Robert J. Sawyer

… Michael Chabon won the Hugo for The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, beating my Rollback. Congratulations, Michael!

Sorry that I haven’t been posting more. I’m fighting a nasty cold here at the con — spent 13 hours in bed last night; missed a panel today. I might be feeling a little bit better … but I’m going to bed right now, just to be on the safe side.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

Today, a bunch of us SF writers played hooky from the Denver Worldcon and went on a VIP tour of the NORAD Cheyenne Mountain Complex, followed by a tremendous dinner at Kevin J. Anderson and Rebecca Moesta Anderson’s palatial home.

Just got back — dead tired. It was a wonderful, wonderful day.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

The Denver Worldcon has moved my reading. It is no longer in the Hyatt; rather it’s in the Convention Center, room 601. Time/date remains the same: Saturday at 4:00 p.m. I’ll be reading from my upcoming novel Wake.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

Well, it’s off to a nice start here in Denver, but it feels small (sparsely attended). Of course, it’s just begun. Wonderful lunch with NASA scientist Paul Abell, his wife writer Amy Sisson, and friend Shoshana Glick. Dinner with my Tor editor David G. Hartwell. Some party hopping.

Exhausted, though, and a bit under the weather, so turning in early. Night!

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

Denver, here we come!

How can you not love a Worldcon whose slogan is, “A mile closer to the stars”?

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

Here’s one to try on friends next time you’re at a party:

What common English word contains this sequence of letters:

A-C-H-A-C-H

Answer in the comments. :)

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

Tor is preparing a new trade-paperback edition of my 2000 Hugo Award-nominated Calculating God, which will included a book-club discussion guide at the back.

This afforded an opportunity to update the splash page at the front of the book (the one in the existing mass-market paperback doesn’t take advantage of the best reviews the book received). Here’s the new text:

Praise for CALCULATING GOD:

#1 on the Locus Bestsellers List!

“The best SF novel of the year; a profound moral and scientific inquiry into the nature and existence of God.” —Borders Books

“Spectacular. This is unusually thoughtful SF.” —Publishers Weekly

“A delicious read: intelligent, emotionally engaging, peopled with interesting characters and driven by a thoughtful narrative that does not shy away from confronting profound questions. How can you go wrong?” —The Globe and Mail

“The alien’s arguments for God’s existence are the most convincing I have seen since Thomas Aquinas — maybe more so. For fiction to be called literature, the story should stay with readers and keep them thinking about it long after the book has been put away. Sawyer has accomplished this with Calculating God.” —Denver Rocky Mountain News

“Exciting and emotional. Sawyer smoothly combines ethical questions and comical dialogue in a highly absorbing tale.” —Booklist

“An ambitious and extremely funny science fiction adventure; Calculating God is the most captivating work of science fiction I’ve read since Carl Sagan’s Contact.” —Victoria Times Colonist

“If the words `science fiction’ conjure up images of spaceships, ray guns, and bug-eyed monsters, settle down with this novel and discover that, in the right hands, science fiction can be literature.” —Halifax Chronicle-Herald

Praise for the Hugo Award-winning ROBERT J. SAWYER:

“Sawyer is a writer of boundless confidence and bold scientific extrapolation.” —The New York Times

“Sawyer has good things to say about the world, about people; he deals in a currency of goodwill, where the trust that we hand him at the start of the book is repaid, with interest, in the thoughtful and frequently emotional denouements.” —Interzone

“By any reckoning, Sawyer is among the most successful Canadian authors ever.” —Maclean’s: Canada’s Weekly Newsmagazine

“Sawyer has undoubtedly cemented his reputation as one of the foremost science fiction writers of our generation.” —SF Site

“It’s hard to think of a modern SF author with dreams as vast as those of the internationally acclaimed Robert J. Sawyer.” —The Toronto Star

“No reader seeking well-written stories that respect, emphasize and depend on modern science should be disappointed by the works of Robert J. Sawyer.” —The Washington Post

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

Speaking (as we just were) of my early days as a writer, here’s a piece I wrote in 1997. It appeared in the Ottawa Science Fiction Society Statement (for which I did a column called “Random Musings, more installments of which are here).

I started out as a nonfiction writer, and a lot of people have asked me if that was a good way to prepare for a career in writing fiction. The answer is yes, it was great for me — but that had a lot to do with the particular kind of nonfiction work I was doing.

I’ve had a lot of discussions with a fellow writer who, like me, started out writing nonfiction. The difference: I started out writing nonfiction for magazines; she started out reporting for newspapers. We both agree that my nonfiction career better prepared me for fiction writing than hers did. The reasons:

