The first of four installments of the full-text serialization of my next novel, Wake, is in the November 2008 issue of Analog, released electronically today (weeks after it came out in hardcopy!). You can get it at Fictionwise here.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
So, today, I was at a writers’ festival, and, when it was time to do my autographing, I was sitting next to a very nice female writer. She had a copy of her book, and I asked if I could see it. I turned to the back and read the “About the Author,” which said she “is an alumnus of …”
No, I pointed out to her, she’s not. She’s an alumna of said program (or, if one prefers gender-neutral language, she’s a graduate of or an alum of said program).
And, just yesterday, a female friend sent me a note on FaceBook saying, “My fiancée just surprised me with November’s Analog – good story!”
To which I replied, “Thanks! But unless it’s a gay wedding, he’s your fiancé (but you are his fiancée).”
(A gender-neutral phrasing would be, “My bethrothed …” or “My intended …”)
(I knew it wasn’t a gay wedding because the lucky man’s picture was on her FaceBook page.)
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Just finished watching (recorded earlier) the 2008 HBO film Recount, about the process of determining the winner in the US presidential election in Florida in 2000. The film stars Kevin Spacey. I thought it was terrifically well done; check it out if you have a chance.
The Wikipedia entry on it is here.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
So, this evening, after a wonderful dinner out with my family, Carolyn and I went on to pick up a friend. Said friend lives in an apartment building with very nice grounds, but as we opened the door of our car to let him in, I remarked that “it smells like a cloud of pesticide got blown in.”
Um, nope. Turned out it was said friend’s cologne!
Eeep!
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
As those who follow my travel schedule know, I fly a lot (next month, I have eight flights booked).
I rely on SeatGuru for information about which are the good seats and which are the bad ones on planes. When you’re flying across country, as, for instance, I am on the trip I just booked via WestJet, having extra legroom can make all the difference between a relaxing, productive (with my laptop) trip, and five hours of pure hell, with some clown leaning his chair all the way back into my face.
SeatGuru — which is free to use — shows you every seat on every plane used by every major airline, and tells you about legroom, whether the seat tends to get cold, how well you can see the in-flight movie screens, etc. I love it.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
For those reading my new novel Wake, now being serialized in Analog: please let me know if you spot any typos or errors. I still have time to correct them in the Ace hardcover, which comes out in April 2009.
Many thanks!
Rob
I mentioned back in June 2008 that Srinivas Krishna, the director who has my Nebula Award-winning novel The Terminal Experiment under option, has renewed his option for a third year.
And I note now that his large-scale public art installation When the Gods Came Down to Earth is on display outside the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto during the Toronto International Film Festival, September 4-13, 2008. Check it out!
More info is here.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Jeffrey A. Carver is a good friend of mine, and also one heck of a good hard SF writer. To set the stage for Tor’s forthcoming release of his next novel, Sunborn, Jeff is giving away ebook versions of his older titles. Highly recommended.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
I had cause today to gather some links to podcasts of me talking about science-fiction writing and the history of the genre, and I thought I’d share them here:
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Cribbed from Torontoist:
The Eden Mills Writers’ Festival—the Toronto literary community’s annual out-of-town oasis—is celebrating its twentieth birthday this summer. This year’s festival, a mere forty-five minutes west of Toronto, starts this Friday [September 5, 2008] and includes workshops, seminars, and the popular “festival day” on Sunday [September 7, 2008].
Some of the big appearances this year include David McGimpsey, Shari Lapeña, Michael Ondaatje, Alistair MacLeod, Robert J. Sawyer, and Jane Urquhart. Book lovers can get a break from the city and spend their Sunday in the village, enjoying readings, music, food, and of course, books to buy.
Website: edenmillswritersfestival.ca
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Pure Speculation Festival (October 18-19, 2008) Hazeldean Community Hall, Edmonton, AB, Canada.
Two days of literary science-fiction and fantasy panels, including Con Spec (hosted by On Spec Magazine) and Comic Talks (hosted by Happy Harbor Comics); plus games, the Geeks for Geeks Charity Auction (in support of the Edmonton Small Press Association), the Speculation Bake-off, and the Costume Shindig.
Guests of Honour: author Robert J. Sawyer, author/game designer Monte Cook and artist Herman Lau. Adult Weekend Pass: $25 until 10/12/08; $30 at the door. Children 12 and under are free. Website: www.purespec.org.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
The 2008 Mississauga Write-Off, which began Thursday evening, August 29, and finished this afternoon, Monday, September 1, was a great success. The weather was gorgeous throughout, and our balcony was put to good use:
Elizabeth Westbrook-Trenholm
Hayden Trenholm
Herb Kauderer
I did some work on the balcony, but also worked with my lovely dual-monitor setup in my office:
Robert J. Sawyer
Meanwhile, David Livingstone Clink worked at my alternative dual-monitor workstation in the living room.
