Robert J. Sawyer

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 …

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… 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

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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.

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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 …)

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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! :)

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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

Yesterday, a study was announced that showed that although our ancestors made different stone tools than did Neanderthals living at the same time, our designs weren’t in fact better. Among the news stories picking up on the study was this.

Because of my Hugo-Award winning novel Hominids and its sequels (“The Neanderthal Parallax” trilogy), I was asked for a comment by a journalist. Here’s what I had to say:

What’s particularly interesting is how long the prejudice against Neanderthals has endured — of course, there are none of them left around to form their own lobby group. But they were physically more robust than we are, and they had brains as big as or bigger than our own. And yet we persist in portraying them as lesser beings.

I rather suspect an argument could be made that they were more intelligent than we are. For instance, we started showing evidence of a belief in an afterlife some 40,000 years ago: we began burying our dead with grave goods — tools, haunches of meat, and so on, things that were too valuable to throw into a hole in the ground unless we were convinced that the dead person was going to need them in some other realm.

Well, Neanderthals were our neighbors in many places: they saw us doing that, and didn’t emulate that behavior; one might argue that they never fell into the trap of superstition.

They also seemed much less interested in make-up and jewelry than we were; we were covering ourselves with red ocher and making necklaces and so on when they were not. Now, we tend to take those things — superstition, vanity — as signs of our intelligence being greater than theirs, but they could just as easily be signs of us having less rational, more superficial minds than the Neanderthals did.

Remember, Neanderthals were obviously bright: they made tools, they had complex social arrangements. But it’s us, not them, who were exhibiting what today many of us consider to be the most fatuous of human behaviors.

As Metin Eren, the lead author of the study, says of the new but not better tools we used, “A new shared and flashy-looking technology might [have served] as one form of social glue” for us. In other words, we have always been riding waves of fashion and looking to identify in-groups and out-groups.

And the Neanderthals were the ultimate out-group. Our track record of getting along well with people who look only slightly different from us is abysmal; imagine how shabbily we’d have treated beings with bigger noses, sloping brows, no chins, and so on. I suspect the demise of the Neanderthals may have been the first of the many genocides we’ve been responsible for.

Consider: a standard hunting technique used by our ancestors was to drive a whole herd of animals off a cliff, even if only a fraction of the corpses could be eaten before the meat went bad; there’s no evidence of Neanderthals over-hunting, but we’ve always done that. Again, who was the brighter?

Sadly, Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” really often means “survival of the nastiest” — we cheat and we kill indiscriminately, and we like to claim that it’s okay because a god or gods is on our side. Yes, we won in the end, but that doesn’t make us better.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

After gnashing teeth for months over the outrageous airfares (all air travel is expensive these days; domestic travel in Canada is outrageous, because of lack of competition), I bit the bullet and booked flights today for the World Fantasy Convention in Calgary.

Carolyn and I arrive early Thursday afternoon, October 30, and are staying to late afternoon, Sunday, November 2.

(We would have come in Wednesday evening, but I’m giving a keynote address for the Grey Bruce Health Network in Ontario Wednesday evening.)

See y’all in Cow Town. Yee-haw!

(Pictured: Carolyn Clink wearing an official Calgary Tourism VIP white cowboy hat.)

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If I had a quarter for every time I said, “If I had a nickel …,” I’d have five times as much theoretical money. — Stephen Colbert

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I’m delighted to report that an excerpt from my Aurora Award-winning short story “Stream of Consciousness” will be used in the new middle-school Canadian textbook Literacy in Action 8: Time Will Tell, edited by Chris Atkinson, and coming out in September 2008 from Pearson Education Canada.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

These days, so much of my communication with people is via email. That’s certainly efficient. But, still …

So, in the last couple of days I picked up the phone, and called two of my closest friends — people I hadn’t talked to in far too long. And it was great to just hear their voices, catch up on what they’re doing (all of us are very busy). What was the old slogan for long-distance calling? “Reach out and touch someone …” Well, here it was, many months since I’d even called these guys, and they’re local calls.

Anyway, world, the update: Bram Stoker Award-winner Edo van Belkom (top) and World Fantasy Award-finalist Terence M. Green (bottom) are doing fine. :)

(I got Edo on my first try; I left a message yesterday for Terry, and he just called me back.)

