Robert J. Sawyer

Carolyn and I will both be 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 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

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

I’m the answer to clue 36-Down in the May 4, 2009, crossword puzzle in The Globe and Mail: Canada’s National Newspaper. The clue is:

Robert ____ (renowned Canadian novelist)
You can access it online here.

Many thanks to my old friend CBC Radio producer Doug MacDonald (who produced “What If? An Exploration of Alternative Histories,” a two-hour Ideas documentary series I wrote and narrated in 1990) for bringing this to my attention.

Update: Holy cow! Turns out I was also independently the answer to a clue in the crossword puzzle in The Toronto Star on Saturday, May 2: 76-Down was “Science-fiction author, first writer-in-residence at the Canadian Light Source (Saskatoon).” How cool is that?

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

Hardcore Nerdity discusses the Toronto launch of Robert J. Sawyer’s Wake.

Pictured: Mark Askwith, Robert J. Sawyer

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

Robert J. Sawyer is giving an invited talk entitled “Webmind: When the Web Wakes Up” at the at the University of Pennsylvania‘s Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, 3810 Walnut Street in Philadelphia, this Wednesday, May 6, 2009, from noon to 1:15 p.m.

The talk deals with some of the science behind Sawyer’s current novel, Wake.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

Just got out of a press screening of the new J.J. Abrams Star Trek movie. It totally, totally rocked, and succeeds 100% at its dual goals both of appealing to hardcore Trek fans and also being totally enjoyable and accessible to those who have never seen any Trek before. This thing is going to have legs; it’ll be one of the huge summer blockbusters of 2009.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

A nice review on the CA Reviews blog of my Wake, which says in part:

While this is clearly a novel of big ideas, the author never neglects the individual characters. Caitlin, her parents, Dr. Kuroda, and even the kids at school all seem very realistic. Allowing us to follow Caitlin’s story from her point of view works perfectly. She’s a teenager, so she’s moody and very human; but she’s a very smart girl, applying knowledge to new situations and grasping abstract concepts with relative ease. She’s a great character, with flaws and a sense of humor.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

Canada’s wonderful bookstore chain McNally Robinson has been a great supporter of my work over the years, and I’ve become friends with many of their booksellers (including Kent Pollard and Ian Goodwillie in Saskatoon, and Chadwick Ginther in Winnipeg).

In honour of the recent release of my 18th novel Wake, McNally Robinson has named me their “Author of the Month” for May 2009 — woohoo! (That means endcap displays in the stores chain-wide, promotion in their print newsletter, and being featured on their website.)

Tomorrow afternoon, I’m going to drop by the new McNally Robinson store in Toronto to sign stock, and on Saturday, May 15, I’m signing at the chain’s flagship store in Winnipeg at 2:00 p.m.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

The terrific online SF magazine SciFi Dimensions has a meaty podcast interview with Robert J. Sawyer right here. Among other things, we talk about my new novel Wake, the forthcoming Flash Forward TV series, and author Nick DiChario, whom I publish under my Robert J. Sawyer Books imprint.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

Just bought Digital Barbarism: A Writer’s Manifesto by Mark Halperin and am very much looking forward to reading it. From the publisher:

Renowned novelist Mark Helprin offers a ringing Jeffersonian defense of private property in the age of digital culture, with its degradation of thought and language, and collectivist bias against the rights of individual creators. Mark Helprin anticipated that his 2007 New York Times op-ed piece about the extension of the term of copyright would be received quietly, if not altogether overlooked. Within a week, the article had accumulated 750,000 angry comments. He was shocked by the breathtaking sense of entitlement demonstrated by the commenters, and appalled by the breadth, speed, and illogic of their responses.

Helprin realized how drastically different this generation is from those before it. The Creative Commons movement and the copyright abolitionists, like the rest of their generation, were educated with a modern bias toward collaboration, which has led them to denigrate individual efforts and in turn fueled their sense of entitlement to the fruits of other people’s labors. More important, their selfish desire to “stick it” to the greedy corporate interests who control the production and distribution of intellectual property undermines not just the possibility of an independent literary culture but threatens the future of civilization itself.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

How cool is that! Former Canadian prime minister Jean Chrétien is on the same plane as me; we’re both flying to Toronto from Ottawa (and I’m finally getting home after 18 days on the road). Tonight: the big launch party for Wake at Dominion on Queen, 500 Queen Street East, Toronto, at 7:00 p.m.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

One could argue that twenty-five years ago today, the modern Canadian science-fiction movement was born.

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:

• reviewing submissions from agents and individual authors;
• commissioning books from writers already on our list and those not yet on our list;
• presenting proposals to the editorial board;
• working with production and marketing personnel to ensure that acquired titles meet profit and sales targets;
• working with authors to ensure quality and timeliness of manuscripts;
• seeing projects through the editorial, production, and marketing phases of the publishing process.
• Should acquire a minimum of 12 books per year;
• Should manage the publication of approximately 15 titles per year.

Qualifications:

• Strong academic background (preferably a Master’s degree in a humanities subject); university degree or equivalent required.
• Several years of experience in publishing, specifically working in Editorial.
• Proven track record of acquiring and editing books in the assigned areas of specialization.

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

Fifteen years ago today, “Evolution,” the final episode of Prisoners of Gravity, the wonderful program about science fiction and comic books produced by TVOntario, aired.

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.

Pictured: Rick Green (above) and Robert J. Sawyer (below) on Prisoners of Gravity‘s “Aritifical Intelligence” episode

The Robert J. Sawyer web site

Montreal Reading!
Librairie Paragraphe Bookstore
2220 McGill College Avenue
Montreal, Quebec
Tuesday, April 28, 2009, 6:30 p.m.
paragraphbooks.com

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

More about Wake

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

I neither confirm nor deny this rumour, but The Hollywood Reporter had an article yesterday that said this:

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

Right here.

And all my Audible audiobooks are here.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

Photos from the book tour stops in Vancouver (at White Dwarf) and Calgary (at Sentry Box:

A packed house at White Dwarf. Photo by kc dyer.

Part of the crowd at Sentry Box. Calgary photos by Kirstin Morrell.

The shirt I’m wearing depicts the famous S. Harris cartoon that figures a couple of times in the plot of Wake, including its first appearance here:

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

Today is Flash Forward day!

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

From The Hollywood Reporter:

Pilots building early buzz
ABC’s sci-fi drama ‘Flash Forward’ among the hot projects

By 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

Cool! See here and here.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

Xanadu Las Vegas, the convention I’m Author Guest of Honor at right now, has been great fun so far. Today I gave a talk on writing, attended talks by Chase Masterson (above) and Lawrence Montaigne (below, with me and Carolyn), watched Chase’s excellent new movie Yesterday was a Lie, and had a wonderful three-hour Chinese dinner with Chase, James Kerwin (who wrote and directed the movie), Bob Patula (a programmer who wrote the math engine for the Excel spreadsheet), and Bob’s wife Melanie — a wonderful time.

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

The National Post — a major Canadian daily newspaper distributed coast-to-coast and headquartered in Calgary — has a wonderful review by Michel Basilières of my novel Wake today, which says in part:

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

The blog “Science Fiction and Other Oddysseys” just posted a nice interview with me conducted by Ann Wilkes. You can read it here, and more about my novel Wake, which I discuss in the interview (among other things) here.

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