Paddy Forde preferred the sun room; note the cover for the British edition of The Terminal Experiment on the wall
Carolyn worked in her office, but also kept an eye on things; here she wears a souvenir shirt from the last writing retreat she and I did — in Dawson City, Yukon!
Al Katerinsky usually worked on the kitchen table, but here is taking a break on the living-room couch.
All in all, a wonderful four days!
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
She leaves you breathless!
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
They’re drifting away: Liz and Hayden left before lunch. Herb, Al, Paddy, Dave, Carolyn, and I went to Swiss Chalet for lunch once more. After, I showed people the “Crazy Ray” episode of Pam Anderson’s sitcom Stacked, one of the best treatments of writerly jealousy I’ve ever seen — and very, very funny.
Herb and Al are heading out the door now …
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
We ordered in pizza (which we ate out on my balcony), then we all did brief readings of the new work we’d written over the weekend. And then, to round out the evening, we watched part one of “In a Mirror, Darkly,” from Star Trek: Enterprise, because Paddy Forde, Herb Kauderer, Al Katerinsky, and Hayden Trenholm had never seen it. Hayden crawled off to bed after watching the opening, but the rest of us stayed up to 1:00 a.m., rapt, watching it; we’ll watch part two tomorrow.
All in all, the Second Mississauga Write-Off has been a great success!
Below: Hayden after a few beers.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
We had a long lunch at The Mad Hatter, a pub near Carolyn and my home; it was a wonderful walk to the pub and, once again, the Toronto weather is perfect. David Clink is rejoining us this evening after his day of golf.
Paddy Forde is in the sun room; Carolyn and Liz Trenholm are in Carolyn’s office; Hayden Trenholm and Al Katerinsky are writing at the kitchen table; Herb Kauderer is on the balcony; and I’m in my office.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Ben Wall, a fan of my stories, just sent me the above photo from BrickFest in Washington D.C., a convention for adult fans of Lego. The placard says:
Brickfest 2008
Starships Merelcas and Starplex
by Phillip Thorne, 33Exploratory starships from the Robert J. Sawyer novels “Calculating God” (2001) and “Starplex” (1996)
How cool is that! :) :) :)
More of Phillip’s amazing work is online — including a Lego model of Hollus having dinner at the Jericho househould from Calculating God. Check it out here.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Pat Forde got us all to watch this online video, entitled “Where the Hell is Matt?”
Next time we send something like the Voyager record out into space, we should include this. It’s us — the joy of being human.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Carolyn just drove her brother, the poet David Livingstone Clink, home; he’s off to play golf tomorrow. But he was a great writing-retreat participant, and we were glad to have him.
Still going strong: Robert J. Sawyer, Carolyn Clink, Hayden and Liz Trenholm, Al Katerinsky, Herb Kauderer, and Pat Forde. Tomorrow’s our final day.
A line I wrote today:
He’d know what to do with her junk; she should know what to do with his … shouldn’t she?
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Herb Kauderer has gone downstairs (we’ve booked the guest suite in our condo for the weekend to house Herb and Al Katerinsky at night) and is napping there; Al is napping in a Muskoka chair on the balcony; and Liz Westbrook-Trenholm is having a nap on the couch in Carolyn’s office.
Clearly, everyone has been working too hard at writing, and is exhausted … or else, the giant lunch we all had at Boston Pizza is taking its toll!
The weather today is absolutely perfect here in Mississauga: it’s 4:20 in the afternoon, the temperature is 25 degrees Celsius, and there’s a wonderful breeze. Me, I’m writing out on the balcony …
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
… and so is Al Katerinsky; both arrived just in time for dinner out at Montana’s (a roadhouse chain restaurant).
Pat Forde was nominated for a Hugo for his remarkable novella “In Spirit,” first published in Analog. He and Al — one of my writing students — will be with us until Monday. David Livingstone Clink is expected in about an hour …
The first day of the Mississauga Write-Off? A roaring success!
Pictured: Pat Forde and Carolyn Clink in May 2007
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
The anthology, edited by Fiona Kelleghan, will be hitting the stories shortly. That’s Fiona, below, in a photo I took at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts in Orlando in March 2008. More about the book is here.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Herb Kauderer, Hayden Trenholm, and Elizabeth Trenholm all arrived around 9:00 p.m. last night. No writing was done, but we did talk a lot about writing and literary matters (and I made chocolate-chip cookies!). We watched the opening ten minutes of both The Daily Show and The Colbert Report — which Liz and Hayden had never seen — then called it a night around midnight.
