Robert J. Sawyer

I’m lucky, and I know it; most of my colleagues aren’t.

Gary Karbon discussed this last year in the blog Culture Feast:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

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Sharon Fitzhenry, the publisher of Fitzhenry & Whiteside, parent company of Red Deer Press, which publishes my Robert J. Sawyer Books imprint, just called.

The Canada Council for the Arts has objected — probably quite rightly, from their point of view — to me publishing Americans under my imprint while the Canada Council helps to subsidize the costs.

So all future books under the Robert J. Sawyer Books imprint will be by Canadian authors only.

In the past, I published the absolutely brilliant Letters from the Flesh by Marcos P. Donnelly of Brockport, New York; two wonderful novels (A Small and Remarkable Life and Valley of Day-Glo) by Nick DiChario of Rochester, New York; and the terrific anthology The Savage Humanists edited by Prof. Fiona Kelleghan of the University of Miami with (except for a story by me) all American contributors. They’re great books, and I’m very proud of all of them.

Next up from Robert J. Sawyer: Distant Early Warnings: Canada’s Best Science Fiction, edited by me and with 100% Canadian content. That should make the Canada Council happy. :)

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They broke up today.

Steve Page, the lead singer, has left the band “to pursue a solo career.”

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

Today’s New York Times has an op-ed piece by Roy Blount, Jr., president of the Authors Guild, entitled The Kindle Swindle?

The Authors Guild has also put up a web page with demos of the Kindle’s text-to-speech (TTS) feature here.

Oh, and by the way, not on this topic, but I occassionally do op-eds myself for major Canadian newspapers. An op-ed piece is an opinion piece or essay that appears opposite the editorial in a newspaper — it’s a featured opinion piece by someone other than the newspaper’s staff editorial writer. I’ve been commissioned to do op-ed pieces by both The Globe and Mail (Canada’s national newspaper) and The Ottawa Citizen (the largest-circulation newspaper in Canada’s capital city):

• A Bright Idea for Atheists
• Michael Crichton’s Blending of Fact and Fiction
• The Private Sector in Space
• Stephen Hawking’s Call to Colonize Space

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

OMG, if you like 1950s and 1960s SF movies and TV shows as much as I do, you have to run and buy The Saucer Fleet by Jack Hagerty and Jon Rogers.

It’s a painstaking, loving, profusely illustrated tribute to the great screen flying saucers of SF: the C57-D from Forbidden Planet, the Jupiter 2 from Lost in Space, the ship from The Invaders, the manta-ray saucers from The War of the Worlds, Exeter’s craft from This Island Earth, and more. Tons of detail, tons of screen captures, tons of blueprints, tons of trivia, all in colour on glossy paper — many hours of reading/browsing pleasure.

List price is $59.95 (and worth it!), but if you’re in Canada grab it from Amazon.ca for just Cdn$37.77 (Amazon.ca says “this title has not yet been released” — but it has; my copy arrived from them today.)

By the way, the publisher is Canada’s own Apogee Books, famed for its Apollo Mission Reports series (but the book is available worldwide). I love, love, love this book!

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

I don’t just host this week’s episode of Supernatural Investigator on Vision TV — I also do the voice-over narration throughout the episode.

Tonight’s topic: Mayan crystal skulls. It airs at 10:30 p.m. Eastern time / 7:30 p.m. Pacific.

Pictured: Robert J. Sawyer and the extinct species known as the newspaper book-review section editor

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This is my 19th novel — a number that frankly astonishes me. :)

I’m going to reward myself by watching another episode of Battlestar Galactica on DVD tonight …

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Publishers Weekly has given Wake a “starred review,” their highest distinction: starred reviews denote books of exceptional merit. The review, which appears in the February 23, 2009, edition, says in part:

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.

As my character Caitlin would say, “Sweet!”

(This is my second consecutive starred review in PW; they also gave a star to Rollback.)

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Woot! eReader, my favourite ebook application — recently released for the iPhone — is now in beta for the BlackBerry Storm. Now, if they’d just get a version for an e-ink reader to market …

eReader has a fair and livable DRM scheme tied to the user, rather than the user’s hardware (unlike Mobipocket), and is much less wonky/buggy than Mobipocket (which still can’t reliably do something as simple as paging backward through a file).

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There’s a mini writing retreat going on at Chez Sawyer right now, and it’s all about sequels. Hayden Trenholm is here, visiting from Ottawa, and he’s working on his laptop at my kitchen table, sprinting towards the end of his revisions on Steel Whispers, the terrific sequel to his hard-boiled SF novel Defining Diana from Bundoran Press. His deadline is eight days away, on March 1.

