Robert J. Sawyer

At least I think they’re snappy. I was asked by a magazine doing a piece about Wake for a one-liner they could use as a teaser. I gave them five, and told them to take their pick:

Ray Kurzweil says the singularity is near. Actually, it’s all around us.

The World Wide Web will soon have as many interconnections as a human brain. What happens then?

Consciousness is an emergent property of complexity. Our minds were the first example, but they won’t be the last.

Artificial intelligence doesn’t necessarily require a programmer.

Human intelligence didn’t require an intelligent designer — so why should we suppose artificial intelligence will?

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

(Many thanks to J.F. Lewis, who runs the SFWA Pressbook — see his own news here.)

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

So, we have six major general-interest regional science-fiction conventions left in Canada: VCON in Vancouver, Con-Version in Calgary, Pure Speculation in Edmonton, KeyCon in Winnipeg, Ad Astra in Toronto, and Con*Cept in Montreal.

And, incredibly, three of them are on the same weekend in 2009! VCON, Pure Speculation, and Con*Cept are all the first weekend in October. Don’t you guys talk? I know there’s a Canadian con-runners mailing list, for Pete’s sake.

VCON and Pure Speculation are definitely close enough physically that there are significant numbers of people who would have attended both — and there are crazy folk like me who will go to any major Canadian con if scheduling permits regardless of its location.

This just makes zero sense, guys. No wonder con attendance is shrinking coast-to-coast.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

Sadly, I’ve had to bow out of Norwescon in Seattle this month. It’s a great con, and I’m very sorry to miss it. I’ll still be at the other cons and festivals I’m scheduled for this year: FilKONtario, Xanadu Las Vegas, The Frye Festival, Keycon, Readercon, the Montreal Worldcon, Con-Version, VCON, the Surrey International Writers Conference, and Astronomicon.

My schedule — including book-tour events for Wake — is here.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

Here’s an episode guide.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

In its starred review, denoting a book of exceptional merit, Publishers Weekly says, “The wildly thought-provoking first installment of Sawyer’s WWW trilogy explores the origins and emergence of consciousness. The thematic diversity — and profundity — makes this one of Sawyer’s strongest works to date.”

I will be making appearances in San Francisco and across Canada promoting the book. All events are free and open to the public — please come out and say hello, and please help spread the word!

# Bookstore Reading and Signing
Borderlands Books
866 Valencia Street
San Francisco, California
Monday, April 13, 2009, 7:00 p.m.
borderlands-books.com

# Bookstore Reading and Signing
White Dwarf Books
3715 West 10th Avenue
Vancouver, British Columbia
Monday, April 20, 2009, 7:00 p.m.
deadwrite.com/wd.html

# Bookstore Reading and Signing
Sentry Box
1835-10th Ave SW
Calgary, Alberta
Tuesday, April 21, 2009, 7:00 p.m.
sentrybox.com

# Bookstore Reading and Signing
Audrey’s Books
10702 Jasper Avenue
Edmonton, Alberta
Thursday, April 23, 2009, 7:30 p.m.
audreys.ca

# Bookstore Reading and Signing
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, 7:00 p.m.
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

# Bookstore Reading and Signing
McNally Robinson
1120 Grant Avenue
Winnipeg, Manitoba
Saturday, May 16, 2009, 2:00 p.m.
mcnallyrobinson.com/winnipeg-events

# Reading & Signing
Waterloo Entertainment Centre
24 King Street North
Waterloo, Ontario
Thursday, May 21, 2009, 7:30 p.m.
Hosted by Words Worth Books
(Free admission if you buy the book at the beginning of the event from Words Worth, or in advance from their store; otherwise, $10 to help defray facilities rental — tickets at the door or in advance at the store)
wordsworthbooks.com

# Bookstore Reading and Signing
Chapters
1425 Kingsway Road
Sudbury, Ontario
Monday, May 25, 2009, 7:00 p.m.
chapters.indigo.ca

# Bookstore Reading and Signing
McNally Robinson
3130 8th Street East
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan
Thursday, June 4, 2009, 7:30 p.m.
mcnallyrobinson.com/saskatoon_events

# Bookstore Reading and Signing
Book & Brier Patch
4065 Albert Street
Regina, Saskatchewan
Saturday, June 20, 2009, 2:00 p.m.
bookbrier.ca

More about WAKE

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

USA Today yesterday had the first official photo from the ABC series pilot based on my novel Flash Forward (above; click for larger version; photo by ABC’s Ron Tom), and in their article they say:

There are still a few big bets [for the fall TV season]:

• ABC is spending $7 million on Flash Forward, an ambitious series based on the sci-fi novel that it hopes is the next Lost. (Everyone blacks out for 2 minutes and 17 seconds and has a vision of the future.)