• Magazine articles have a traditional “beginning, middle, and end” structure: the magazine writer has to find both a narrative hook and a conclusion, whereas the newspaper writer has to adhere to the standard inverted-pyramid structure, in which the “hook” is simply a bald statement of the most-important facts, and there is no conclusion — the article is structured so that it can be chopped off at any paragraph break by the editor, depending on available room in the newspaper. The upshot: I’m a much better plotter, and much more innovative in my choice of narrative forms, than she is.
• Feature magazine articles are written much more slowly. A reporter might do several stories a day; a magazine writer might do only a couple of stories a month. The differences are obvious: the magazine writer learns to spend much more time on each piece, working with and revising the text. I’m now content to spend a week or more on a short story, if need be; my associate has a hard time going back to the same short story on a second day.
• Both feature magazine articles and news stories are often assigned to a given word length (say, 2,000 words) — but the newspaper writer, who is working much more quickly, will find 2,000 words and stop. I often would have 5,000- or even 10,000-word first drafts of 2,000 word articles: there’s a much greater filtration process, deciding what is really necessary to the story and what can be dispensed with. The result is that I write much tighter fiction (more plot events; more ideas per page) than does my associate.
• Magazine features often consist in whole or in part of profiles of other people; a magazine writer learns to capture the voice and personality of distinct individuals on the printed page, whereas a reporter is usually constrained against doing that. Magazine writers try to capture who somebody is, reporters capture just what they said. I ended up learning a lot more about characterization than my associate did.
• This one is a subtle difference, but it’s based on the fact that although beginning magazine writing and beginning small-town reporting probably pay about the same (which is next to nothing), established magazine writers make a hell of a lot more money than any but a top person at a major big-city daily. I ended up writing for Canada’s top magazines, often making a dollar a word for my nonfiction articles; because of this, I tend to shy away from any but the major short-fiction markets. My associate, who never made the equivalent of more than a dime a word for her reporting, still pursues things that I consider non-markets (payment in copies of the magazine, instead of cash), or fraction-of-a-penny-a-word markets.

  That’s all well and good, except that because she’d “sold” dozens of stories to such markets, she thought she was a much better, more polished short-story writer than she really was . . . and when she did go after the major markets (and tried to switch to novel writing, as well as trying to acquire an agent), she found her stories being bounced, often with just form rejections. So, while a staff reporter doesn’t really think too much about markets, a freelance article-writer does constantly rank the attractiveness of markets, and perhaps ends up with a better “reality-check” sense about his or her progress in fiction writing.

• A related point: when someone is paying you a dollar a word (or even a goodly fraction of that amount), you do feel you’ve got to give real value to the editor for that money. I have never uttered the words “well, it’s good enough, I guess” in relation to a piece of writing; my associate admits that that’s the first sentiment that occurs to her upon completing a draft of a piece.

If I had to summarize it all with a gross generalization, the magazine path taught me quality over quantity; the newspaper path taught her quantity over quality.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

Those who’ve been to my home often remark on the lovely painting above my fireplace. It is, in fact, the original of the cover for the September 1988 Amazing Stories by Bob Eggleton, illustrating my novelette “Golden Fleece.” The same painting was later used on the Science Fiction Book Club version of the novel expanded from that story, and, after that, on Tor’s trade-paperback reissue (see the bottom of this post).

Although I made my first SF sale in 1979, this sale to Amazing Stories was what I consider to be my first major sale. First, it was, at that time, by far the longest piece I’d sold (at 13,000 words); second, it was deemed good enough to be the cover story; and third, at that time, Amazing had a policy of paying a flat $1,650 for cover stories, meaning I was paid about 13 cents a word — more than double the going rate (then and now) at most other SF magazines.

It was also this piece that landed me my first literary agent, Richard Curtis.

Amazing Stories ran the following lengthy “about the author” piece back then:

THE LITERARY CAREER OF
ROBERT J. SAWYER

(Published in the September 1988 Amazing Stories)

At the time “Golden Fleece” takes place, JASON and the Argonauts have been on their way to the planet Colchis for five years. For them, that seems an impossibly long time. I know how they feel. It took me five years of off-and-on poking and prodding to finish their story.

In December 1982, Locus: The Newspaper of the Science Fiction Field announced a call for submissions for a DAW Books anthology called Habitats, a collection of stories dealing with the experience of living in places such as arcologies, terraformed worlds, and domed cities. Such ideas appealed to me — I’d already written about a domed Toronto in my story “Ours to Discover” — so I decided to try to come up with something for that book.

I’ve always liked playing with words, and the term starcology came to me almost at once. I guess I play with them too much, though. The April 30, 1983, deadline came and went with my story still unfinished. It didn’t much matter. I was well over the 7500-word limit DAW had imposed.

April 30, 1983, was an important deadline for me in another way, though. It was the day I stopped working at a regular job and became a full-time freelance writer. I write magazine articles about high technology and business. I also wordsmith for corporations and governments. Neither is as satisfying as creating other worlds, but the money is an order of magnitude better. Besides, I’d always thought I’d have plenty of time for fiction. But my business has been booming lo this past semi-decade and somehow the years have slipped by with me only completing a handful of SF stories, with “Golden Fleece” by far the longest.

Writing science fiction seems a lot like making stew: you throw things into the pot and then let them simmer. For “Golden Fleece,” the ingredients included an editorial by geneticist David Suzuki on why he believes Reagan’s Star Wars won’t work; an exhibition at the Royal Ontario Museum about the Titanic, from which I learned the sad story of Arthur Peuchen; a course I took in classical humanities; watching a re-run of The Ten Commandments on the tube; and a job I once did preparing a chapter on special relativity for a high-school physics text.

I’m trying to clear more of my schedule for SF writing. My current project is a time-travel novella with the working title “End of an Era.” It concerns dinosaurs — if I hadn’t ended up a writer, I would have become a paleontologist. Of course, I’ve been poking at it since the summer of 1980 . . . If it’s received well, I’ll expand it into a novel.

