Robert J. Sawyer

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

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!

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

… 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.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

Harriet Klausner — Amazon.com’s #1 reviewer — now has a website devoted to science fiction and fantasy reviews, and she’s just posted a review of my Calculating God, which says in part:

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.)

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

The February 20, 2009, edition of Entertainment Weekly — the #1 best-selling magazine about entertainment in the United States — begins this week’s “The Hollywood Insider: News and Notes” thus:

Despite the fact that they are weathering stagnant — or downright dreary — ratings for dense shows like Heroes and Lost, the networks are still planning on ambitious series with complex mythologies for next fall.

As the drama development season winds up this month, some of the most notable projects include ABC’s Flash Forward (an adaptation of the sci-fi novel by Robert J. Sawyer) and Eastwick (based on John Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick), NBC’s Day One (lots of aliens from Heroes‘ Jesse Alexander), and Fox’s Masterwork (a National Treasure-like tale from Prison Break‘s Paul Scheuring).

“These are all huge shows,” says Endeavor agent Ari Greenburg. “Writers are obsessed with Damages and Lost. They all want to write complex dramas.”

Indeed we do — and it’s nice to see Flash Forward at the top of the list!

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

… Jonathan Vos Post just posted this assessment of my latest novel, Wake:

What’s not to like? Vivid storytelling with interesting characters, during which we are rocketed through metaphysical exploration of what it is to be conscious (human versus ape hybrid versus web intelligence), lightning flashes illuminate the nature of perception through translucent eyelids and an ape Picasso, 2-D versus 3-D, cellular automata, neuroanatomy, family dynamics, schoolyard dynamics, internationalism, and so much more. Jane Goodal meets Stephen Wolfram at a cocktail party by Lettvin, J.Y. Maturana, H.R. McCulloch, and W.S. Pitts (What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain). A plethora of ideas on every witty page, yet character- and narrative-driven. Superb!

Woot!

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

… you have to buy from the Amazon.com Kindle store.

Over on MobileRead.com, they have a thread entitled “Kindle Myths and Partial Truths,” in which the very first claim is this:

Myth: If you buy a Kindle, you are locked into Amazon’s Kindle store.

Truth: There are many sources for books that can be read on the Kindle.

And he goes on to site Fictionwise.com as an alternative.

My reply:

Weeeeelllll, since this thread is about “myth” vs. “truth,” the “truth” should be the whole truth, explicitly spelled out.

Yes, it’s a myth that you can only acquire content for the Kindle via the Amazon store. However, it’s a truth that the only source for a wide range of major-publisher content is the Amazon store: you want a New York Times bestseller — or even most of the authors you see in a bookstore or library (assuming their work is available as ebooks at all) — you do have to buy from Amazon.

When someone buys an ebook reader to read novels by James Patterson or Stephen King (or even me) or nonfiction by Malcolm Gladwell or Bill Bryson, to tell them that — hey, no probs, you can get Jane Austen’s Emma over here — is ducking the question and not really separating myth from truth. :)

Fictionwise’s multiformat books available in Mobi format can indeed be used on the Kindle but they are principally titles from small publishers, old and otherwise out-of-print works, or public-domain works.

For a graphic example of the difference, simply go to the main page at Fictionwise.com. The books listed on the left-hand side are the ones you can get there for the Kindle; the ones on the right-hand side are then ones you can’t get for the Kindle anywhere but the Amazon store.

Myth vs. truth is useful discourse; obfuscating boosterism isn’t. :) It seems “Kindle Myths and Partial Truths” is indeed an apt title for this thread.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

As I’ve already said, I support the ability of the blind and visually impaired to be able to use assistive technologies — including screen-readers — to access text. Hell, anyone who’s read my Wake (recently serialized in Analog), which has a blind girl as the main character, can’t have any doubts about that.

My grandfather was blind for most of his adult life, diabetes (a leading cause of blindness) is rampant in my family, and I myself spent six days blind in 1972 (hospitalized with both eyes covered because of a severe eye injury); I am totally, totally sympathetic to the needs of the blind. If you’re blind, as I’ve said in this blog, I think it’s perfectly fine for the Kindle (or any other device) to help you access text you’ve legitimately acquired.