The coverage at USA Today Online is here.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

SciFi Dimensions has just posted a lovely review of my Calculating God on the occasion of it being reissued in trade paperback by Tor Books. The review concludes:

“If sci-fi is literature that leaves you thinking as it thoroughly entertains you, then Sawyer’s Hugo and Campbell Award finalist Calculating God is a paragon of the genre. Sawyer treats with heady themes that seldom are explored so well and so memorably. Don’t miss it.

You can read the whole review here.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

I’m Special Guest at FilKONtario this weekend in Toronto, Canada’s largest filking convetion. Come on out and join the fun!

I’m particularly thrilled because my friends Randy McCharles and Val King are coming all the way from Calgary for the con. W00t!

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

K. Stoddard Hayes, who did the recent SciFi.com interviews with me about Flash Forward, has some nice things to say about the novel in her blog here.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

Starplex was the only novel in its year to be nominated for both the Hugo and the Nebula, and it won Canada’s Aurora Award and CompuServe’s Homer Award, and was a finalist for Japan’s Seiun Award.

This brings to eleven the number of my novels that have, or will have, unabridged audiobook editions. I’m absolutely thrilled, needless to say.

Asimov’s Science Fiction: “Sawyer’s latest should gladden the hearts of readers who complain that nobody’s writing real science fiction anymore, the kind of story that has faster-than-light spaceships and far-off planets and interstellar combat and all the neat things they gobbled up so greedily when `Doc’ Smith was dealing them out. Here’s a story with plenty of slam-bang action but no shortage of material to attract thinking readers, either. Sawyer deftly juggles half a dozen sweeping questions of cosmology (not to mention everyday ethics and morality) while keeping the story moving ahead full speed. His scientific ideas are nicely integrated into the plot, yet they also hint at larger metaphorical levels. Enjoy.”

Analog Science Fiction and Fact: “Mind-boggling. A complaint often heard these days is that there’s not enough `sense of wonder’ in today’s science fiction. Robert J. Sawyer’s Starplex ought to lay that complaint to rest for quite a while.”

Gregory Benford, author of Timescape: “Complex but swift, inventive but real-feeling, with ideas coming thick and fast. For big-time interstellar adventure, look no farther.”

The Halifax Chronicle-Herald: “Starplex appears to be traditional science fiction — it takes place aboard a spaceship, and several characters are extraterrestrial — but it’s actually a rumination on several very deep questions, including: Where did we come from? Where are we going? And the deepest of the deep, Is there a God?”

Library Journal: “An epic hard-science adventure tempered by human concerns. Highly recommended.”

Science Fiction Chronicle: “Excellent hard SF, with Sawyer tossing stars, people and time travel around with reckless abandon. One of the best SF novels of the year.”

Sci-Fi Weekly: “An audacious engineering effort that makes Larry Niven’s Ringworld look like a high-school science project.”

The Toronto Star: “Here, at last, is an ambitious attempt to exploit the possibilities that the genre is capable of.”

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

… are here.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

See David Halpert’s blog here.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

Ad Astra, Toronto’s annual general-interest SF convention, wrapped up today.

It was one of the best Ad Astras in years, and I had a great time. Highlights included drinks Friday night with David G. Hartwell, Kathryn Cramer, Terence M. Green, Merle Casci, and their children; giving a standing-room-only reading from Wake, a great panel today on ebooks, and a Robert J. Sawyer newsgroup luncheon.

Herb Kauderer took some photos of the luncheon:

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

• Book Launch & Birthday Celebration
  The Clock Tower Brew Pub
  575 Bank Street
  Ottawa, Ontario
  Wednesday, April 29, 2009, at 7:00 p.m.
  Book sales provided by Perfect Books
  clocktower.ca
  perfectbooks.ca
• Book Launch
  Dominion on Queen (pub)
  500 Queen Street East
  Toronto, Ontario
  Thursday, April 30, 2009, 7:00 p.m.
  Book sales provided by Bakka-Phoenix Books
  dominiononqueen.com
  bakkaphoenixbooks.com

(I was born in Ottawa, and I live in Greater Toronto.)

Click here for a printable copy of the Toronto invitation (not that you need one to attend — all are welcome at both events!)

I’ll also be in Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Saskatoon, Regina, Winnipeg, Sudbury, Waterloo, and Moncton. See here for info about those events.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

It’s a good list, and my hat’s off to all the finalists (sincerely — I had nothing that was eligible last year).