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

The November 2008 issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact is now on newsstands. It contains the first of four installments of a full-text serialization (not an abridgment) of my 18th novel, Wake — so here’s your chance to be among the first (30,000 or so!) people to read it. :)

The rest of the novel will appear in the next three issues (we just received the page proofs for Part 3 of 4 today). Enjoy!

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

I got asked in my Yahoo! Groups newsgroup today what was in my to-be-read pile.

Well, as it happens, my favorite ebook retailer, Fictionwise.com, is having a big sale right now, so I picked up the 27 books below. Some — Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot; William Gibson’s Neuromancer; and James Alan Gardner’s brilliant collection Gravity Wells — I already had in dead-tree editions; the rest are things that I think I’ll enjoy reading:

• 13 Things That Don’t Make Sense: The Most Baffling Scientific Mysteries of Our Time by Michael Brooks
• Adapting Your Novel for Film by Pauline Baird Jones
• The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics by Leonard Susskind
• City at the End of Time by Greg Bear
• Declare by Tim Powers
• Don’t Know Much About History by Kenneth C. Davis
• Going for Infinity by Poul Anderson
• Gravity Wells by James Alan Gardner
• Guerrilla P.R. 2.0: Wage an Effective Publicity Campaign Without Going Broke by Michael Levine
• A History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell
• I, Robot by Isaac Asimov
• Ilium by Dan Simmons
• Olympos by Dan Simmons
• Lilith’s Brood [Xenogenesis Series Omnibus] by Octavia E. Butler
• Masterpieces: The Best Science Fiction of the 20th Century by Orson Scott Card
• Neuromancer by William Gibson
• The Odyssey: Deluxe Edition by Homer & Robert Fagles
• Old Twentieth by Joe Haldeman
• The Oxford Dictionary of Idioms by Oxford University Press
• Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely
• Saturn’s Children: A Space Opera by Charles Stross
• Secrets of Mental Math: The Mathemagician’s Guide to Lightning Calculation and Amazing Math Tricks by Michael Shermer
• Simplexity: Why Simple Things Become Complex, and How Complex Things Can Be Made Simple by Jeffrey Kluger
• Speaking of the Fantastic: Interviews with Classic Science Fiction and Fantasy Authors by Darrell Schweitzer
• The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments by George Johnson
• Vacuum Diagrams by Stephen Baxter
• The Way We’ll Be: The Zogby Report on the Transformation of the American Dream by John Zogby

First up, I think, will be Charlie Stross’s new one …

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I just received this note from the editor I’m working with on an essay I was commissioned to write:

I must say, I feel defunct! This is fabulous. I loved it. Thank you. I have one minuscule suggestion … [an excellent point about adding a comma]. But that’s my only comment. My work on this one is done.

I’m very proud of this particular piece, and will say more about when it becomes publicly available.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

There’s a discussion over in MobileRead.com about what authors make. Jeffrey A. Carver already chimed in there, and I just added this:

To expand a bit on what my friend Jeff Carver said above, many major US publishers pay the following royalty rates, or similar amounts:

Hardcovers: 10% on the first 5,000 copies; 12.5% on the next 5,000 copies; 15% thereafter

Trade (large-format paperbacks): 7.5%

Mass-Market paperbacks (beginning authors): 6% on the first 100,000 copies; 8% thereafter

Mass-Market paperbacks (established authors): 8% on the first 100,000 copies; 10% thereafter

Note that these royalties are on the list (cover) price, not on what the bookseller actually charges. If Amazon sells a $25 hardcover at $16, the author still normally gets $2.50 (although there are conditions when the discount to the bookseller has been so deep that special lower royalty rates kick in).

Most ebook retailers, on the other hand, pay royalties as a percentage of the actual price paid by the consumer, not the suggested list price (so although the percentages are higher, the actual royalty amount isn’t as good as it appears at first blush).

First novels from major publisher normally have advances against royalties of $2,500 to $7,500, although there are exceptions; advances go up for later novels, if sales warrant.

A great many genre-fiction writers stall for their whole careers at a per-book advance level of around $20,000, though; few authors are getting $50,000 or more per book in genre fiction.