But the market that Amazon is pursuing with the Kindle is not blind users. We need to clearly understand that Amazon did not put text-to-speech in the Kindle as an assistive technology; they put it in so people could have books read to them while driving in their cars, and so on: they put it in to go after the market segment that now buys audiobooks.

You want proof? If it were an assistive technology, then the user interface for the Kindle 2 would also support text-to-speech, and it doesn’t. I quote Dr. Marc Maurer, President of the National Federation of the Blind, on this very point:

We note, however, that the device itself cannot be used independently by a blind reader because the controls to download a book and begin reading it aloud are visual and therefore inaccessible to the blind.

Now, some have said the text-to-speech quality is so bad that no one but the blind would routinely use it; it’s a “GPS voice,” as Stephen King called it. But it will not always be so; Amazon is savvy enough to grab the rights now when few will use this technology, rather than waiting until the technology is more mature and widely used.

Authors have ALREADY FOR DECADES NOW waived their rights to income from audio versions of their work made for the blind, whereas Amazon has said nothing about giving away ebooks — let alone Kindles — to blind users. We authors are the ones with the established track record of supporting the rights of the blind; let’s not forget that: we’ve been the good guys for decades when it comes to making our content freely available to the blind.

This is not an authors vs. the blind issue, and to paint it as such is unfair and misleading. I fully grant that an accommodation for the needs of the blind and visually impaired has to be found as we move ahead with technology, but an accommodation for authors’ rights has to be found, too.

And the bottom line hasn’t changed: contracts have been breached, and unless and until we decide that contracts don’t matter in our society, that fact should not be glossed over.

Indeed, I bet that if Amazon had approached authors’ organizations first and asked if they could do this, they would have gotten permission from authors’ groups to do it for free (or, perhaps, on condition that Amazon donate a portion of its profits on the Kindle hardware and the ebooks it sells to the National Federation of the Blind). But they didn’t ask. They just took the rights — and that’s wrong.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

Twenty-six years ago, on January 4, 1983, I joined the Writer’s Digest Book Club. I bought a lot of books from them over the years — my friend book-collector Jack Brooks once remarked, looking at bookcases in my home, that I had the largest private collection of books about writing he’d ever seen. I let my membership lapse some years ago, though, but thought I’d check out what they were up to these days.

The URL WritersDigestBookClub.com now points to a page labeled Writer’s Digest Book Shop, and leads off with a note that says, “Please note that we are no longer accepting new members.” So, it looks like they’re essentially gone.

It’s very hard for book clubs of any type to survive in the era of Amazon.com (which discounts books so much that their prices aren’t much different than the special book-club prices, plus offers free shipping). But, still, this was one that I was fond off, and I’m sad to see it go.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

Way back in 1985, I got a copy of the CP/M version of Grammatik for my Osborne 1 computer. Grammatik scanned documents for obvious grammatical errors (which I almost never made), homonym confusion (“weight” instead of “wait”), wordiness, and so on. For a year or two, I ran it on every article I wrote (back then, my writing business was mostly magazine articles), and I actually found it useful. I was already a good writer selling a lot of work, but I’ve never been one to turn down help. In particular, it showed me that I was using many unnecessarily wordy phrases (such as “at this time” instead of “now”).

Later on, I got a copy of Correct Grammar for DOS, which was a similar package. I wrote macros for WordStar (which I still use) to let me check blocks of text through either Grammatik or Correct Grammar, and I do sometimes still use them when I have to bang out something for publication and the deadline is so tight I won’t have time to proofread in hardcopy.

Of course, these days, Microsoft Word comes with a style checker. What’s amazing is how little advanced such software is in 2009 over what was available a quarter of a century ago. Here’s a great interview from the New York Times with Bruce Wampler, principal architect of Grammatik, on that topic.