And now we’re all hard at work writing (except for Carolyn, who’s off at the farmers’ market, buying us some fruit). Liz is in Carolyn’s office, Hayden is in the kitchen, and Herb and I are in the living room. At the moment I’m reading the material I’ve written to date on Watch, the second WWW novel, just to remind myself of where I was going with it …
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Two months ago, the SciFi Channel’s SciFi Wire ran a nice little piece by John Joseph Adams entitled “Identity Theft is Sawyer’s Last Collection.”
To prepare that article, John did a much longer by E-mail interview with me, and I thought I’d share the whole thing here:
(1) Please describe the book — just enough to give readers a taste of the collection. (Another way of asking this would be to say: What kind of stories do you write?)
This is my second, and final, collection of short fiction. I’ve published 40 or so short stories over the last couple of decades. I find short fiction very hard work, although I guess I’m good at it: Identity Theft and Other Stories contains two Hugo finalists; a Nebula finalist; a story that won Analog‘s Analytical Laboratory award; a piece that won Europe’s top SF award, the 6,000-euro Premio UPC de Ciencia Ficción; two winners of Canada’s top SF award, the Aurora; and three stories that are currently have their film rights under option.
But I really prefer writing novels, and so am going to concentrate on them from now on. Between Identity Theft and my previous collection, Iterations, which Red Deer Press has just reissued with a handsome new cover complementing the one on Identity Theft, we now have the Collected Stories of Robert J. Sawyer in two very attractive volumes.
The stories I’m proudest of in Identity Theft are the ones that get at a real human truth without sacrificing the sense of wonder, such as “Come All Ye Faithful” about the only priest on Mars, “Relativity,” about a female astronaut returning to face a family that’s aged a lot more than she has, and “Shed Skin,” which was the seed for my novel Mindscan, about a fellow who has transferred his consciousness into an artificial body and realizes he’s made the worst mistake of his life.
(2) Tell me a bit about the title story: a bit of synopsis and/or a bit of background on how you came to write the story.
“Identity Theft” is a novella — 22,000 words — and it takes up about a quarter of the book. It was commissioned by Mike Resnick for an original Science Fiction Book Club anthology called Down These Dark Spaceways. A lot of my novels — including Golden Fleece, Fossil Hunter, The Terminal Experiment, Illegal Alien, and Hominids — have been SF/mystery crossovers, so Mike felt I’d be a good fit for this anthology of SF hard-boiled detective stories. I took all my favorite things — fossil hunting (on Mars!), musings about the nature of consciousness, and what I hope is snappy, sarcastic dialogue — and put them together.
(3) Please illustrate the range of the collection by briefly comparing/contrasting a story on one end of the spectrum with one on the other end.
Identity Theft contains a wide range of stories. The most mainstream is “Driving a Bargain,” which I wrote for a young-adult horror anthology edited by Edo van Belkom; it’s about a teenage boy struggling to find a used car that he can afford, and not looking too carefully about why one offered to him is cheaper than it should be.
At the other end, I take us to the very end of Earth’s existence in “On the Surface,” which I think is one of my very best stories. Do you know the ending of The Time Machine — the part that’s left out of all the movie adaptations? Before returning home to the 19th century, H.G. Wells’s Time Traveler takes a jaunt to the far, far future, when the sun is dim and red. Well, I thought to myself, if it’s that dim, the Morlocks finally could back onto the surface and reclaim our planet …
(4) Was there anything about any of the stories that was unusual or noteworthy? For instance, was there one that was personal to you on any level, or for which you had to do a lot of research, anything like that? If so, please discuss.
The whole world was shocked on February 1, 2003, when the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated on re-entry, but my shock was worse than some, I imagine. I do commentary on space missions from time to time for CBC radio and TV, but I happened to be fast asleep that morning when my phone rang, and a producer woke me basically saying, “They’ve lost contact with Columbia, and you’re on the air in five … four … three …”
I take no pleasure in the fact that I predicted in my 1998 novel Factoring Humanity that there would be another shuttle disaster after Challenger. But I am endlessly fascinated by the fact that we gave up in 1972 going any more than a few hundred kilometers from Earth. In direct response to the loss of Columbia, I wrote “The Eagle Has Landed.” Another story in my book, “Mikeys,” also deals with my deep fondness for the manned space program.
(5) Do you have any favorites in the book? If so, what about those stories make them stand out for you?