And I’m doing a final top-down polish on Watch, the sequel to Wake — and my deadline is (gak!) 72 hours away …

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It’s complicated (sigh). I always intended the title to be one word, Flashforward, since it’s a play on the word flashback, which is a single word.

But when designing the book cover, Tor’s art department split it into two words on the cover and the spine (without anyone asking me if it was okay), but left it as one on the back cover, and the interior designer left it as one everywhere, too.

David S. Goyer, Brannon Braga and I all discussed this in L.A. back in 2007, and all agreed that the title should be one word logically, but people keep referencing it as two words, because that’s what they see on the book cover, and that ended up being the spelling used for the TV series title.

I’ve given up the fight: I’m now referring to my book as Flash Forward — two words. But it really was a decison the author, not the art department, should have made.

(For Pete’s sake, “Flashforward” as as single word is only one letter longer than “Calculating” and just two letters longer than “Frameshift,” both of which they managed to fit on a single line on other covers of mine …)

More about the novel formerly known as Flashforward is here.

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Over at Locus Online, Mark Kelly has updated the indispensable Locus Index to Science Fiction Awards with results through the end of 2008 (and he’s also given it a very attractive facelift).

Here’s the entry on me.

And nice to see here that I’m in 8th place overall for total award wins in the history of the field, and am in the top 30 overall in total number of nominations.

(And, cough, cough, if you do the math, you’ll see that I have the highest ratio of nominations to wins, at 36%, of anyone in the top 30 [that is, 36% of the time when I’m nominated, I win].)

And, why, yes, my mother is a statistician. How could you tell? ;)

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Carolyn and I aren’t down there yet — I’ve got a novel to finish that’s due on Monday — but we are going down in 12 days to watch them film the big scene in which the main character discovers that this crazy planet full of apes was Earth all along, and —

Well, actually, no — and I can’t tell you what is being filmed (shh! no spoilers!). But it’s all very, very cool … ;)

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I have a great fondness for Greece: I love its history, and visited the country in 1978, and, of course, the central symbolism of my first novel, Golden Fleece, is drawn from Greek myth, and the plight of Theodosios Procopides in Flash Forward is a riff on classic Greek tragedy.

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The American Heritage English Dictionary says it’s two words: “light bulb.”

Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary says it’s two words: “light bulb.”

But Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary says it’s one word: “lightbulb.”

When a book is being copyedited, the copyeditor must specify which dictionary he or she is conforming to, unless (a) the publisher specifies one, or (b) the author specifies one. But regardless of who chooses it, all spellings in a given book are supposed to conform to a single dictionary’s usage (and, yes, I know: Emerson was probably right when he said, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”).

I always specify in my notes to the copyeditor the one I’m using, and when I was at Tor I got into the habit of specifying Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (first the 10th edition, now the 11th, known in the trade as Web 10 and Web 11 respectively), which was that publisher’s preference, and I’ve carried that over to the WWW trilogy.

And so in Watch, the one and only reference to an incandescent lighting device is going to be spelled as a single word (even though it looks wrong to me). But, man, you’d think we’d have no ambiguity about such a common term at this late date!

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

Quill & Quire Online just reported:

The Harper Tories have promised to maintain existing funding levels for the country’s magazine industry ($75.5-million annually), but guidelines announced this week for the new Canada Periodical Fund could put Canada’s small-run literary magazines in jeopardy.

The new Canadian Heritage-run program merges two other federal funding bodies – the Canada Magazine Fund and the Publications Assistance Program – in an effort to streamline operations and tie support of the periodical sector to “the reading choices of Canadians.” This new system won’t become a reality until at least 2010, but when it does, funds will be allocated using a formula based on paid circulation, and magazines with less then 5,000 annual subscribers will be shut out altogether.

(For my non-Canadian readers, Harper is Stephen Harper, Canada’s current prime minister; the Tories are the ruling, but minority, Conservative party.)

What a typically conservative approach: let’s give the money to those who need it least.

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As I mentioned before, my Hugo Award-nominated Rollback is currently the “One Book, One Brant” reading choice for all of Brant county in Ontario. The Paris Star has a nice article about that in the current edition, which you can read here.

Pictured: Kelly Dinsmore, Mayor Rod Eddy, and Sharon Briggs reading the hardcover of Rollback (click for slightly larger version; photo by Casandra Bellefeuille)

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At what point in your creative process did you decide that Wake et al., would be a trilogy? And was it the same point for your first trilogy (or 2nd) or was the first one more of the publisher’s choice (as in “this is too long to publish as a single novel; let’s break it up into a trilogy”)?