Anyway, an ad showed up in my inbox this week for a standalone package that tries to be a more-modern version of Grammatik. Looking around, I found there are several such programs on the market. I haven’t tried any of them, but here are the ones that turned up in my search:

• Editor
• Grammar Expert Plus
• myWriterTools
• StyleWriter
• WhiteSmoke

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

I figured I should put my money where my mouth is.

The Authors Guild

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

Woot! Go me!

Well, it’s been almost a year and I have finished reading the last of your books and short stories. I’ve read every single one!

I’m writing to tell you how much I have enjoyed them all. Your characters are believable. The science in the stories is fascinating. I love the philosophical and theological implications of the tales. The stories stay with me after I have finished them and provide opportunities for further thinking! And discussion… My two teens are tired of hearing me talk about “Robert J. Sawyer”. :-)

Actually, my daughter has read three of your books and enjoyed them very much and my son always asks me to tell him about the plot of the book I have just finished.

My favourites have been the Neanderthal trio, Calculating God (my all-time favourite) and, to my surprise, The End of an Era. I was even amazed to find myself enjoying the Quintaglio Ascension. I didn’t think I would like dinosaurs as main characters, but you made them believable.

Just wanted to let you know how much I have enjoyed your work.

Which is precisely what I needed to hear as I struggle to finish my new novel Watch, which is due 10 days from now …

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

In my novels Hominids, Humans, and Hybrids, I argued that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens probably didn’t crossbreed in nature. At the time I was writing those books, it was a very contentious issue in paleoanthropology, with some vociferously arguing that, in fact, Neanderthals hadn’t really gone extinct at all, but that we’d just co-opted them into our own gene pool.

But the first-draft of the Neanderthal genome, released just yesterday, shows that Neanderthals were indeed a distinct species that didn’t intermix genetically with us.

I found it intriguing that yesterday, a special US federal court ruled that the case, also vociferously fought, that vaccinations caused autism had no scientific merit.

And, of course, yesterday was Darwin’s 200th birthday, and we all know people who have devoted their lives to arguing that he was wrong.

I wrote a story called “Flashes,” first published in Lou Anders’s 2006 anthology FutureShocks, and since reprinted in my own collection Identity Theft and Fiona Kelleghan’s anthology The Savage Humanists, in which SETI succeeds and we receive the long-sought-after Encyclopedia Galactica, and droves of scientists who have spent their careers arguing positions that were totally off base end up committing suicide.

It was a grim little story, but I do wonder how people who spend their whole lives advocating something that turns out to be wrong make their peace with that. (Of course, the answer is that in many cases they don’t: they refuse to accept the new evidence, because the cost of accepting it — and realizing they’ve wasted so much of their time — is too much to bear.)

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

In the discussion of whether the ways in which an ebook document may be used (for instance, whether the person who has licensed that document can be restricted from printing it out or having text-to-speech software read it aloud), one commenter on this post of mine wrote, “You actually DON’T have the right to tell me what I can do with something that I legally purchased.”

This argument — “I paid for it so no one can tell me after that what I can do with it” — is simply out of touch with reality.

You can buy a car, but there are countless regulations governing what you may do with it even though it’s your property. You can’t, for instance, drive it without a license, drive it recklessly, permanently export it to another country, drive it without insurance, allow children to drive it, park your car in my driveway, and so on.

You can buy tobacco or alcohol, but there are countless regulations governing when and where you may consume them, and you can’t transfer ownership of either to minors.

You can buy soft drinks but, in many jurisdictions, you can’t throw out the containers when you’re done but rather must recycle them; same for newspapers and other paper products including paperback books.

You can buy a gun (in some jurisdiction), but you can’t use it except under very narrow circumstances.

You can buy a scanner and color printer, but you can’t use it to scan and print banknotes (indeed, many scanners and printers have technology built in to prevent them from doing that).

You can buy a model of a spaceship from your favorite TV show, but you can’t put it in a movie you’re making without a licensing agreement.

You can buy a DVD of a motion picture, but you’re not allowed to exhibit it commercially (“licensed for home viewing only”).