My wife and best friend, Carolyn Clink, has been my chief critic and inspiration. Others have read my works-in-progress, too. For “Golden Fleece,” I’d particularly like to thank physicist Ariel Reich for reviewing the science and SF writers Algis Budrys and Terence M. Green for their comments on the fiction.

In five more years, Starcology Argo will arrive at the promised land. I wonder where I will be?

… AND PAST ACHIEVEMENTS

Fiction

• Motive, one-third of the Futurescapes trilogy, a dramatic starshow produced by the Strasenburgh Planetarium, Rochester, NY, performed 192 times in the summer of 1980.
• “If I’m Here, Imagine Where They Sent My Luggage,” in The Village Voice, January 14, 1981. Reprinted as a “Bon Voyage” card by Story Cards, Washington D.C., 1987.
• “Ours to Discover,” in Leisure Ways, November 1982.
• “The Contest” in 100 Great Fantasy Short Short Stories, edited by Isaac Asimov, Terry Carr, and Martin Harry Greenberg, Doubleday hardcover 1984, Avon paperback, 1985.
• “Uphill Climb” in Amazing Stories, March 1987.
• “The Good Doctor” in Amazing Stories, forthcoming.

Selected Critical Works

• “Donald M. Kingsbury: An Interview,” in Science Fiction Review, Spring 1982.
• Writer and narrator, Other Worlds, Other Minds: A Science Fiction Odyssey, three one-hour programs for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Ideas radio documentary series, first broadcast in January, 1986.
• Entry on Science Fiction, The New Canadian Encyclopedia, Hurtig, 1988.

For my current CV, see here — it’s a wee bit longer. ;)

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

However, at least for the moment, I’m beating him! :)

Yes, I have no doubt that one week from today, Michael Chabon’s wonderful The Yiddish Policeman’s Union is going to beat my Rollback for this year’s Hugo Award for Best Novel of the Year.

But, to my absolute astonishment and delight, I see that my short-story collection Identity Theft and Other Stories is currently beating his book on the bestsellers’ list published by Locus, the American trade-journal of the science-fiction and fantasy fields.

Here’s this month’s Locus Trade Paperback Bestsellers List (numbers following listings are months on list and position last month; all the titles are debuting this month except for the Brooks):

AUGUST 2008 (data period: May [List on Locus site]):

1) The Queen’s Bastard, C.E. Murphy (Ballantine Del Rey) 1 –

2) World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, Max Brooks (Three Rivers Press) 6 3

3) Identity Theft and Other Stories, Robert J. Sawyer (Fitzhenry & Whiteside) 1 –

4) The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, Michael Chabon (HarperPerennial) 1 –

5) Chronicles of the Black Company, Glenn Cook (Tor) 1 –

Whoohoo!

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

I’ve given my website and this blog makeovers. They’re small changes, but they’re all I’ve got time to implement right now. Still, I think they look better than they did before, and now they both use the same colour scheme, for a more integrated feel.

(The astronomical background images are pieces out of the Horsehead Nebula.)

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

As I’ve mentioned before, one of my favorite all-time movies is 1983’s WarGames (just re-issued in a 25th-anniversary DVD, pictured above).

In honor of the 25th anniversary, Wired has this terrific article about how the movie came to be and its impact on geek culture. Check it out.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

… her!

Yup, at the Denver Worldcon, you can come to the panel on “The Evolution of Science Fiction” with Ben Bova, John E. Stith, L.E. Modesitt, Robert J. Sawyer — and the brilliant and lovely Shoshana Glick.

(That’s Sho pictured above, during her January 2008 visit to Toronto, during which she stayed with Carolyn and me.)

This seems as good a way as any to get people to actually look at my REVISED PROGRAMMING SCHEDULE for Denvention 3, the 2008 World Science Fiction Convention, which begins next week in Denver. :)

My autographing is new to the previously posted list, and I’ve added the room numbers:

Friday, August 8:

• 10:00 a.m.: Canadian Science Fiction [CCC – Korbel 4AB]
• 11:30 a.m.: A World Made of Birds — What if the
  Dinosaurs had Survived? [CCC – Korbel 1B]
• 5:30 p.m.: Kaffeeklatch (join me for coffee and chat — advance sign-up at the convention required) [CCC – Korbel 4E]

Saturday, August 9:

• 10:00 a.m.: Digging up SF: Paleontology in SF [CCC – Room 502]
• 2:30 p.m.: The Evolution of Science Fiction [CCC – Korbel 1C]
• 4:00 p.m.: Reading from my upcoming novel Wake [Hyatt hotel – Granite BC]

Sunday, August 10:

• 10:00 a.m. (to 11:15 a.m.): Signing/Autographing (seated next to Nancy Kress) [CCC – Hall D]
• 1:00 p.m.: Holy Holographic eBooks! Ideas for Next Gen Reading Technologies

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

The October 2008 issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact is out, and in the “In Times to Come” section at the back, which plugs the following issue, we find this teaser for my next novel, Wake:

Next month (our November issue) we begin another mind-stretching serial by Robert J. Sawyer, with a cover by George Krauter. In Wake, the term “mind-stretching,” often heard in connection with science fiction, applies a bit more literally than usual, with several minds stretching themselves — and each other — in literally unprecedented ways. All minds operate under limitations, which can be overcome by a variety of means; but probably all of those approaches have one thing in common. And the possibilities extend very far out, in ways both exhilarating and terrifying….

