP to lure women into bed. Produced by Elevator Films.
Detour on the Road to Atlantis
Tues., May 19, 2009, 10:30 PM ET / 7:30 PM PT
Have ocean explorers found clues to the whereabouts of the lost civilization of Atlantis? Produced by Arcadia Entertainment Inc.
It’s in the Stars
Tues., May 26, 2009, 10:30 PM ET / 7:30 PM PT
For thousands of years, astrology has influenced both Western and Eastern cultures. But can the position of the stars really influence earthly affairs? Produced by Sorcery Films Ltd.
FINAL EPISODE: The White Mountain Abduction
Tues., June 2, 2009, 10:30 PM ET / 7:30 PM PT
Narrated by Robert J. Sawyer (in addition to hosting)
What happened to Barney and Betty Hill on the night of September 19, 1961? Their niece investigates the world’s most famous case of alleged alien abduction. Produced by Paradocs.
(Full episode guide is here.)
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Got a nice bit of fan mail just now, in response to the news about the series order for Flash Forward. He says:
Here’s hoping someone will read the wonderful novel Wake and turn it into a movie as well. I enjoyed it immensely and can hardly stand waiting for its sequels. Amazing and interesting premise that’s wonderfully executed. It evoked such an emotional response I can hardly express how much I enjoyed it. Way to go.
Sweet!
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My friend Stephanie Wilson in Ottawa sent me some lovely pictures she took at my launch party for Wake at the Clock Tower Pub on my birthday, Wednesday, April 29, 2009:
Photos copyright 2009 by Stephanie Wilson.
More photos from that night are here.
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For eleven years now, Mike Shinabery, a radio broadcaster and journalist in Alamogordo, New Mexico, has been doing lengthy, meaty radio interviews with me — Mike does his research, knows his science, and is himself an SF fan.
Last month, on April 9, 2009, he had me on his morning show on KSRY AM 1230 for 40 minutes talking about my new novel Wake — my tenth time on his show!
You can listen to the whole thing right here. (Mike’s co-host is Jean Vallance.)
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
More info is here, and my previous appearnce on Dr. Gluss’s show is here.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
You can listen to the whole thing right here (Prof. Kelleghan is introduced by Daniel Creed of Florida Atlantic University). Running time: about 15 minutes.
Abstract:
Time and the Fiction of Robert J. Sawyer: Flash Forward to the End of an Era
By Fiona Kelleghan
University of MiamiRobert J. Sawyer frequently bends time in his novels and short stories, and always in service of finding deep human truths or making profound philosophical points.
From exploring time dilation in his Aurora Award-winning novel Golden Fleece and the short stories “Relativity,” “Where the Heart Is,” and “The Shoulders of Giants” (featured in Hartwell & Cramer’s The Hard SF Renaissance) …
… to actual travel through time in the Seiun Award-winning End of an Era, the Hugo-nominated Starplex, and his short stories “If I’m Here, Imagine Where They Sent My Luggage,” “Just Like Old Times” (winner of both Canada’s top SF award and it stop mystery-fiction award), “You See But You Do Not Observe” (a Sherlock Holmes pastiche that won France’s Le Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire for year’s best foreign short story), and “On the Surface” (a sequel to H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine) …
… to figurative time travel as with the rolling back of ages in his latest novel, the Hugo nominated Rollback …
… to the Delphic glimpses of the future given to all of humanity in his Aurora Award-winning novel Flash Forward (and the ABC TV series pilot based on it) …
… to the sideways treks in time to parallel worlds in his Hugo Award-winning Hominids and its sequels and short stories such as “Iterations” and “Lost in the Mail,” few writers have more thoroughly explored the distorting lens of time displacement as a way of uncovering larger realities and providing penetrating insights into characters.
[The short stories not hyperlinked above are available from Fictionwise.com.]
Also available in audio form: Prof. Kelleghan’s 2008 ICFA paper “The Intimately Human and the Grandly Cosmic: Humor and the Sublime in the Works of Robert J. Sawyer.”