One of my favorites is a story called “Flashes,” about what might really happen if SETI ever resulted in us actually receiving the Encyclopedia Galactica from aliens — the accumulated knowledge of advanced races. I actually thought about calling that story “Infodumps,” which is the pejorative term some of those who don’t like for any sort of expository passage. When I was writing the story, I thought it might be cool years down the road to have it as the title story in a book: a hard-SF collection called Infodumps might tweak the critics in a way that would have amused me. But my wife talked me out of that. Still, I think it’s a very nifty story, with some of the best imagery I’ve ever come up with, and I had a blast writing snippets of Encyclopedia Galactica entries on topics such as “Life After Death” and the fictitious science of “Chronics.”
(6) Anything else you’d like to add?
For me, one of the coolest things about bringing all these pieces together into a single a book was the chance to write story notes. Each story has an introduction by me, telling a bit of the history of how I came to write the piece. I always find such notes fascinating in other writers’ collections — and find collections that don’t have them rather unsatisfying. I tried to be as candid as I could be, and I hope other people enjoy not just the stories but these peeks into their creation, as well.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Remember back in July, in reference to my stint as Special Guest at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con, I asked, “So how does a free trip end up costing $2,700?”
The answer — in part — has arrived! I’m torn between announcing “Thunderbirds are Go!” and “The Eagle has Landded!” :)
When Americans interview me, I usually say I got into science fiction through Star Trek and 2001: A Space Odyssey — but that’s only part of answer. My real first exposure to science fiction was through the Supermarionation programs of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson, the best known of which is Thunderbirds.
And a company named Iconic Replicas in the UK has a license currently to produce large-scale limited-edition replicas of Thunderbird 1, Thunderbird 2 (my favourite!), and Thunderbird 3 (Carolyn’s favourite).
Thunderbirds 1 and 3 come with partial replicas of their hangars, and with Plexiglas display cases — but Carolyn and I have decided to display them without those. They’re living in the room we used to call the sun room but is now known as Tracy Island!
Each of the Thunderbirds is limited to 800 pieces, and comes with a hand-signed Gerry Anderson certificate of authenticity.
I was admiring all three Thunderbirds at Comic-Con — pricey though they were! — when the U.S. distributor offered me a great deal if I took all three.
But I wanted more, and asked him what he’d charge me if I also took one of their Eagle Transporters from the Andersons’ live-action series Space: 1999 — a replica limited to 1,500 pieces.
He conferred with the UK representative and came back with a sweet price for them all, and the deal was done.
The Eagle also comes with a signed Gerry Anderson certificate, and Plexiglas case, but at the moment it’s living free on a coffee table in our living room.
(No, I didn’t spend all of that $2,700 I racked up at Comic-Con on these; there were several other goodies, too — including one more yet to come from Iconic Replicas …)
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
One of the more memorable lines from the 1956 classic SF film Forbidden Planet. And the most memorable character from that film was the one who said it: Robby the Robot.
Carolyn got me this fabulous seven-inch-tall diecast Robby figure, manafacutred in Japan by X-Plus, at the Denver Worldcon. It sits next to my living-room workstation, looking over my shoulder as I type.
Note quite as nice as bringing home a Hugo from Denver — but close! :)
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Man, have I been swamped!
In the last month, I’ve had lots of writing projects that had to be done — two major ones that I can’t say anything about just now, but I got them done ahead of deadline (go, me!); another that I turned in yesterday on deadline; and today I finished writing my keynote address for next week’s conference of the Canadian chapter of Meeting Professionals International (how meta is that — a meeting about planning meetings!).
In fact, I have nothing left to do besides working on Watch, my next novel, except for writing and recording some audio introductions to Arthur C. Clarke novels for Audible.com — and those aren’t due for a month.
Man, it feels good to have some breathing room!
But there’s no rest for the wicked! Tomorrow night begins the second-ever Mississauga Write-Off at Carolyn and my place: a bunch of writers converging on our penthouse for the long Labour Day weekend for an intensive writing retreat. The first three out-of-towners arrive tomorrow — Thursday — night, so we can get a good start first thing Friday morning, and we’ll go through late Monday afternoon.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
On top is the cover for my next novel, Wake, coming in April 2009 from Ace Science Fiction and Penguin Canada. The girl depicted is Caitlin Decter, the novel’s protagonist.
On the bottom is a picture of my wife, Carolyn Clink, when she was in Grade 6.
I think the resemblance is uncanny. :) And, no, cover designer Rita Frangie had never seen this, or any, photo of Carolyn when she created the book’s cover image.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