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

Enik was the coolest character on The Land of the Lost, the NBC Saturday morning half-hour live-action SF show from the 1970s that had David Gerrold as story editor.

And I scored one of the above at Comic-Con: one of 480 Enik banks. Enik was an Altrursian, the ancestors of the Sleestaks (it was quite a shock for him to discover that his civilizaiton had fallen and his people devolved to barbarism). They were introduced in the episode “The Stranger” written by none other than Star Trek‘s Walter Koenig (who also wrote one of the best animated Star Treks, “The Infinite Vulcan.”

As I mentioned earlier, I had dinner with Walter Koenig on Thursday night at San Diego Comic-Con. David Gerrold, Carolyn, and I were a bit late joining our dinner party (we were meeting in the exhibition hall, and we’d ended up going the wrong way; to make it back to the other end is a major undertaking).

Walter was only at the con for that one day, and as we were going by the Funko booth, David wanted to stop to look at the giant Sleestak figure (below), but Walter was in a hurry to get to dinner (since he was heading back up to L.A. afterwards), and wouldn’t let us stop … so, ironically, he missed seeing the wall display of action figures based on a character he created! (Neither David nor I noticed the Enik figures as we were whipping by the booth — but we both went back the next day, and David cadged Eniks for both himself and Walter. Very kind of him!)

“I cannot allow your sacrifice to be greater than mine.” –Enik the Altrusian to Will Marshall in Walter’s script

San Diego Comic-Con International 2008 was extremely generous with Carolyn and me: since I was Special Guest this year, we had all our expenses covered — roundtrip airfare for both of us from Toronto, five nights in the Omni right across the street from the convention center (where our suite number was 1701 — the Enterprise‘s serial number!), and all our meals paid for.

And yet, I return to Toronto $2,700 poorer.

How, you ask?

By going nuts in the dealers’ room! :) And very happily so. We only hauled $700 worth of stuff back with us; the rest is orders or pre-orders for merchandise that will be shipped later (with proper customs delcarations; I’ll happily pay the Canadian tax when it arrives).

What kind of things did we get? Well, for one, the 15-inch statue of the Battlestar Galactica from Diamond Select Toys pictured above (we opted for this, the battle-damaged version, as it had more character than the pristine version). It’s a good, not great, piece (I tend to agree with Sean Huxter’s “B-minus” review over at Science Fiction Weekly), but we got a deal, and it’s not like there’s another large version of this ship available.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

Okay, I’m no expert on music, but, like millions of people, I found Canadian singer Feist’s nifty “1 2 3 4” (above), which was used on an iPod commercial, quite appealing (in that it-keeps-running-through-your-head sort of way).

And I thought for sure the song with the lyric “I crinkle my nose” that’s on the radio a lot these days was Feist — the voice sounds identical to me. But it’s not; it’s someone named Colbie Caillat, and the song, it turns out (after some spelunking with Google) is called “Bubbly.” Still, it’s a nice cheery piece, and it makes me happy. :) You can hear/see it on YouTube here (and the Feist song “1 2 3 4” is here).

(And yes, I even like The Partridge Family. So there.)

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

The final day at San Diego Comic-Con comes to a close. We had a wonderful time.

This morning, I hooked up with Anthony Pascale, who runs TrekMovie.Com (for whom I reviewed the Star Trek Classic remastered episode “The Immunity Syndrome” last year).

He and I went to the event related to the sitcom It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. I used my VIP badge to get us into the special seating at the front, and I ended up sitting next to Fred Savage, star of The Wonder Years, as they screened a new episode of Sunny, which Fred had directed. The panel discussion afterwards, with the three male stars of the series, was excellent.

The afternoon: more trawling through the dealers’ room (including close encounters with Star Trek: The Next Generation stars Jonathan Frakes, Marina Sirtis, and LeVar Burton, and Zachary Quinto, the new Spock in the upcoming movie).

That was followed by drinks with Astrid and Greg Bear, plus Mike Moscoe/Mike Shepherd. Then I went to the Buffy: The Vampire Slayer musical sing-along. For several reasons, “Once More with Feeling” has special connotations for me …

And then the convention was over: five exhausting, exciting, fun-filled, amazing days. We had our final dinner here in San Diego with our friend, book collector Cary Meriwether (pictured above).

And now we try to pack all the stuff we acquired! Among the things I bought [actually, pre-ordered]: a 12″ statue of Linx the Sontaran, my favourite Doctor Who alien, from the very first Doctor Who I even watched, The Time Warrior — I love Sontarans.

Tomorrow is the long, two-legged (via Chicago) trip back to Toronto — during which I intend to get a lot of writing done.

Let me just close by saying to the San Diego Comic-Con International 2008 committee: THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU! Being Special Guest at this year’s convention was one of the biggest honours ever in my career, and Carolyn and I will always be grateful to you!