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Faust says, in part:
Best known as the author of the Hugo Award-winning Hominids, Sawyer is Canada’s answer to near-future science-ponderer Michael Crichton. He’s also a pacifist, whose oeuvre is at odds with much of science fiction, supposedly the literature of big ideas but which so often descends to war-porn and genocidal wish-fulfilment.
Sawyer’s success proves that science fiction doesn’t have to be that way. Frequently against an unabashedly Canadian backdrop, Sawyer’s tales engage issues as diverse as the existence of God, Neanderthal ethics and techno-immortality. His career of delivering provocative novels, without murder as the key dramatic device, proves that the genre formerly known as the “scientific romance” is as relevant as ever, if not more.
The whole article is here.
Sawyer also appeared on Minister Faust’s Edmonton radio show recently; that audio interview is here.
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There’s nothing harder than being a freelancer in today’s publishing climate, and having a new child just makes it even more difficult. Check out John Klima’s blog.
(John is the editor of the Hugo Award-nominated fanzine Electric Velocipede and did the recent interview with me for the Tor.com website.)
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Of course, Penguin has done a great job getting the book out there, but I also have to thank Canada’s independent booksellers, and the two chains — Chapters/Indigo and McNally Robinson (where I’m Author of the Month chain-wide for May) — who have all gotten behind the book.
Needless so say, I’m thrilled!
“Sawyer is one of the most successful Canadian writers ever. He has won himself an international readership by reinvigorating the traditions of hard science fiction, following the path of such writers as Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein in his bold speculations from pure science. Clashes between personalities and ideologies fuel [Wake‘s] plot, but they’re not what the book is about. It’s about how cool science is. Sawyer has marshalled a daunting quantity of fact and theory from across scientific disciplines and applied them to a contemporary landscape — with due regard to cultural and political differences, pop culture, history, economics, adolescent yearnings, personal ambition and human frailty. —National Post (Calgary)
“Sawyer paints a complete portrait of a blind teenage girl, and imagines in detail — from scratch — the inside of a new being. Almost alone among Canadian writers, he tackles the most fundamental questions of who we are and where we might be going — while illuminating where we are now.” —The Ottawa Citizen
“A fast-paced and suspenseful story full of surprises and humour.” —The Saskatoon StarPhoenix
“It’s refreshing to read a book so deliberately Canadian in a genre dominated by Americans, and it’s easy to see why Sawyer now routinely wins not only Canadian science fiction prizes but also international accolades. His fans won’t be disappointed, and readers picking up his work for the first time will get a good introduction to a writer with a remarkable backlist.” —Winnipeg Free Press
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On Wednesday, May 6, 2009, Hugo and Nebula Award-winning science-fiction writer Robert J. Sawyer gave an invited 90-minute talk at the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience [pictured] at the University of Pennsylvania (“Penn”). Sawyer was the first science-fiction writer ever invited to speak at the Center.
Sawyer’s talk delved into the cognitive science, neuroscience, and other areas that informed the portrayal of a sentient World Wide Web in his 2009 novel Wake and the uploaded consciousnesses in his 2005 John W. Campbell Memorial Award-winning novel Mindscan.
SPOILER WARNING: His talk contains major spoilers for both books, giving away significant plot points; please do not listen to the talk until you’ve read these books. (However, he talks about them separately — first Wake, then Mindscan.)
The talk is here as an MP3 file.
“Thank you again for making the trip to Penn! It was wonderful to finally meet you, after enjoying so many of your books. Your talk exceeded my fondest hopes — it was so clear and interesting and provocative! — and the group adored it.”
— Martha J. Farah, Ph.D.
Director, Center for Cognitive Neuroscience
“I enjoyed your talk immensely. It fit the bill perfectly in showing how excellent speculative hard science fiction can be informed by and inform those of us in the cognitive neurosciences.”
— Anjan Chatterjee, M.D.
Professor of Neurology
Information on booking Robert J. Sawyer as a speaker is here.
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