Has your plotting evolved over time to be more aware of this sort of thing?

My answer is might be of interest to other writers, so I’m sharing it here:

I’ve sold twenty novels, and almost half of them — nine books — are parts of trilogies:

The Quintaglio Ascension: Far-Seer, Fossil Hunter, Foreigner.

The Neanderthal Parallax: Hominids, Humans, Hybrids

WWW: Wake, Watch, and Wonder.

(As it happens, right now, I’m in the final few hours of polishing Watch before submitting it to my publishers; it’s due on Monday.)

Each of these trilogies had a different genesis.

I wrote Far-Seer as a standalone — no intention of doing a series (I’d even killed off the main character in the last chapter).

When it was done, my agent said let’s try to sell a sequel, and we did (as with the first episode of Hill Street Blues, where Hill and Renko were gunned down in cold blood, my character’s fatal wounds suddenly became merely serious injuries, although I, at least, had the luxury or rewriting the ending so it was apparent that he’d lived).

And then the publisher decided to ask me for another sequel after the first two were done. But after that, I wanted to write something very different (With humans! On Earth! In the near future!), and so I wrote The Terminal Experiment instead of continuing the series (which I think ended at a fine point, anyway).

For the Neanderthal Parallax trilogy, it was actually my then-British publisher who said the only things selling in the UK were trilogies or on-going series, and so my next project should be a trilogy; otherwise, Hominids would have been a standalone. The original working title for the standalone book would, in fact, have been Neanderthal Parallax.)

After I turned in the third book, Hybrids, my editor, David G. Hartwell, said I could go on writing Neanderthal books as long as I wanted to — but I wanted very much to do something different at that point. (For more on this, see my essay Commiting Trilogy: The Origins of “The Neanderthal Parallax”.)

For the WWW trilogy, I actually sold it as a standalone (called Webmind) to Tor, and after struggling with it for over a year found I just couldn’t do it as a single book; the idea was too big.

So I had a meeting with David G. Hartwell (my editor) and Tom Doherty (Tor’s publisher) and told them that, and said I’d like to fulfill the contract instead with a new standalone, and wrote Rollback instead. I then re-envisioned Webmind as a trilogy (writing an outline for it that now bears very little resemblance to what I’m actually doing — I really hate doing outlines).

If I had my druthers, I’d never write sequels or trilogies — at least not one book after another; I much prefer writing standalones. But sometimes that’s not what the market wants, and sometimes the idea can’t be handled properly in a single book.

On the other hand, part of what I hate about trilogies is working back-to-back on the same project for years: I take a year or so to write a book, and spending three years in a row on any set of characters is enough.

But to my surprise I was recently asked by David Hartwell if I’d consider writing more Quintaglio books (and I might), and I would indeed like to write more about the Neanderthals at some point.

So, who knows about the future? (Answer, according to the Lawgiver in the last Planet of the Apes movie: “Perhaps only the dead.” But I digress …)

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Snoot Entertainment in L.A. — the company that has my hard-boiled SF novella “Identity Theft” under option — has a 3D CGI SF film called Battle for Terra coming up, and the trailer just hit Moviefone today. Check it out!

(Identity Theft will be live action; proudcer Jessica Wu reports that they’re working on concept art for it now.)

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OMG. So, with one of the Chapters gift cards I got for Christmas, I bought Quark — the complete series — on DVD. This science-fiction sitcom from 1978 was created by Buck Henry and starred Richard Benjamin. I fondly remembered it, but …

Wow, is it ever crappy. Obvious, dumb jokes; intrusive laugh track; terrible sets. Holy cow. Television has come a looooong way in 30 years! I’ve seen way better student films or YouTube videos — and this was a major network series!

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… they cut the check! I received today the big purchase-price payment from ABC for the TV rights to my novel Flash Forward. Woot!

Filming of the series pilot begins in four days, on Saturday, February 21. Carolyn and I have booked our flights to L.A., and will be going down to watch part of it.

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I’ve often taught science-fiction writing in week-long courses at the Banff Centre in the ski-resort town of Banff, Alberta. I’m sure my students remember The Banff Book & Art Den — the one bookstore in Banff — as fondly as I do.

Quill & Quire is reporting that the store closed its doors for good last week … another great independent gone, but, interestingly, not because of direct in-the-same town competition from a big chain (although, of course, as a resort town, lots of its business was from people who were just passing through and did have options to shop elsewhere). It was a beautiful store, on multiple levels, with lovely, polished hardwood floors. I’ll miss it.