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

Today started with this panel, masterfully moderated by MaryElizabeth Hart from San Diego science-fiction bookstore Mysterious Galaxy:

10:00-11:00 “Looking at Our World: Eye on the Future”: Speculative-fiction authors discuss shaping the future through their fiction and shaping their fiction to the future. Panelists [pictured, left to right]: Comic-Con 2008 Guest of Honor Robert J. Sawyer (Rollback), John Zakour (Dangerous Dames), Charles Stross (Saturn’s Children), Alan Dean Foster (author of more than 100 books), William C. Dietz (When All Seems Lost), Tobias S. Buckell (Ragamuffin), and Ann Aguirre (Grimspace)

I’d been afraid the panel was going to be unwieldy with so many of us on it, but it actually came off extremely well, and we had a packed room.

After we all did an autographing session, aided by Toronto TV personality Liana K (co-host of Ed & Red’s Night Party, recently added to the line-up of the US cable channel Ripe TV), dressed up as Power Girl.

I was pleased to see that in addition to my Tor titles, Mysterious Galaxy had laid in a nice stock of my new short-story collection Identity Theft and Other Stories, from Canada’s Red Deer Press, as well as my earlier collection Iterations (that’s John Zakour on the right).

After the signing, Rob Sawyer (me!), Toby Buckell, Charlie Stross, and Carolyn Clink (pictured, l-r), all went to Dick’s Last Resort (pub) for a nice alfresco lunch, at which much shop was talked. :)

Carolyn and I spent the afternoon working through the exhibits/dealers’ room some more, and Carolyn had her picture taken with one of our favorite actors, Robert Culp of I, Spy and Greatest American Hero fame.

I stopped by the Write Brothers booth, and to my surprise and delight was given a copy of their plotting/story-outlining software StoryView, which I’ve long been intrigued by; expect a review here soon.

(Other goods scored in the dealers’ room today: a limited-edition Enik the Altrusian (Sleestak ancestor) plastic coin-bank figure (just 480 made) from Land of the Lost; a complete set of The Six Million Dollar Man series on DVD — of somewhat (cough, cough) dubious pedigree.)

I spent some pleasant time chatting with editor Jim Frenkel at the Tor Booth, and ran into David Gerrold again. Later in the day, we ran into Astrid and Greg Bear, and went for a snack together.

Dinner was terrific: Carolyn, myself, multiple Hugo Award-winning author (and San Diego local) Vernor Vinge, and screenwriter David Baxter (who, among other things, wrote for Star Trek: Voyager). We ate outside, and had a wonderful, leisurely dinner.

All in all, a wonderful, pleasant day.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

Today was my “Spotlight on Robert J. Sawyer” event. I was pleasantly surprised by the size of the audience, and very gratified by the quality of the questions in the Q&A.

After my talk, I had some nice chats with people, including a woman who is now a Hollywood scriptwriter who had read Far-Seer when she was 14, and had sent me a fan letter then, and a man who is a paleontologist at the University of Texas.

I was also touched by the industry professionals who came out to my talk, including fellow writer Jean Lamb; Fraser Robinson, the head of original production for Space: The Imagination Station; and film producers Keith Calder and Jessica Wu (who have my “Identity Theft” under option; Keith, who is a six-year veteran of the San Diego Comic-Con, kindly observed that my talk was one of the very best he’d ever heard there).

Today was also my big day for going through the vast exhibition/dealers’ area … and for buying things! I’ll say more about my acquisitions later, but I’m very pleased with them.

During the day I ran into Craig Engler from the SciFi Channel, Mark Askwith from Space: The Imagination Station, and fellow writers Mike Shepherd/Mike Moscoe, and Kevin J. Anderson and Rebecca Moesta Anderson.

I stopped by the Ace Science Fiction booth, and spoke to a marketing person who said the cover for my forthcoming novel Wake is spectacular (I haven’t yet seen it myself; apparently, it was just finished). And Carolyn and I went to the Ace/Roc presentation (a PowerPoint presentation about upcoming Ace and Roc titles through the end of the is year) — very well attended, and very interesting.

Dinner was with film producers Jessica Wu and Keith Calder at a wonderful restaurant called Cafe Chloe.

I can’t believe this convention is only half over! :)

(A giant Sleestak from Land of the Lost in the dealers’ room)

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

We had a wonderful first full day at San Diego Comic-Con, at which I’m special guest.

(Noel Neill)

We started Thursday by attending a session with Noel Neill, now 87, who played Lois Lane in the classic 1950s TV series The Adventures of Superman. Sadly, 15 minutes of her hour were eaten up by a “tribute” video that consisted mostly of schtick by a modern guy and lots of clips that featured George Reeves rather than Noel. But when she did speak, she was funny and warm, and absolutely charming. Carolyn and I scored front-row seats for that one.

We then briefly ran into Fraser Robinson, the head of original programming for Space: The Imagination Station, Canada’s counterpart of the SciFi Channel.

(John Barrowman)

I then went off to visit the unbelievably massive dealers’ room, while Carolyn went to see a panel on the BBC series Torchwood, which included many of the actors, including the guy who plays Captain Jack.

Meanwhile, I caught up with my friends Marc Scott Zicree (who wrote “Far Beyond the Stars,” arguably the best ever Deep Space Nine episode) and David Gerrold (who wrote “The Trouble with Tribbles”) as a panel they’d been on was ending.