Note that the advances above for the principal licensed territory (in many cases, just the US and Canada). Authors may get separate advances for the UK (often bundled with Australia), and for foreign (translation rights). Some authors, however, sell World English Rights to the same publisher (Tor, the largest SF publisher in English, tries to buy those rights, for instance).

SF author Mike Resnick did a rough-and-ready back-of-an-enveloped calculation some years ago that suggested that of the 1,2000 or so active members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, maybe 100 make $100,000 or more per year. Change that figure to $500,000 or more, and it’s probably 25 members.

(But even $100,000 isn’t as good as it sounds — you have to buy your own office equipment, pay your own health and other insurances, get no pension, etc. etc.; a standard yardstick is that you need to make twice as much if you’re self-employed as you do as an employee to enjoy the same standard of living and level of security.)

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Five years ago today — on Monday, August 25, 2003 — I sent out the following email notice to 21 very talented new writers. The workshop that grew out of this notice, The Fledglings, is still going strong, and the members are producing some very fine work. (As an example, last year Fledgling member Stephen Kotowych won the Writers of the Future Grand Prize.) I’m very proud of this group. Here’s the note from 2003 that started it all:

Hello talented writer! Robert J. Sawyer here.

I’m contacting a select group of those who came to see me while I was writer-in-residence at the Toronto Public Library’s Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation and Fantasy.

Not everybody who visited me is on this list; in fact, it contains just 21 names out of the 70 people who had appointments with me. If you are on this list, I thought you were both (a) at an advanced level in your writing, and (b) might benefit from workshopping your manuscripts.

So: I’m inviting you to come to the inaugural meeting of a new writers workshop. I will attend the first meeting only, and I’ll simply come to explain workshopping etiquette and procedures. (I won’t be critiquing any manuscripts myself.) After the first meeting, it’s up to those who are participating to organize the workshop and run it themselves.

Arlyss Ponchuk has very kindly volunteered the Penthouse room at the co-op she lives in for the first meeting. It’s a perfect location — a couple of blocks from where the famed SF editor Judith Merril used to live.

And, of course, it’s very much in Judy’s footsteps that I’m following here: she founded a similar workshop, which took the name the Cecil Street Irregulars, after her tenure in 1987 as writer-in-residence at the library that now bears her name. Many of the hottest writers in Canadian science fiction and fantasy came out of that workshop, including Bram Stoker Award-winning horror writers Edo van Belkom and David Nickle, John W. Campbell Award winner Cory Doctorow, current Sunburst Award finalist Karl Schroeder, and Asimov’s contributor Michael Skeet.

If you’re interested in coming out to the first meeting of a new workshop, let me know — and also let me know of any Saturday or Sunday dates you cannot attend in September and October. We’ll try to find a date for the inaugural meeting that accommodates the largest number of people. (I can’t do it on Saturday, September 6; Saturday, October 11; or Sunday, October 12, so those dates are off the list already.)

An important note: belonging to a workshop is not a prerequisite for making progress as a writer. Many — nay, most — published SF/F writers broke in without ever belonging to a workshop (I have never belonged to a workshop myself). If workshopping doesn’t sound like something you’d find fun or useful, don’t worry about it. But if it seems like something you might enjoy and be helped by, then let me know.

Frankly, 21 people is way too many for a workshop — eight or ten is ideal — so if everybody wants in, we might divide into two groups (a “commercial” workshop and a “literary” one, or a science-fiction workshop and a fantasy one — whatever works given who shows up).

For the first meeting, you’ll be expected to bring copies of a manuscript to distribute to the other attendees (don’t make copies yet, of course: wait until we know the exact number who will actually be attending). We should probably limit the wordcount to 5,000 words for the first round — a short story, or a chapter of a novel. Everyone who comes to the first meeting, and wants to attend the next one, will take copies of all the other manuscripts for critiquing: you critique others, others critique you.

Are you interested? Please let me know either way!

All best wishes!

Rob

P.S.: Below is the article I wrote about my time as writer-in-residence at the Merril; it’ll be in the next issue of SOL Rising, the newsletter of the Friends of The Merril Collection.