(And Calgary — the nearest big city — lost one of its great booksellers recently, too.)

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No, it’s not a scam — it’s the Canadian government’s annual kickback to Canadian writers to compensate them for their lost royalties on copies of their books circulated in libraries.

Just about every Western country except the United States has such a scheme. I’ve got so many books, I easily get the maximum payout each year (which this year was $2,800), but authors with smaller oeuvres can still count on getting something.

If you’re a Canadian author, and you haven’t yet registered your books, now is the time. You’ve already missed out on payment for 2008, but registration for 2009 is on right now, and only goes until May 1.

Official details are here, a lengthy blog post by me from three years ago on this topic is here, and a now-dated article I wrote about this system — called The Public Lending Right — is here (the biggest change in the system between what I described in that 1992 article and how it works today is back then they surveyed ten randomly chosen libraries, and now they survey seven).

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Over on Facebook, there’s a meme going around about posting “25 Random Things” about yourself, and tagging 25 other people to do the same. I didn’t tag anyone else, but here’s the list I posted today:

1. I am, by birth, a dual US-Canadian citizen.

2. My childhood imaginary friend wasn’t a person or an animal. It was a magic hook that descended down from the sky on an infinitely long string.

3. I was in a car accident when I was 10. I don’t drive. The two facts are connected.

4. My nickname, until I was 10, was Robin. I kind of regret that I rebelled against it; I think Robin Sawyer is a cool name for a writer. No one calls me Bob, but a few close friends call me either RJ, Robbie, or The Robman.

5. When I was a kid I couldn’t stand pizza. Now it’s my favourite food.

6. My parents wouldn’t let me play with toy guns or watch violent TV shows. The Man from UNCLE was banned in our house.

7. I was blind for six days when I was 12.

8. I was raised a Unitarian, and if I’m in one of those situations where you have to name a religious affiliation, and can’t say “none,” that’s the one I specify.

9. When I was in my early teens, I thought Barbi Benton was the most beautiful woman in the world. [That’s Barbi above.]

10. My very first publication was a letter to the editor in The Toronto Star in praise of Canada’s switch to the metric system. I think I was 14.

11. Until I was 15 or so, I flat-out refused to wear blue jeans, and when bell-bottoms were in fashion, I wouldn’t wear them, either; I was adamant about not conforming.

12. My first girlfriend (whom I started dating when I was 15) is now my sister-in-law. (I married her sister.)

13. Up until my last year of high school, I thought I was going to be a paleontologist; I still love dinosaurs.

14. I was my high-school valedictorian, editor of the high-school newspaper, and was the voice (alternating with a female student) that read the school’s morning announcements in my last year of high school; I loved high school. :)

15. I don’t have my wisdom teeth, but I do have my tonsils.

16. In Grade 11, I wrote an essay for school on “Dramatic Irony in Oedipus Rex,” and got an A+. In second-year university, pressed for time, and studying the same play in English class, I handed in the same essay again, and got a B.

17. I have flat feet.

18. These days, I host the TV series Supernatural Investigator on Vision TV — but even the people at Vision don’t know that in 1983-84, I was one of the six people who were part of The Rosewell Group, the consulting team that spearheaded the creation of Vision TV; it was my first big writing contract, and I spent nine months on it. The leader of the group was the Hon. David MacDonald, who had been Secretary of State under Joe Clark.

19. In the 1980s, I was a team captain in The Canadian Inquisition pub trivia league; recently, the league had a round of questions about me — how cool is that!

20. I had a vasectomy when I turned 40. It was easy and relatively painless.

21. I’ve never really been a fan of major TV or film stars, but I love character actors, especially from the 1970s. My favourites are Darren McGavin and Alan Oppenheimer — I’ll watch them in anything. And I’ve always thought William Shatner is a terrific actor — so there.

22. I am a huge fan of folk singer Pete Seeger (a taste I inherited from my parents); this will become apparent to those who read my next novel, Watch. [That’s Pete Seeger’s Greatest Hits below.]

23. I sponsor a boy in Guatemala through Foster Parents Plan; his name is Victor Hugo (really!), and I have a picture of him on my refrigerator door.

24. Although I love science fiction, many of my favourite movies aren’t SF at all: Casablanca, Judgment at Nuremberg, To Kill a Mockingbird, Born Free, The Candidate, The Paper Chase, and Witness, for instance.