You can buy a DVD burner and blank DVD media, but you can’t legally use it to make and sell copies of commercial software, music, or movies.

You can buy clothes that don’t conceal your genitals, but you cannot legally wear them in public in many jurisdictions.

You can buy a boom-box, but you can’t run it at full volume in public places or late at night.

You can buy a microwave oven, but you can’t use it on a still-alive squirrel you caught in your backyard.

You can buy prescription drugs, but you can’t give them to anyone else.

You can buy a tree, but you can’t burn its leaves after your rake them up in many jurisdictions.

You can buy a house, but you can’t use it for commercial purposes, or turn it into a multi-family dwelling, unless it is licensed for that use.

You can buy a camera, but you can’t use it to take pictures of people through their windows.

You can buy a book on a subject, but you can’t plagiarize its contents and pass them off as your original research in your essays for school or university.

You can buy a dog, but in many jurisdictions you can’t let it run free without a leash.

You can buy software — such as some Norton products — that contain advanced data-encryption routines, but you cannot export the software outside the United States or Canada.

You can buy a cat, but most places you cannot kill, cook, and eat it.

You can buy devices that allow you to record phone conversations, but you cannot, in many jurisdictions, use them.

You can buy a police-radar detector, but, in many jurisdictions, you cannot turn it on.

You can win an Oscar — thus obtaining the trophy legally — but you cannot then sell that trophy.

You can buy all sorts of property but you can’t bequeath ownership of it to your children or someone else without paying estate taxes.

In some jurisdictions, you may own but cannot sell or display Nazi artifacts.

And on and on and on. Society routinely and frequently limits what can be done with things we’ve bought — and, indeed, in the specific case of intellectual property, we already have oodles of case law upholding that in fact, yes, indeed, society does have the right to tell people “what they can do with something that they’ve legally purchased.”

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

… was a great success. I bought a tuxedo, so I wouldn’t have to keep renting one:

More on The Book Lover’s Ball.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

Today is Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday. He’s always been a profoundly important figure to me (I visited his home, Down House, in 1995).

My third novel, Fossil Hunter, was my parable about Darwin, telling the story of his counterpart on an alien world, including a riff on his classic voyage aboard the Beagle.

“I’d seriously recommend Fossil Hunter as better than any high school biology text I’ve seen on classic Darwinian evolution.” –Paul Levinson in The New York Review of Science Fiction

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

… and the Authors Guild is objecting to this. It’s a very interesting point. Traditionally, print rights and audiobook rights are separate. Audible.com and others have done audiobooks of my novels, and those deals are with me, not the print publisher (in fact, today I just got a nice check from my agent for part-two of Audible.com’s fee for their audio book of my Wake, coming in April).

(The Kindle 2 is Amazon.com’s second-generation dedicated ebook-reading device; it was announced this Monday, February 9, 2009, and is expected to ship shortly.)

For the last five-plus years, print publishers have been insisting on grabbing ebook rights along with print rights (Tor threw around terms like “non-negotiable” and “deal-breaker,” as apparently mandated by their parent company). But ebook rights are very specifically defined as the right to display text electronically. Amazon recognizes that it can’t allow people to print Kindle-edition books, but it has simply gone ahead and allowed them to be read aloud by the device — turning every ebook into a de facto audio book.

Now, yes, today, the quality is crap, and a professionally performed audiobook is obviously a much better experience — but that’s not always going to be the case; computers will be able to do quite credible readings of even dramatic material in a few years’ time. And another significant source of writers’ incomes (for me, audio-books were a five-figure part of my business last year) may evaporate … without consultation, without discussion, without negotiation.

I’m not saying that, ultimately, the right to have text read aloud electronically should be limited; I am saying that the way in which the publishing industry and traditional rights issues are being trampled without consultation — whether it’s Amazon potentially cannibalizing audio-book rights (and the irony that they now own Audible.com is not lost on me) or Google just goin’ ahead and digitizing my books, and everyone else’s, without so much as a “May I?,” is pernicious. The Authors Guild is right to be objecting, and Amazon was wrong to do this without permission; all stakeholders need to be involved in the discussions — including authors.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

“Evolution is not a theory — it’s a fact. It really happened.”

