The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
On April 29, 1984, Judith Merril invited all the “good science fiction” heads she could find to the founding meeting of Toronto Hydra, a social networking group for science-fiction professionals. That predates the publication of the first Tesseracts anthology by some months, and the founding of SF Canada and On Spec by five years.
Among those attending that historic first meeting: John Robert Colombo, Phyllis Gotlieb, Terence M. Green, Robert J. Sawyer, and Andrew Weiner.
I was the coordinator of Toronto Hydra for the next eight years, until October 1992. More of the group’s history is here.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Laura Shin, my wonderful editor at Penguin Canada, has moved on to greener pastures. Penguin is now looking for her replacement: a genre-fiction editor who can, among other things, specifically handle science fiction. Note: the deadline for applications is this Thursday.
Commissioning Editor
Penguin Group (Canada)
Location: Toronto, ON
Deadline for applicants: April 30, 2009
Date posted: April 20, 2009
Job description: Penguin Group (Canada) has an exciting permanent opportunity for a Commissioning Editor. This position will be located at the Penguin, Yonge & Eglinton office.
Job Summary:
Responsible for acquiring and developing new titles for the Canadian publishing program. The editor will be acquiring books in the following areas: crime, thrillers, mysteries, historical fiction, horror, fantasy, science fiction, and women’s commercial fiction. He/she will work closely with the Rights and Contracts, Production, Marketing and Publicity, and Sales departments.
Major Responsibilities:
Qualifications:
Interested parties are invited to submit a resume and cover letter to:
Paula Hunter, Human Resources Consultant
Pearson Canada
26 Prince Andrew Place
Don Mills, Ontario, M3C 2T8
Fax: (416) 447-0598
paula.hunter@pearsoncanada.com
Applications will be received until April 30, 2009.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
The Ottawa Citizen — the largest circulation newspaper in Canada’s capital city — has not one but two articles about Wake today:
Future Looks Bright to Sci-Fi Writer Sawyer
Web and Brain Merge in Profound Vision of Future
Woohoo!
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
PoG starred Rick Green, and was produced by Gregg Thurlbeck and Mark Askwith, ably assisted by Shirley Brady, and I was fortunate enough to be the most frequent guest in the program’s history.
The show ran for five seasons and 139 episodes. A brief history of this landmark series and my involvement with it is here.
The Robert J. Sawyer web site
Ottawa Book Launch Party!
The Clock Tower Brew Pub
575 Bank Street
Ottawa, Ontario
Wednesday, April 29, 2009, 7:30 p.m. (not 7:00 p.m., as previously announced)
Hosted by Perfect Books
clocktower.ca
perfectbooks.ca/index.html
Toronto Book Launch Party!
Dominion on Queen (pub)
500 Queen Street East
Toronto, Ontario
Thursday, April 30, 2009, 7:00 p.m.
Hosted by Bakka Phoenix Books
dominiononqueen.com
bakkaphoenixbooks.com
All events are free and open to the public, and no invitations are required. Come on out!
“Sawyer continues to push the boundaries with his stories of the future made credible. His erudition, eclecticism, and masterly storytelling make this trilogy opener a choice selection.” —Library Journal
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
ABC is so excited about its new project Flash Forward the network has plans to start marketing the show before its even officially ordered a series.
When viewers tune in for the 100th episode of Lost next week [on Wednesday, April 29, 2009], they will be served an extra dose of mystery. Sources said ABC will launch a stealth promo campaign for Flash during the episode …
The mystery [ad] spots will in fact be for Flash … Promoting a new show for next season in April — a program that hasn’t even been formerly announced yet — is extremely unusual.
Based on Robert J. Sawyer’s sci-fi novel, Flash starring Joseph Fiennes, chronicles the aftermath of a global event in which everyone in the world blacks out for 2 minutes, 17 seconds and has a mysterious vision of the future.
The full Hollywood Reporter article is here.
Note to Canadian viewers: remember to watch a US feed for Lost (from an American ABC affiliate), not the Canadian broadcast by CTV, or you won’t see the Flash Forward promo(s) … if, in fact, there are any.
Oh, and in the nice coincidence department, Lost‘s hundredth episode airs on April 29 — which happens to be my birthday. :)
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Photos from the book tour stops in Vancouver (at White Dwarf) and Calgary (at Sentry Box:
Kuroda had brought his notebook computer with him. Caitlin, curious, ran her hands over it. When closed it was as thin as the latest MacBook Air, but when she opened it she was astonished to feel full-height keycaps rise up from what had been a flat keyboard. She’d read that lots of technology appears in Japan months or even years before becoming available in North America, but this was the first real proof she’d had that that was true. “So, what’s on your desktop?” she asked.
“My wallpaper, you mean?”