In April, May, and June of 2003, I was writer-in-residence at the Merril Collection. Many people have thanked me for my generosity in doing this — so let’s start by setting the record straight. It was a paying job, funded by the Toronto Public Library and the Friends of the Library’s South Region. They’re the heroes of this, and I am extremely grateful for their support.

My residency began with a reception for library board members and staff at the Toronto Reference Library, with refreshments provided by the Friends of the Merril Collection (thank you!). At that event, I said that being writer-in-residence at the Merril is “an honour without parallel” for an author of science fiction. And it is: to be asked to take on a role that had only ever before been held by Judith Merril herself was hugely flattering, and I was deeply moved by the opportunity. Indeed, I felt Judy’s spirit hovering over me throughout my time in residence, and I tried my best to make her proud.

During my residency, patrons were allowed to each submit up to 20 manuscript pages, and I read these in depth. I then had an hour-long one-on-one session with each patron, going over his or her manuscript and answering questions.

I was delighted by the wide range of people who came to see me: absolute beginners, previously published writers, students, retired people, and more — even the grown son of one of my high-school girlfriends! At the end of the session, each patron was asked to fill out an anonymous evaluation form. To my delight — and relief! — 100% of the feedback was positive.

I’d learned a lesson from my previous stint as a writer-in-residence (in 2000, at the Richmond Hill Public Library). Back then, I went into the library for just one or two appointments several times a week, which I found discombobulated my writing schedule. At the Merril, I decided to do most of my appointments on Saturdays (assuming that most patrons would find that more convenient than coming in on weekdays), and sometimes did as many as seven appointments in a row. Rather than flagging as the day wore on, I found myself energized — every session was a pleasure.

This scheduling let me handle my residency duties while still getting a lot of my own writing done — which is actually part of the point: a writer-in-residence is supposed to devote 70 percent of his or her time to personal writing projects.

My contract called for me to critique sixty manuscripts, but demand was so high I agreed to do an extra ten for free — and we still had to turn people away. That just goes to show how much need there is for this sort of service, and I hope that it won’t be long before the Merril Collection gets to have another writer-in-residence. Working with Collection Head Lorna Toolis and her staff was a treat. Their constant professionalism and good humour were a joy.

When Judy Merril was writer-in-residence, sixteen years ago, she invited the most promising of the people who came to see her to form a writers’ workshop. Judy came to the first meeting of that group, which dubbed itself the Cecil Street Irregulars, and is still going strong. I’ll be doing the same thing in September, facilitating the inaugural meeting of a new workshop, which I hope will help produce the next generation of Canadian science fiction and fantasy writers.

It’s just one more way of continuing Judy’s fabulous legacy.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

I’m delighted to report that Snoot Entertainment in Los Angeles has renewed its option on my Nebula Award-nominated novella “Identity Theft” and its sequel short story, the Aurora Award-winning “Biding Time,” for a third year.

When Carolyn and I were in Los Angeles earlier this month, we had a wonderful meeting at Snoot’s offices with producers Keith Calder and Jessica Wu, and a potential director for the project.

Both “Identity Theft” and “Biding Time” are reprinted in my new short-story collection, Identity Theft and Other Stories from Red Deer Press.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

Carolyn is away for the weekend. She’s helping our niece Melissa move into residence at McGill.

I’m bacheloring it. Lunch was chicken wings from Swiss Chalet. Dinner was a frozen pizza onto which I added a lot of garlic. For desert, I had a chocolate bar sweetened with sugar alcohols.

Memo to self: don’t mix lots of garlic with sugar alcohols.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

You can hear my appearance from Tuesday, August 19, 2008, on psychologist Howard Gluss’s radio show online right here. Dr. Howard Gluss is a psychologist in Los Angeles.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

I’m speaking and reading at a Canadian literary festival next month, and I confess to have been in a rather feisty mood when it came time for me to answer a by-email interview sent to me by the publicity manager for the festival. Here’s what I had to say:

1. How is the role and importance of science fiction writing shifting in the world as we wake up to environmental and technological issues?

The role isn’t shifting — but the general public is waking up to the role the genre has always historically filled: a place for wondering what will happen “if this goes on.” Science fiction has long dealt with environmental disasters, and has illuminated not just the promise but the peril of new technologies — and the real world is taking note.