Happy 200th birthday, Charles Darwin. You gave us the most profound truth in all of science (and therefore the most profound truth of all). Relativity was interesting, in an abstract way; the Copernican revolution, likewise. But that species originate through natural selection speaks directly to who we are, and how we came to be here.

Tonight, I’ll be on Discovery Channel Canada’s Daily Planet, talking about evolution. Thank you, Charles Darwin, for the great gift you gave us.

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. — Charles Darwin

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

I’m absolutely thrilled to be included on this list over at David Halpert’s SciFiWatch of “Nine Science Fiction Blogs You Should Keep Track Of.” It’s a great group to be part of!

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

I’m thrilled to report that Toronto’s Divani Films and director Srinivas Krishna have just renewed their option on motion-picture rights to my 1995 Nebula Award-winning novel The Terminal Experiment for a fourth year. Woot!

The movie is being developed with the participation of Telefilm Canada and Astral Media’s The Harold Greenberg Fund.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

… but my friend Virginia O’Dine drew this clip from Onion News to my attention. LOL!

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

In honor of the release of the Italian edition of my novel Humans, second volume of my Neanderthal Parallax trilogy, Sosio Silvio conducted a by-email interview with me, although many of the questions were actually about the upcoming Flash Forward TV pilot. The Italian version of the interview is online at Fantascienza.com here, and the orginal English is below.

Your novel Flash Forward has been chosen to be developed into a TV series. Can you tell us something about the idea on which the novel is based?

In 1975, when I was in grade 10, I founded my high-school’s science-fiction club. Twenty years later, in 1995, we had a reunion party. We were all amazed at how differently our lives had turned out from what we’d expected. Several members of our group had been married and divorced in the interim, and practically no one had the job he or she thought they were going to get. Me, I’d been planning on becoming a paleontologist; Ted had his sights set on becoming a veterinarian; Rick was going to be a filmmaker; and Bruce was going to be a police officer.

Twenty years later, I was a science-fiction writer. Ted had become a computer programmer. Rick had become a lawyer. And the guy who wanted to be a cop was now a cordon bleu chef.

We all kept saying the same thing about our high-school days: if I had known then what I know now, how much better things would have been!

Well, a science-fiction writer can’t hear a comment like that without wanting to put it to the test. And so the novel Flash Forward was born. In it, an experiment goes awry at CERN, the European Center for Particle Physics, causing the consciousness of everyone on Earth to jump ahead twenty-one years for a period of two minutes. Suddenly people know for an absolute fact how their lives, their careers, and their marriages are going to turn out. The novel details the impact such knowledge has, both for good and bad. Of course, a two-minute glimpse can be frustratingly ambiguous. Could you go ahead with a planned wedding knowing that two decades hence you would be married to someone else? How would you greet the imminent birth of your first child if you knew that he’d grow up to be a vicious, surly thug?

As with many of my novels, Flash Forward tries to combine a mind-stretching idea with a very human story. Indeed, I think science fiction is at its best when it lets us examine the human condition under circumstances that no one has ever encountered before — that’s what makes the genre anything but formulaic, and endlessly fascinating to write.

The story has been adapted for the TV series? There are important changes from the original story of the novel?

Brannon Braga and David S. Goyer have put their stamp on it, and, yes, they’ve made some changes. I’ve frankly been surprised about how concerned they’ve both been that I be comfortable with the changes: when you sell something to Hollywood, you give up creative control. But right from our first meeting in 2007, David and Brannon have seemed genuinely concerned that I be happy with what they’ve done. And, indeed, I am — very happy.

We’re hoping Flash Forward will run five or six 22-episode seasons, so they’ve had to expand my novel, which, if you filmed every scene in it, might have made an eight-hour miniseries, into over a hundred hours of drama, and I’m delighted with the very clever approach they’ve taken.