I’m particularly thrilled, though, by the nominations of James Alan Gardner for best novella, and my writing student Tony Pi for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.

(That’s my Hugo trophy for Hominids above; this year’s design hasn’t been unveiled yet.)

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

I try to make it to as many major regional SF conventions in Canada as I can each year. This year, I’ll be at VCON in Vancouver, Con-Version in Calgary, Keycon in Winnpeg, the World Science Fiction Convention in Montreal, and, of course, at Toronto’s Ad Astra, which begins tomorrow (not to mention Toronto’s FilKONtario the following weekend, at which I am Author Guest of Honour).

And — you heard it here first, folks: special last-minute guests at Ad Astra this year: Dr. David G. Hartwell, Hugo Award-winning senior editor at Tor Books, and Kathryn Cramer, multiple Hugo Award-nominated co-editor of Year’s Best SF, The Hard SF Renaissance, and The New York Review of Science Fiction.

I’ll be doing a reading from Wake Saturday at 1:00 p.m. in the Crowne Room; the rest of my programming schedule is here.

Ad Astra website.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

My favorite Windows file manager, ZTreeWin, has just been updated to version 2.0, and now supports Unicode filenames. The latest version works with NT, 2000, XP, and Vista, and will work with Windows 7 when it’s out. Get it here.

I love, love, love this program.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

At least, The Easton Press thinks so. Just got word that they’ll be doing a signed, numbered, limited leather-bound edition of Wake. Cool!

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

I have separate editors in New York and Toronto. Ginjer Buchanan, my New York editor at Ace, accepted Watch on Tuesday, March 17, and today Laura Shin, my editor at Penguin Group (Canada), accepted it, too, saying, “Watch is wonderful!”

Yay!

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

David G. Hartwell, my long-time editor at Tor, took this shot of me at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts in Orlando last week. (And, yes, it was cool enough there that I was wearing a fleece much of the time.)

His other shots from the conference are here.

Photo: Robert J. Sawyer

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

And today, I got my Fictionwise royalty check — cool.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

Hex or Hoax?

Tues., March 24, 2009, 10:30 PM ET / 7:30 PM PT coast-to-coast in Canada on Vision TV

Jinxes, curses, hexes, the evil eye: many cultures possess their own brands of black magic. Are there really people who can harness dark forces to strike down their enemies? In this episode, Halifax filmmaker Donna Davies enters the world of sinister sorcery to learn about Newfoundland witches’ spells, Haitian voodoo rituals and cutting edge contemporary research into the science of the curse. Produced by Sorcery Films Ltd.

Host: Robert J. Sawyer

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

Part 2 (of 2) of SciFi.com’s interview with me about the ABC adaptation of my novel Flash Forward is now up right here.

The interviewer is Karen Hayes.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

Above: David S. Goyer and Brannon Braga on the set of Flash Forward, based on the novel by Robert J. Sawyer

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

“Peking Man” was originally published as the lead story in Dark Destiny III: Children of Dracula edited by my friend Edward E. Kramer, and it won Canada’s Aurora Award for Best English short story of the year.

Above: Peking Man as he appears at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing — setting, incidentally, for part of my new novel Wake.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

… despite the “sexual innuendos.” So says Flamingnet, a YA book review site with YA reviewers. You can read the 17-year-old reviewer’s thoughts here. (Rating: 10 out of 10.)

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

So, I spent a lovely afternoon here in Orlando, in the shade by the pool, working on revisions to Watch, the second volume of my WWW trilogy.

My beta-test readers have been getting back to me, and I must say the response has been extremely positive, but these comments from one particular reader made my day:

The last ten pages or so of this novel had me exceptionally transported. When I finished the last page, I paused; and the next thought I had was, “He’s fucked. How the hell is he going to top this?” But I’m looking forward to finding out.

I spent a while trying to decide if this was the best “middle book” of a trilogy ever. The only thing that I could come up with that comes close is the middle book of F. M. Busby’s Demu Trilogy … Watch is a great book.

:)

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

The Friday, March 20, 2009, edition of the Ottawa Citizen — the largest circulation newspaper in Canada’s capital city — has an op-ed piece by me entitled “All Screens Are Not Created Equal” about multitasking, computer use, and attention deficit disorder. At some point it will go behind the subscribers-only wall, but right now it’s free to read online right here.

An op-ed is a signed opinion piece that appears opposite the editoral in a newspaper; it is an opinion piece by someone other than the paper’s editorial writer. You can find older op-eds by me here (scroll down).

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site