The recent TV special How William Shatner Changed the World was a wonderful tongue-in-cheek look at how science fiction had set much of the modern agenda, from computers to cell phones, from telecommuting to genetic engineering. Science fiction beta-tests the future; it’s our distant-early-warning system for whatever threats are just over the horizon.

2. What are your own hopes and visions for the genre and its relationship to the literary world? What are the main issues in that sphere?

Despite what I just said, in some circles, science fiction still fails to get enough respect. As it happens, today’s mail brought the new issue of Quill & Quire, with an ad for the University of Guelph’s new Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing — and there’s not one single genre-fiction writer on the faculty, let alone a science-fiction writer.

The assumption that SF can’t be high art, that it doesn’t take skill and subtlety to write, is a pernicious canard perpetuated by those who have never read the stuff.

As far as literary merit is concerned, I’ll pit my books, or the ambitious books by my colleagues, along with our awards (41 national and international ones to date for my own work) and reviews (including starred reviews, denoting work of exceptional merit, for my latest, Rollback, in both Library Journal and Publishers Weekly) against anything that’s out there in other fields.

Science fiction writers do everything that other writers do, plus more — they add a layer of social consciousness and forward thinking onto all the other literary virtues that any fiction must contain.

3. In your success and popularity you seem to have taken on a seriously custodian/cultural kind of role that has real pragmatic use. What does that tell us — what cultural need is being met? What kind/level of responsibility do you feel in that?

The Ottawa Citizen and the CBC have both dubbed me “the dean of Canadian science fiction,” and, earlier this year, when naming me one of the 30 most influential people in Canadian literature, Quill & Quire said I’m “the public face of Canadian sci-fi.”

I take those roles seriously; I’m an evangelist for the genre I’ve devoted my life to: I want it to be well and widely read. Science fiction is important: it talks in meaningful ways about the future, it proffers solutions, and it engenders hope.

As the pace of change accelerates, more than ever we need literary advance scouts, helping us steer the way toward a better tomorrow, either by portraying desirable futures — which tends to be my own style — or by shining a spotlight on dystopias, in hopes that we can avoid them.

4. Feel free too, to comment on your thoughts around appearing at the Festival itself and the importance of a representative from the science-fiction quarter.

Well, if you’ll forgive me, it’s about bloody time! :)

Among the literary festivals I’ve done previously are: Blue Metropolis Literary Festival, 2008 and 2000; Harbourfront International Festival of Authors, 2007 and 1996; Banff-Calgary WordFest, 2007; Stratford Book Festival, 2005; Singapore Writers Festival, 2005; Shuswap Lake International Writers’ Festival, 2004; Sunshine Coast Festival of the Written Arts, 2004 and 2002; Moose Jaw Festival of Words, 2003; Winnipeg Writers Festival, 2002 and 1997; and the Ottawa International Writers Festival, 2000; plus events at the National Library of Canada, 1999 and 1996, and the Library of Congress in Washington in 2007 and 1999.

So, it’s impossible to say that your festival is being cutting-edge here in letting one token SF writer in. That said, I’m thrilled at the opportunity to reach a new audience. What I’ve found every single time — every single time — I’ve done a mainstream literary festival is that the audience responds enormously positively; it’s the self-appointed gate-keepers, whether on the festival circuit, at the Canada Council, or in academia, who are holding on to old prejudices, not — thank God! — the reading public.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

I’ll be the guest for an hour tomorrow night (Tuesday, August 19, 2008) on The Howard Gluss Radio Show, starting at 11:00 p.m. Eastern time (8:00 p.m. Pacific).

The topic: The psychology of science fiction.

More info is here

A podcast will be available. :)

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

Carolyn and I are home after 12 days on the road. Our trip took us to Denver for the World Science Fiction Convention, to NORAD’s Cheyenne Mountain Complex, to Los Angeles for four days, and finally to Malibu for the Writers of the Future conference/ceremony. All in all, a wonderful trip, and I think I’m finally (well, 95%) over my cold. Yay!

Also, I’m very pleased with how much writing I got done during this trip. Thank God for laptops!

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

Above is the cover for Wake, the first volume of my WWW trilogy, coming from Ace Science Fiction and Penguin Canada on April 7, 2009.

Here’s a larger version.

I think it’s magnificent.

The art and design are by Rita Frangie.