It’s the first time that you sell a work to Hollywood?

I’ve had lots of books optioned before, and good screenplays have been written based on some of my novels, but nothing has ever actually gone into production. I’m absolutely thrilled, and my wife and I are heading down to Hollywood to watch the filming of the pilot.

Have you been involved in the development of the series?

Contractually, I am consultant to the series: I was paid to provide input to the pilot script, and will be paid to provide input to every episode of the series. I’m also contracted to write one of the first-season episodes. The novel is mine, but the series is David and Brannon’s. I’m determined to help them realize their vision.

Have you met Brannon Braga? What do you think of him?

Yes, indeed. I was thrilled to meet Brannon. He is extremely intelligent, extremely creative, and a nice guy, to boot. I’m a long-time Star Trek fan, and Brannon, of course, co-authored “All Good Things …,” the finale of Next Generation, and First Contact, arguably the best of the Star Trek movies, so meeting him was a total thrill.

This month in Italy has been published Humans, the second book of the cycle The Neanderthal Parallax. I’ve really appreciated the first book, Hominids. Can you tell us something about this sequel?

The structure of the trilogy is this: In Hominids, the first book, a modern-day Neanderthal male — the quantum physicist Ponter Boddit — who lives in a parallel world where our kind of humanity is extinct, comes to our version of reality.

In the second volume, Humans, a modern day Homo sapiens female — the geneticist Mary Vaughan — travels to the Neanderthal version of reality.

And in the third, Hybrids, they try to discover the best of both worlds; ultimately, I think of it as a utopian series.

I hope to see that third volume, Hybrids, in Italy very soon. This is definitely the end of the story?

Yes, indeed. The series was conceived of as a trilogy at the start, and it ends with a definite bang. Some have actually taken me to task for providing definite conclusions: one of the plotlines deals with Ponter’s atheism, a trait shared by all Neanderthals, and Mary’s Roman Catholicism; another deals with Ponter’s bisexuality and polyamory, again, a trait shared by all Neanderthals, and Mary’s heterosexuality and monogamy. Those come to very definite climaxes in the third book, which, depending on your points of view, you’ll either love or hate — but, either way, I hope will make you think.

What are you writing now?

A trilogy about the World Wide Web gaining consciousness. The first volume, Wake, will be out in April 2009, to be followed by Watch and Wonder. Many people — including my New York and Hollywood agents — seem to think Wake is the best thing I’ve ever written; following that up with two sequels is daunting, but I’m working hard to make sure the next two books are just as good.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

I went into S-VOX (parent company for Vision TV) to record the voice-over narration for one of the episodes of Supernatural Investigator today. For most episodes I just appear at the beginning and the end, introducing the topic and doing a wrap-up, but for a couple of them the week’s expert chose not to do narration, so I’m doing it. The episode I recorded narration for today was about Mayan crystal skulls — oh, and don’t forget that episode 3 of the series airs tonight.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

Carolyn and I were in Turkey from Saturday, January 31, through Friday, February 6, 2009, so I could give a keynote address at a business conference there. Of course, we squeezed in some great sightseeing, too! Here are a few photos from the trip.

Inside the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul

David Gerrold, who was also giving a keynote, and our Istanbul tour guide Mehmet Bozdemir

The Blue Mosque in Istanbul

Robert J. Sawyer giving his keynote at the “Time to Exit the Labyrinth” Conference at the Conrad Istanbul

Robert J. Sawyer, Erin Brockovich, and Carolyn Clink; Erin also gave a keynote at the conference.