We then attended a panel on the upcoming NASA-sponsored (!) SF film Quantum Quest. Actors Gary Graham and Robert Picardo, plus Tom Kenny, the guy who voices SpongeBob SquarePants, were on the panel; we scored front-row seats again.

(Left to right: David Gerrold, Carolyn Clink, Robert J. Sawyer, Walter Koenig, William F. Nolan; facing us: George Clayton Johnson.)

Later, David Gerrold, Carolyn, and I went out to dinner, joined by actor Walter Koenig and writers George Clayton Johnson and William F. Nolan (who together wrote Logan’s Run; George also wrote the classic Star Trek episode “The Man Trap”). It was a terrific dinner at an Australian restaurant in San Diego’s Gas Lamp district, near the Convention Center.

(Left to right: Robert J. Sawyer, Walter Koenig)

(Carolyn Clink and a Dalek)

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

Carolyn and I flew from Toronto to San Diego, by way of Chicago, today for San Diego Comic-Con International, at which I’m a Special Guest this year. We were picked up at the airport, and whisked to our lovely hotel suite.

Once we got checked in, we took a cab over to the San Diego Aerospace Museum, which is having a Star Trek exhibition. It’s $24 a head to get in, and, frankly, isn’t worth it. The bridge re-creation is only so-so (Spock’s Library Computer is missing the hooded viewer and the console used for the self-destruct sequence; Sulu’s helm station doesn’t have the targeting scope; there are no chase lights running beneath the main view screen, and that screen has rounded corners; etc.).

And the tour guide flat-out lied and said that this chair they were letting everyone sit in was the actual Captain Kirk chair from the original series. (No, it isn’t; that one is at the Science Fiction Museum in Seattle — behind glass.)

Also, most of the props are reconstructions, not originals, and the Excelsior model is not the one from Star Trek III, but a smaller one built for a flashback episode of Voyager.

We had a wonderful dinner in the hotel restaurant, then headed over to the preview night, and wondered around the gigantic exhibit hall. We saw Nicole DeBoer from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Lou Ferrigno from The Incredible Hulk. I bought a 16″ Diamond Select Toys statue of the Battlestar Galactica from the new series, and pre-ordered a 12″ statue of Linx the Sontaran from the classic Doctor Who episode “The Time Warrior.” We also stopped by the Tor booth, and the Ace booth, and ran into some old friends, including local fan Cary Meriwether.

Today was a long day — 27 hours for us, with the time-zone changes. But it’s been great fun. And, best of all, I got some very good writing done on the airplane (I tend to get a lot of my best work done on planes — which is good, given how much I travel). Tomorrow (Thursday) is the first full day of the convention.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

Man, I love this job! On Monday, following Readercon 19 in Burlington, Massachusetts, I stopped by MIT, and had a wonderful three-hour tour-and-lunch with AI pioneer Marvin Minsky (above: Robert J. Sawyer, Marvin Minsky) and his students Bo and Dustin. We visited the AI Lab and the Media Lab — and I met the robot below.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

My friend Melody Friedenthal today asked me, “Which idea in the Neanderthal Parallax books did you start with?”

For me, book ideas start out quite vague, and only after much research do they become concrete. But, culled from my writing journals, here are notes about the creation of the basic ideas for the Neanderthal Parallax trilogy. (Note that I bounce back and forth below between the spelling “Neanderthal” and “Neandertal;” I discuss that issue in this introductory note to the first novel in the trilogy, Hominids.

Saturday, December 30, 1995: Carolyn and I went to lunch at The Olive Garden out on Highway 7. An idea occurred to me [over lunch] for a multibook SF series: Earth is threatened by some menace so great that many multiple versions of Earth — one were dinosaurs evolved intelligence; another where Neanderthals became the dominant form of humanity; others were different Cambrian explosion bodyplans rose to intelligence — must band together to defeat it.

Sunday, June 20, 1999: Went for a walk with Carolyn, and told her the idea I had for a novel about parallel modern-day worlds, one peopled by the descendants of Cro-Magnon, the other by the descendants of Neandertals.

Tuesday, June 22, 1999: Downloaded 50,000 words of research on Neanderthals from CompuServe’s Magazine Database Plus, as research for my possible next novel. Also, checked Amazon.com for information about novels on Neanderthals or other prehistoric humans, including Waiting, Almost Adam, Esau, and Neanderthal. Nothing is similar to my premise.

At 5:00 p.m., wrote up a series of goals for the Neanderthal novel:

• To write an ambitious novel for publication in 2002, to be a real contender for the Hugo Award to be presented in Toronto in 2003;
• To be a tour de force of world-building, rewriting the last 40,000 years of human history;
• To be a big book, 150,000 typesetters words (135,000 grammatical words);
• To have out-of-genre appeal.

Wednesday, June 23, 1999: Did some research reading on Neandertals.

Friday, July 9, 1999: Readercon 10 near Boston, Massachusetts. Dinner with Jim Minz [at the time, David G. Hartwell’s assistant at Tor Books]. Handed him the manuscript for Calculating God; we discussed how quickly he or David could get feedback to me; I said I needed it as soon as possible, since I’m going to Australia for five weeks. He asked me what I was going to work on next and I pitched my vague notion about two parallel world, one in which Cro-magnon came into ascendancy, the other in which Neandertals did. He sounded very intrigued by it.