The cover copy for the book will read:

Caitlin Decter is young, pretty, feisty, a genius at math — and blind. Still, she can surf the net with the best of them, following its complex paths clearly in her mind.

When a Japanese researcher develops a new signal-processing implant that might give her sight, she jumps at the chance, flying to Tokyo for the operation.

But Caitlin’s brain long ago co-opted her primary visual cortex to help her navigate online. Once the implant is activated, instead of seeing reality, the landscape of the World Wide Web explodes into her consciousness, spreading out all around her in a riot of colors and shapes. While exploring this amazing realm, she discovers something — some other — lurking in the background. And it’s getting smarter …

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

A fine day in Los Angeles — gorgeous weather.

Carolyn and I had lunch with Marc Scott Zicree and his wife Elaine; very pleasant. (Marc and I both just lost Hugos — me for novel; him for dramatic presentation short form for his New Voyages Trek episode “World Enough and Time.” Among his other writing credits: the wonderful Deep Space Nine episode “Far Beyond the Stars.”)

We then went to the Getty Museum, and, oh my God, was it beautiful — something like a cross between what Heaven would look like if it existed and the cloud city of Stratos from “The Cloud Minders” on Classic Star Trek — absolutely gorgeous architecture, and breathtaking exhibitions (including a wonderful temporary one on Bernini).

Then we stopped in at Barnes and Noble, then it was off to dinner: with Andre Bormanis and his girlfriend Miche; Andre was on the writing staff of Enterprise and Threshold and it on the staff of the new series Eleventh Hour, based on the UK series of the same name. Terrific time.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

My best intentions of blogging my time at Worldcon fell by the wayside because of the severe cold I was suffering through during the convention. It’s mostly abated now (yay!), and Carolyn and I are safely in Los Angeles, doing a little business … (and had a pleasant relaxing dinner at Tony P’s, our favorite restaurant in Marina del Rey). So, a few random pleasant memories of Denvention 3 will have to suffice:

Running into Toronto friends Hope Liebowitz and Murray Moore on the flight down to Denver.

Catching up for the first time in far too many years (eight, we think) with old friends Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith.

Seeing Barb Galler-Smith glowing all weekend long after Brian Hades bought her first novel from her at the con.

A nice chat with Steve Miller and Sharon Lee.

A wonderful dinner with my Tor editor David G. Hartwell, a wonderful dinner with Analog editor Stanley Schmidt and his wife Joyce, a wonderful lunch with my Ace editor Ginjer Buchanan, and a terrific breakfast with Steve Feldberg, the director of original content for Audible.com.

Seeing old friends (and world-class costumers) Pierre and Sandy Pettinger — and getting invited by them to be Guest of Honor at a con in Omaha next summer.

Chatting with Paolo Bacigalupi and his father, Todd; kidding around with Lou Anders; meeting Rome Quezada of the Science Fiction Book Club; hanging at the Dead Dog party with Marah Searle-Kovacevic and Diane Lacey.

A wonderful lunch with old friend John E. Stith, Mark Graham (the reviewer from the Denver Rocky Mountain News), fans Jim and Marlys Schneider, and Robert Charles Wilson and his wife, at a terrific brew pub.

Getting to see the cover for Wake for the first time (Ginjer brought a printout to lunch), and, OMG, it’s stunning. (I’ll post a version here as soon as I can.)

A terrific Robert J. Sawyer newsgroup luncheon at Bubba Gump’s — thanks to all who came!

A terrific panel on the evolution of science fiction, moderated by L.E. Modesitt, with Shoshana Glick (who suggested the panel), John E. Stith, Ben Bova, and me.

A final meal with Australian writer K.A. Bedford and his wife Michelle, plus new Aussie writer Lesley, Barb Galler-Smith, Shoshana Glick, and IFWA (Calgary writers’ group) members Randy McCharles, Val King, and Susan Forest.

And, of course, the wonderful NORAD tour, and dinner at Kevin and Rebecca Anderson’s afterwards …

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

How cool is this? A fine fellow called ionreflex has started a SETI@home team named ROLLBACK in honor of my novel of the same name. Woohoo!

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

The NORAD trip I was on on Thursday is blogged here by Annalee Newitz of io9.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site