“Yes.” Caitlin had had her mom put a photo of Schrödinger — the cat, not the physicist — on as her wallpaper; even though she couldn’t see it, it made her happy knowing it was there.
“It’s my favorite cartoon, actually. It’s by a fellow named Sidney Harris. He specializes in science cartoons — you see his stuff taped to office doors in university science departments all over the world. Anyway, this one shows two scientists standing in front of a blackboard and on the left there are a whole bunch of equations and formulas, and on the right there’s more of the same, but in the middle it just says, `Then a miracle occurs …’ And one of the scientists says to the other, `I think you should be more explicit here in step two.'”
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
And a very nice piece it is, too. You can read it here (as reprinted in The Ottawa Citizen).
(The Edmonton Journal is the major daily newspaper in the capital city of the province of Alberta.)
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
The event at White Dwarf was packed, and I believe they sold out of Wake hardcovers. And, amazingly, some old friends from public school back in Toronto showed up. Cool!
Bonnie Jean Mah and her infant son Jason were my escorts in Vancouver, and we were joined for dinner beforehand by Rhea Rose (Bonnie was my writing student at Banff in 2000; Rhea was my student in Calgary in 2003).
I’m at the Vancouver airport right now, waiting for my flight to Calgary; I sign tonight at Sentry Box there.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
My 1999 novel Flash Forward begins thus:
Chapter 1 Day One: Tuesday, April 21, 2009
A slice through spacetime …The control building for CERN’s Large Hadron Collider was new: it had been authorized in A.D. 2004 and completed in 2006. The building enclosed a central courtyard, inevitably named “the nucleus.” Every office had a window either facing in toward the nucleus or out toward the rest of CERN’s sprawling campus. The quadrangle surrounding the nucleus was two stories tall, but the main elevators had four stops: the two above-ground levels; the basement, which housed boiler rooms and storage; and the minus-one-hundred-meter level, which exited onto a staging area for the monorail used to travel along the twenty-seven-kilometer circumference of the collider tunnel. The tunnel itself ran under farmers’ fields, the outskirts of the Geneva airport, and the foothills of the Jura mountains …
In my novel, on this day, the Large Hadron Collider is turned on for the first time, and everyone on Earth blacks out for a period of two minutes; during that time, people foresee their futures.
One thing I couldn’t foresee a decade ago when the book came out was that ABC was going to make a TV series pilot based on my novel … but they have, and it’s great.
Another thing I couldn’t foresee was that Flash Forward would still be in print (and still selling well) a decade later.
Flash Forward won Canada’s Aurora Award as well as Spain’s Premio UPC de Ciencia Ficción (the world’s largest cash prize for science fiction writing), and it got me my first-ever starred review (denoting a book of exceptional merit — an honor also bestowed on my most recent novel, Wake ) in Publishers Weekly (in the April 19, 1999, edition), which called the novel “A creative, soul-searching exploration of fate, free will, and the nature of the universe,” and said, “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.”
And, well, I guess it has. :)
Happy Flash Forward day! My all our futures turn out to be bright!
You can read more about Flash Forward (including the rest of the opening chapters) here.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Bookspot Central reviews Wake, saying in part:
A very entertaining read. Sawyer has written a pretty fast paced novel with WWW: Wake. Deceptively so in fact. Although it does not slow the story down he has packed the text with references to developments in information technology, mathematics, physics, linguistics and a number of other fields. He does so without the reader having to understand every detail of the science he describes, the general idea is usually enough, but all this scientific and technical detail does create a second layer into this novel. Parts of the novel read like Oliver Sacks writing science fiction.
You can read the whole review here.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Bitten By Books reviews Wake today:
WWW: Wake provides a refreshing intersect of science and real life, of consciousness and perception, of imagination and potential. Sawyer puts the science back in science fiction and does it with panache rather than with a sledge hammer.
You can read the whole review here.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Pilots building early buzz
ABC’s sci-fi drama ‘Flash Forward’ among the hot projectsBy Nellie Andreeva
April 19, 2009, 11:00 PM ET
Although most pilots — especially on the comedy side — are yet to be completed, several projects are enjoying early buzz based on screenings, testings, dailies or the strength of their script and cast.ABC’s sci-fi drama “Flash Forward” starring Joseph Fiennes is a lock for a series order.
The article is here.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Wake book tour events:
# White Dwarf Books
3715 West 10th Avenue
Vancouver, British Columbia
Monday, April 20, 2009, 7:00 p.m.
http://www.deadwrite.com/wd.html
# Sentry Box
1835-10th Ave SW
Calgary, Alberta
Tuesday, April 21, 2009, 7:00 p.m.
www.sentrybox.com
“Sawyer continues to push the boundaries with his stories of the future made credible. His erudition, eclecticism, and masterly storytelling make this trilogy opener a choice selection.” — Library Journal
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
And yesterday, we hung out a lot with Dani Kollin and Eytan Kollin, the wonderful team of writing brothers, authors of The Unincorporated Man, just out from Tor.
