Robert J. Sawyer

So this Sunday, I’m appearing at the library in Paris, Ontario, as the concluding event of this year’s One Book, One Brant community-wide reading program; the book they’re doing this year is my Rollback.

If you’re in the area, come on out this Sunday, March 1, 2009, for a lively reading, Q&A, and more, at the Paris Public Library, 12 William Street, Paris, Ontario, at 1:30 p.m.

Just now, the library sent me directions to the library, and I thought to myself all Canadian directions contain the same landmark: the local Tim Hortons. They’ve become the modern Canadian inukshuk! For anyone else making the trip from the Toronto area, here are the directions:

• Take Hwy 403.
• Past the Brantford exits, you’ll come to Hwy 2 Paris Rd exit
• Stay in right lane — sign will say to Paris
• Follow on Paris Rd until you get to the 2nd set of stop lights. (Tim Hortons on the corner)
• Turn left onto Dundas St. stay in right lane
• Take Willow St. exit towards downtown
• Go to stop sign turn left on William St. stay in left lane
• Go through the main intersection (stop lights) and the library is one block over on your right.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

Yeah, yeah, we all know Rob’s into big government :) so feel free to tune this out, but here’s a guy who just got a $6,000 phone bill for using his iPhone in Mexico. And, yeah, sure, we can all smugly argue that this particular guy should have known better — but stories like this crop up all the time.

The billing formulas your cell-phone provider uses are known … to them. And although they’re rip-offs, the math behind the rip-offs is trivial. Cell-phones should have to display the current-cost-per-second on their screens, should have to display an alert when you’ve gone over your plan’s monthly maximums, and should have to display a running tally of your bill.

More: they should require specific user authorization (just punch in an acknowledgement to continue) when your monthly bill is exceeding a pre-set amout (which, by default, should be something low, like $100, but easily setable to whatever threshhold the user wishes).

We have laws that keep credit-card companies from charging you more than $50 if your card is used fradulently. We need laws that keep cellular providers from surprising us with what our bills are going to be. They know — or should know — what we’re being charged as we’re racking up the charges; there’s no reason for them not to tell us. If they can text me to wish me a happy birthday or tell me about their latest sale, they can certainly inform me of how much money they’re sucking out of my wallet right now.

And, geez, isn’t one of the prime rules of business to never make the customer regret having chosen to do business with you? A business model that’s based on making the customer livid when he sees his or her bill is just nuts.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

In response to my posting about being unable to publish any further non-Canadian authors under my Robert J. Sawyer Books imprint, Marcos P. Donnelly sent the following:

BROCKPORT, NY, REVOKES NAFTA

BROCKPORT, February 26 — In a surprise response to complaints by the Canada Council for the Arts concerning the publication of U.S. works by Robert J. Sawyer Books, the upstate New York town of Brockport announced its unilateral revocation of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

“That’s it, we’re done, we’ve had it!” fumed town supervisor Nat O. Lester, who declared the revocation late Thursday. “We’re shipping back all the Labatt’s in town, and we’re closing our portion of the Erie Canal to Canadian boaters.”

Town merchants voiced initial support of the NAFTA overturn. “I’m sick of those foreigners sneaking in here with their funny-looking money,” said Lorenzo Villaguarde, owner of Lorenzo’s Mexican Market in downtown Brockport. “You know how hard it is to convert from Canadian dollars to American dollars to Mexican pesos to Colombian pesos? Madre de Dios, the exchange fees are killing me! Seal the border!”

Reaction from Washington was guarded.

“As the, uh, new guy here in the Oval, uh, Office, I’m not fully … fully certain whether Brockport has, uh, the legal right to reverse, um, NAFTA,” said one Washington official who declined to be identified due to his high rank in the administration. “The Canadians seemed … pretty nice to me. Didn’t they seem, uh, nice? I think they’re nice.”

But as Washington waffled, Brockport bustled to rid their town of all things Canadian. Bulldozing of the local Tim Horton’s began at 8:00 p.m EST, and the local Wegman’s announced it would now refuse any checks drawn on Scotiabank or Toronto-Dominion.

“In addition, I’m encouraging Brockport citizens to send testy emails to Canadian political leaders,” supervisor Lester said, although he later admitted he couldn’t identify any of those leaders by name.

In an ironic twist to the Brockport NAFTA revocation, local author Marcos P. Donnelly discovered that the Canadian engine of his Chevrolet Cavalier had been removed from his car and deported.

“Great,” Donnelly muttered. “Now how the fuck do I get to work tomorrow?”

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

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

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

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. :)

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

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

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

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 …

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

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.)

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

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).

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

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 …

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

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.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

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? ;)

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

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 … ;)

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

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.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

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.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

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)

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

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 …)

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

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.)

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

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!

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

… 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.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

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.)

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

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).

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

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.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

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.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site