25. I own six Scrabble sets, all different: deluxe rotating, various portable ones, and so on — and yet I’m lucky if I get to play two games a year. Just no time — which is the story of my life!

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

An interesting phenomenon has emerged with discussion of ebook readers. You see it over on the iRex discussion forum, and in the hardware-specific topics on Mobileread.com (the Kindle section, the Sony Reader section, and so on), and elsewhere: any criticism of the device (the hardware, the availability of content for it, and so on), is taken as a failing of character on the part of the person making the criticism, with sinister suggestions made about hidden agendas. It actually makes those discussion forums rather less pleasant — and less productive — than they should be.

My own take is this: people invest so much money in these devices (a Sony Reader is around US$300, a Kindle around US$350, an iRex iLiad around US$600) that it was a difficult purchase to make financially and psychologically, and they don’t want anything said after the fact to instill or enhance regret.

Nothing new about this: we saw it for years in Mac / PC wars, we see it now in iPhone / Blackberry debates, and so on.

As long as the hardware is expensive, people will respond emotionally, rather than rationally, to discussions of the device they themselves have sacrificed to buy.

I hope the hardware prices will come way, way down in the next couple of years so that people will comment on and respond to the actual functioning of the device and not their financial/emotional investment in it.

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I had dinner last night with my friend Diane Lacey, who is on the Hugo Awards committee for this year’s Worldcon in Montreal, and she asked that I remind people that the deadline for nominations is drawing near — as it also is for the Auroras.

You can nominate for the Hugos here.

And Canadians can nominate for the Auroras here.

Deadline for both is at the end of the month. :)

Oh, and my own suggestions for nominations for the Hugos and Auroras are in this thread.

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An email I received today from a university student, wanting to write her first novel:

I have just read your advice on writing. I am struggling to come up with what to write about. I am sort of tired of writing about things relating to me. I feel like my head is a confused sea of ideas. Can you help me?

My reply:

For me, ideas to write about come from months and months of research. Pick something that thematically interests you — the plight of the poor, race relations, the abortion issue, internationalism, whether it makes since to spend money going into space, the question of whether God exists — and then just immerse yourself in reading nonfiction on that topic looking for ideas and points related to it that lend themselves to dramatic treatment.

Books don’t spring full-blown from one’s forehead; they are the results of months of research and planning before the first word is written.

Good luck!

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… I love the Kindle, as I said loudly and clearly right here when it first came out. It’s a great piece of hardware, and Jeff Bezos has done a lot to bring pricing sensibility to the ebook marketplace.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

An interesting shift over the last little while at Locus Online.

Its subtitle has always been “The Website of The Magazine of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Field,” but that used to be best read as “The Website of The Magazine of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Field” — that is, the site was updated frequently (often several times a day), and the emphasis was on industry news (and not necessarily the same news, or the same reportage of it, that would eventually appear in the magazine).

Now, it seems to be significantly more “The Website of the Magazine of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Field” — a site about the magazine (although there’s still news posted several times a week).

Of late, the top banner ad has frequently been for Locus magazine (rather than a book), the lead interview right now is with Jonathan Strahan (Locus‘s book-review editor), they’ve added a Locus “roundtable,” where the staff and regular contributors discuss the content of the magazine (which, over the last several days, at least, has been the main source of fresh content), one of the center-of-page news stories last week was Locus magazine staff profiles, the “Locus poll & survey” (which becomes grist for a future issue of the magazine) is promiently featured, and the main news feed — labeled “Locus sf&f news” — is coming directly from Locus‘s editorial offices in Oakland (and rather irritatingly breaks off each story in the middle of a sentence or even a word: “and the late Algis Budrys are the recipients of the inaugu…”).

Still, there’s oodles of great content there, and plenty of comprehensive databases you won’t find anywhere else.

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Although most of this profound science fiction novel is passive as the two scientists debate the existence of God, this is a terrific tale that will have the audience pondering how they would we react if an ET arrived with strong empirical evidence that God exists. The story line mostly focuses on Hollus the believer and Thomas the non-believer who wants to believe as he is dying from cancer. There is also a limited but fascinating look at the reactions of various people from the Intelligent Design crowd to the Darwinists and all sorts in between who have their own agendas. Fans of cerebral science fiction will relish the visit from a theistic evolutionary ET spider.

I’m actually re-visiting Calculating God myself: I’m listening to Audible.com’s Audie-award-nominated audiobook of the novel right now; the reading, by Jonathan Davis, is terrific.

(Oh, and a shout-out to Kirstin Morrell for drawing the Klausner review to my attention.)

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