Sunday, July 25, 1999: Started reading material for my possible novel about an alternative universe in which Neanderthals survived instead of Cro-Magnons.

Monday, July 26, 1999: Reading about Neanderthals. Thought I might do my Space Colonies short story about a Neanderthal space colony, as a warm-up for the novel; might call it “This Town Ain’t Big Enough.” [Space Colonies, ultimately retitled Star Colonies: A DAW anthology edited by Martin H. Greenberg and John Helfers, published in June 2000; my story, “The Shoulders of Giants,” ended up being nothing like the above.]

Tuesday, July 27, 1999: Read up on Neandertals for my next novel. Phone conversation with [my literary agent] Ralph Vicinanza: I asked Ralph if we should hit Tor up now for a contract, or wait until after the Hugos [my novel Factoring Humanity was a Hugo Award-finalist at this time]. He said let’s strike while there is still a sense of anticipation; he’ll call David G. Hartwell to see what sort of proposal David needs. I pitched the Neandertal parallel-world idea at Ralph; he likes it — so I guess that’s what I’m doing next.

Wednesday, July 28, 1999: Started actually writing Neandertal outline, producing 1,086 words.

Thursday, July 29, 1999: Finished, by mid-afternoon, I thought, the outline for Neandertal World — but in the evening I skimmed Waiting by Frank M. Robinson (and edited by David G. Hartwell); Jim Minz had sent me a copy because I told him I was working on a book about Neandertals. Robinson uses his conflict between the modern descendants of archaic humans to preach about ecology; my take was too close to that. Aided by the Encyclopedia Britannica and Grolier’s [Encyclopedia] on CD-ROM, I came up with the idea of the threat to the two worlds being a magnetic reversal (I suspect this might have been in my mind because earlier in the week, I had used Britannica to look up the Geologic Time Scale, and the chart it presented listed magnetic reversals). I like the magnetic-field collapse better than the ecological threat, anyway. The proposal now stands at 1,400 words.

Friday, July 30, 1999: Thought of a new title for the Neandertal book overnight: Neandertal Parallax. Gave the outline a final polish, and faxed it to Ralph Vicinanza.

Tuesday, August 3, 1999: Ralph Vicinanza called. He gave David G. Hartwell an over-the-phone pitch for Neandertal Parallax, and will send him the outline tomorrow; Ralph thinks it’s an excellent outline, and more than adequate to get a contract.

And, indeed, Ralph Vicinanza got me a very handsome six-figure three-book contract. “Neanderthal Parallax” became the overall trilogy title, and the individual volumes were Hominids, Humans, and Hybrids.

The actual pitch that sold the series to Tor is below. Don’t worry too much about spoilers; the final books deviate a great deal from this outline:

NEANDERTAL PARALLAX

a novel proposal by

Robert J. Sawyer

Ne·an·der·tal: now the preferred spelling by most English-language paleoanthropologists of the word formerly rendered as Neanderthal, recognizing the official revision of the spelling of the original German place name by the German government.

par·al·lax: the apparent shifting of an object’s position when seen from a different point of view.

#
Forty thousand years ago, two distinct species of humanity existed on Earth: Archaic Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis. Both looked out on their world with dull gazes, unable to comprehend it, barely aware of their own existence.

And then an event that would change everything occurred: in the quantum structures of the complex neural tissue packed into the brains of Homo sapiens, consciousness emerged. And with consciousness came art and sophisticated language and science and religion and subtle emotions and planning for the future. Until this time, no truly self-aware lifeform had existed on Earth, no creature lived, primate or otherwise, that was driven by anything other than instinct.

Of course, this newfound awareness enabled Homo sapiens to out-compete the Neandertals; in less than ten thousand years, the Neandertals were extinct.

Or, at least, they were extinct here — in this universe.

But, under quantum physics, the phenomenon of consciousness is intimately tied in with the nature of reality. Indeed, quantum theory predicts that every time an event observed by an intelligent being could have two outcomes, both outcomes do come to pass — but in separate universes. Until the rise of consciousness, there were no branching universes, no parallel realities. But, starting on that crucial day 40,000 years ago when consciousness emerged for the first time, the universe did begin to split into multiple versions.

The very first split — the very first time an alternative universe was spun off from this one — happened because the original emergence of consciousness, a product of quantum fluctuations, could have gone a different way: instead of consciousness first arising in a Homo sapiens mind, it might instead have arisen originally in a

Homo neanderthalensis mind, leading to the Neandertals deposing our ancestors, instead of vice versa.

And 40,000 years later, in what in this universe is referred to as the dawn of the 21st century, an artificial portal opens, bridging between our universe and one in which the descendants of Neandertals are the dominant form, allowing small numbers of individuals to pass in either direction.

Many things are the same on both Earths: the sky shows the same patterns of stars, the year is still 365 days long, and is divided into months based on the cycling of the moon’s phases. The gross geography of both worlds — the shapes of the continents, the location of lakes and mountains — is the same. And the flora and fauna is essentially the same (although Neandertals never hunted mammoths or other animals into extinction, and so they still flourish).