Robert J. Sawyer, conference organizer Pelin Pirnal

On the day after the main conference, Rob and David also gave futurism talks at the headquarters of Garanti Bank in Istanbul

Our private tour of the Greco-Roman ruins Ephesus — virtually deserted on the day we visited

The Celsus Library at Ephesus

Robert J. Sawyer and Carolyn Clink out front of the Celsus Library

Roman bust and Carolyn Clink

Tumbled columns at Priene

Our fabulous private tour guide, Yusuf Savat, as we visited Priene

More of Priene, although we also toured Miletus and Didyma

Didyma

All in all, an amazingly wonderful trip, and I’m very glad I went.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

As a lead-up to my trip to Istanbul, I did four quick-and-dirty by-email interviews for Turkish newspapers, wire services, and magazines. The deadlines on these were so tight that I just had to bang out my answers without having a chance to compose my thoughts or edit my responses — so don’t expect me to defend to the death anything I say in them. :)

Here’s the fourth of those four interviews.

1. What went wrong with yesterday’s science-fictional predictions for the 21st century?

Science fiction failed in several ways in its predictions for the 21st century. It predicted a secular 21st century, and we have anything but that. It predicted rampant consumerism and a throwaway society (disposable clothes and so on), without considering the environmental impact. It predicted that price would be no object — we would build cities on the moon, and so forth, simply because we could, without thinking about the economics of that (simply put, science-fiction writers thought everyone would think it was plainly obvious that we should go into space, when, in fact, to most people the case for that has not been made). And it predicted that international competition, instead of international cooperation, would by the driving force behind the economy. Most science-fiction writers saw the US-Soviet Cold War continuing well into this century, and few, if any, saw the emergence of anything like he European Union. Ultimately, humanity is a cooperative animal, but that fundamental truth was missed in most SF.

2. Does today’s economic meltdown promise an upcoming green world?

It doesn’t promise it, but it suggests that it’s possible. With old systems collapsing, we have an opportunity to redefine how we do business. Certainly, we need to reduce our carbon emissions, and President Obama, for instance, has already called for new legislation in the United States to require cleaner automobiles — he’s doing the right thing in recognizing that right now, while we’re rebuilding industries, is the time to set new environmentally friendly ground rules.

3. What will determine which managers and government figures will thrive in the future?

The equation is backwards: the lesson to be learned from the current economic crisis is that government leaders who only care whether they themselves thrive are doomed, and corporate managers who only care whether they themselves thrive are doomed. Managers and government figures are custodians of trust: if you are seen as being in it only for yourself, you will quite likely have a spectacular fall; if you are seen as being in it for the good of the company you work for — its customers, its employees, and its shareholders, all three not just the last — — your company will succeed, and you will succeed along with it. Same thing for a nation: Bush-Cheney clearly served only a narrow, rich portion of the US; Obama-Biden has embarked on the path of serving everyone — if they really mean that, and really do that, they will ultimately thrive in ways that their predecessors could only dream of.

4. Would you name any probable ‘ultimate survivors’ — either corporate bodies or countries — of the post-crisis era?

Google has a corporate slogan: “Don’t be evil.” That’s the motto all corporations should adopt for the 21st century. The days when you can say one thing to your customers and another to your shareholders are past. Google hasn’t always lived up to its slogan, but just consider the worldwide adoration that Google enjoys and the worldwide animosity toward Microsoft: both are in fact quite aggressive — even rapacious — companies, but one is seen as being responsive, at least to some degree, to public concerns, while the other is seen — as the continuing EU sanctions against it attest — as thinking of itself as above the law. We’ve seen in the US of late what happens in unfettered free markets; there is a role for government regulation and oversight; those nations that recognize that role will ultimately succeed, those who allow greed to be the prime motivation will fail. But even without oversight, the public image that Google and companies like it put forward — we’re in this to be the best — will triumph over those companies perceived as only being in it to become the richest.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

Woot! Audible.com’s unabridged audiobook of my novel Calculating God has just been nominated for an Audie Award. Given by the Audio Publishers Association, the Audies are the top honor in the audiobook industry.

The full list of finalists in the Science Fiction and Fantasy category:

Calculating God, by Robert J. Sawyer, Narrated by Jonathan Davis, Audible, Inc.

Childhood’s End, by Arthur C. Clarke, Narrated by Eric Michael Summerer, Audible, Inc.