(Chase played Leeta the Bajoran on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and Lawrence was Stonn the Vulcan in the classic Star Trek episode “Amok Time.”)
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
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.
[In Wake,] he 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. He paints a complete portrait of a blind teenage girl, and imagines in detail — from scratch — the inside of a new being.
Clashes between personalities and ideologies fuel the plot, but they’re not what the book is about. It’s about how cool science is.
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.
You can read the whole review here.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
So begins my essay “Seeing the Web,” now available at the Penguin USA website, as part of their promotion for my new novel Wake. Check it out.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Pictured: Robert J. Sawyer and Ann Wilkes at Rob’s signing at Borderlands Books in San Francisco on Monday, April 13, 2009.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
An important update on the Robert J. Sawyer event for Wake at the Waterloo Entertainment Centre in Waterloo, Ontario, on Thursday, May 21, at 7:30. I just learned this myself (I was not involved in the discussions between the bookseller and my publisher):
Waterloo’s venerable bookshop Words Worth Books is sponsoring this event, and paying the rental fee on the Waterloo Entertainment Centre.
The bookstore’s policy is to let people in for free who have bought the book (either at the start of the event, or in advance at Words Worth), and to charge $10 to those who just want to attend but not buy the book from Words Worth. (As you can see, they do this for most of their out-of-store events.)
I apologize for the inconvenience, and hope people will still come out for what I’m sure will be a great evening.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Library Journal has weighed in on my novel Wake:
Sf veteran Sawyer (Hominids) continues to push the boundaries with his stories of the future made credible. His erudition, eclecticism, and masterly storytelling make this trilogy opener a choice selection.
W00t!
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
And a lovely review it is, too. Of course, they’re reviewing the unabridged audio book version from Audible.com, but the review says lots of nice things about the novel. Particularly gratifying to me is this:
Is Caitlin’s blindness realistic? This is where my own personal experience comes into play. I’ve been legally blind since birth, although since I have some residual vision the comparison isn’t exact. Even so, it’s evident to me that Robert J. Sawyer has done his homework in this regard. Caitlin’s life is replete with all the trappings associated with blind life: white canes (which I just traded in for my first guide dog), text-to-speech screen-reading software, and braille displays. More importantly, Sawyer understands how the world is conceived and constructed for those of us with either no vision or limited vision.
And the reviewer (Seth Wilson) likes my characters, too:
Wake strikes a good balance between the cerebral and the emotional. [Caitlin] Decter is a complex and ultimately likable character. … The supporting cast of characters in Caitlin’s life are just as three-dimensional. … The interactions and conflicts between the characters are subtly portrayed, lending Wake a sense of realism despite the bizarre goings-on behind Caitlin’s eyes.
You can read the whole review here, and get Audible.com’s version of the novel here, and learn more about my novel here.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Just saw Penn & Teller’s live show here in Las Vegas. It was awesome — funny, amazing, thought-provoking. Nice to have a little break before the truly hectic part of the book tour begins!
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Uh-oh! The time for my event in Ottawa on April 29, 2009, is 7:30 p.m., not 7:00 p.m. as previously announced. Sorry about the confusion!
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Mysterious Galaxy, the wonderful science-fiction specialty bookstore in San Diego, California, shipped a carton of 24 copies of my Wake to Borderlands Books in San Francisco, where I was reading on Monday, April 13, and I autographed them all, so you’ll soon be able to get signed copies there, too. Yay!
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
I’ve now arrived in Las Vegas (where the weather is cold and rainy — dang!). Carolyn has joined me here. In two days the convention Xanadu Las Vegas, at which I’m Author Guest of Honor begins, but until then, we’re chillaxing. Tonight we go see Penn & Teller, and tomorrow we go see comedian Louie Anderson.
Pictured, left to right: Kelen Tuttle and Daniel Ratner of SLAC; Dr. Kaye Mason; the tunnel over Kelen’s shoulder runs for two miles into the distance
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Before my reading, I met a fellow named Sean, who seemed intrigued by my books. He bought a mass-market paperback of Calculating God — used! But he gave me the 56 cents in royalties I would have earned if he’d bought it new — two quarters, a nickel, and a penny. :)
It was also great meeting a young man named Don and his father; Don had never read until he’d discovered my books, starting with Starplex. It was very gratifying to meet someone who’d become a reader because of me!
I signed lots of stock of various titles at Borderlands, so you can still get an autographed copy of Wake or my other books if you stop by the store.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