Ghost Radio, by Leopoldo Gout, Narrated by Pedro Pascal, HarperAudio

Skybreaker, by Kenneth Oppel, Narrated by David Kelly, Full Cast Audio

Sunrise Alley, by Catherine Asaro, Narrated by Hillary Huber, Blackstone Audio, Inc.

You can get Audible’s version of Calculating God here.

(Oh, and I’ll just mention in passing that the introduction to one of the other nominees — Childhood’s End — is by none other than yours truly; I also do an introduction to the Calculating God audiobook, too.)

The winner will be announced at the Audies gala on Friday, May 29, 2009, at the New York Historical Society in New York City.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

This Thursday, February 12, 2009, is the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin, and Discovery Channel Canada is doing a special episode of its nightly science-news program Daily Planet devoted to Darwin Day. The guests are science-fiction writer Robert J. Sawyer (author of Hominids) and paleontologist Peter Ward (co-author of Rare Earth).

Checking my records I see that it’s been — gak! — almost four years since I’ve been on Daily Planet (the last time was Tuesday, April 19, 2005, talking with astronomer Seth Shostak and comedian Elvira Kurt about SETI). But, nonetheless, this is my 37th appearance on Daily Planet (or @discovery.ca, as the series was originally known), and my 267th TV appearance to date.

This episode of Daily Planet airs at 7:00 p.m. Eastern time Thursday, 11:00 p.m. Eastern Time Thursday, 9:00 a.m. Eastern Time Friday, and noon Eastern Time Friday, and will also be online and for sale through the iTunes Store. Daily Planet is hosted by Jay Ingram and Ziya Tong.

Here are some pictures from the shoot, which occurred this morning in my home:

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

The Office of the Future

As a lead-up to my trip to Istanbul, I did four quick-and-dirty by-email interviews for Turkish newspapers, wire services, and magazines. The deadlines on these were so tight that I just had to bang out my answers without having a chance to compose my thoughts or edit my responses — so don’t expect me to defend to the death anything I say in them. :)

Here’s the third of those four interviews.

1. What will the future offices look like?

The major question is whether there will be offices in the future. Telecommuting — with perfect virtual reality — may make it unnecessary for people to physically gather together in a single place. If they do, though, I think we’ll see an end of cubicles. People complain that workers are less productive today than they were decades ago, and blame that on distraction from the multitude of input sources on their desktops — but the real distraction comes from the background hubbub of the workplace, and the inability for most workers to close doors and shut all that out so they can concentrate. The cubicle for office workers will go down as one of the great business blunders of the 20th century; we’re blaming technology — the leveraging power of which has given us the ability to get more done — for reductions in productivity when the real culprit is office-space design.

2. What do you think the use of Internet in our lives and in the offices will be like in the future?

It will be totally immersive; everything will be connected to the Internet — not just things we traditionally think of as computers, or even communication devices, but all devices; they will monitor their own health and their needs for supplies, and order in repair people or supplies over the net of their own volition. Access to the Internet won’t be confined to just when you’re looking at a screen in a corner of your office: it will be everywhere, constant, and very high bandwidth; we will work inside a sea of information and instantaneous computing.

3. What do you think about the way of doing business in the future?

All the virtues of the Internet will be applied to business. Businesses must be transparent: potential customers, current customers, employees, and government regulators need to be able to see what exactly is being done. Gone will be the days of doing things without public knowledge or scrutiny. And, of course, business will be global. The notion of Turkish business or Canadian business or Japanese business will all seem equally quaint: the World Wide Web is just that, a net that envelopes all of us, and allows us — again, in good online fashion — to collaborate no matter where we might be.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

Another nice email today, also prompted by an online book order:

I have to let you know that you have turned me on to reading again. I read a lot through college but in my adult life I have not found anything that makes me make the time for reading until a few weeks ago when a friend at work was reading Flashforward. Since then I’ve read Flashforward, Mindscan, and Calculating God. I had forgotten that this world is full of rich ambiguity and possibilities; your books are waking up the part of me that wants to explore life by reminding me that we don’t know everything just yet. Please keep up the great work!

*Blush.*

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site