But all the details of culture are different. Gender roles, family structures, economic models, morals, ethics, religion, art, vices, and more are unique to each species. In what I hope will be a tour de force of world building, the Neandertal world will be as rich and as human as our own, but different in almost every particular. Although there is much diversity in modern human cultures, many themes recur in almost all of them, themes that can be traced back to our archaic Homo sapiens ancestors of 40,000 years ago: pair-bonding, belief in an afterlife, territorial defense, xenophobia, accumulation of wealth. The modern Neandertal society will have entirely different approaches to these and other issues, based on the their different evolutionary history.

For instance, humans are able to effectively communicate with words alone: language spoken in darkness, printed text, radio, telephone conversations, E-mail — all are possible because we can easily transcribe or transmit spoken sounds, and convey virtually our entire intended meaning with just these sounds. But there is much evidence that Neandertals would have had a substantially reduced vocal range compared to that of archaic humans — possibly meaning they, and their descendants, would have to supplement verbal communication with facial expressions and gestures. If their descendants developed books or telephones at all, they might only be useful for conveying limited kinds of information.

Meanwhile, some fossil sites suggest that only female Neandertals homesteaded, and males lived nomadic existences, interacting with females only to breed. Projected into the present day, such lifestyles might define radically different social arrangements, with most individuals having long-term same-sex partnerships (of two, or possibly more, individuals), and secondary other-sex relationships. Absentee fathers wouldn’t necessarily be bad fathers, though: modern Neandertal society might be built around multiday holidays during which all work stops and rural males come into the cities to be with their offspring.

And, of course, all the background of daily life — here, in our universe, typified by such things as single-family dwellings, nine-to-five jobs, private automobiles, television, contract law, national allegiances, and war — would be completely different in the Neandertal world, a world equally advanced scientifically but in which individuals are much more physically robust, have larger brains (ancient Neandertal brains averaged 10% larger than those of Homo sapiens), are much less interested in colonizing and proselytizing, and are much better suited to living in cold, northern climates: the harsh lands that we know as Alaska, northern Canada, Siberia, Scandinavia, and Iceland — sparsely populated in this universe — might be developed centers in the Neandertal world.

Neandertals and humans differ genetically by only 0.5% (whereas humans and chimpanzees differ by 1.4%); incorporating the latest anthropological research to develop a modern, technological Neandertal culture, the book will illuminate what it means to be human.

#
The portal between the two universes has been opened accidentally, by the creation not in this world but rather in the Neandertal one of a giant quantum-computing facility (quantum computers — currently in development — access alternate universes to almost instantly solve otherwise intractable mathematical problems).

The contact could not have come at a more propitious time. In both universes, Earth’s magnetic field is collapsing — a prelude to a polarity reversal. Such reversals have happened many times during our planet’s geologic history. They occur without any discernible periodicity, and can last as little as two thousand years or as long as 35 million years (the current normal-polarity period began 780,000 years ago; the preceding period of reversed polarity lasted from 980,000 to 780,000 years ago). The difference between reversed and normal polarity is trivial: compass needles point south during the former and north during the latter. But the transitional period is of great concern: during it, the magnetic field shuts down, and dangerous cosmic-ray particles that are normally deflected are free to bombard the Earth’s surface.

Neither the Neandertals nor the Homo sapiens alone have the technology to prevent the collapse of the magnetic field, or, failing that, to protect their worlds during the transitional period — but, perhaps by pooling their differing scientific expertises, they will jointly be able to save both worlds.

The exchange of science and culture starts off promisingly enough, but then the Neandertals discover that we have depleted our ozone layer (which provides additional protection from cosmic rays) through our use of chlorofluorocarbons and petrochemical exhaust from automobiles. It becomes clear that the magnetic-field collapse actually presents a much greater threat to us than it does to them. On their world, the onslaught of cosmic rays will surely cause many cancers and mutations, but on ours, out-and-out mass extinctions — including, likely, that of Homo sapiens — will additionally occur.

The Neandertals have learned of our history of expansionism and warfare (something they don’t share). Many of them fear if no solution to the magnetic-field collapse is found that we will try to forcibly invade their world with its intact ozone shield — it is, after all, the only other habitable planet that we could possibly escape to.

Continued contact between the two universes is at the Neandertals’ discretion, not ours: shutting off their quantum-computing facility will almost certainly sever the link, closing the portal. And once they learn that 40,000 years ago in this universe, our kind drove their ancestors to extinction, will they want to help us? Or, indeed, will they feel justified in letting us die — just as we let their kind die in our own past? Homo sapiens will have to prove its humanity, if it is going to be saved.

#
Neandertal Parallax will be an ultimately uplifting novel of first contact, speculative anthropology, world-building, and cutting-edge quantum theory, with the potential for a sequel or ongoing series.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

I’m at Readercon 19 in Burlington, Massachusetts, where, on Friday, July 18, 2008, the winner of this year’s Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award, honoring a deceased SF writer who has slipped from public consciousness but deserved to have renewed attention brought to his work, was presented to Stanley G. Weinbaum, author of, among others, the seminal short story “A Martian Odyssey.”

The current jury for the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award is:

• Martin Harry Greenberg
• Barry N. Malzberg
• Mike Resnick
• Robert J. Sawyer

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

Summer’s here, and the Rob-man is on the road!

• Thursday, July 17, to Sunday, July 20, 2008: Readercon, Burlington, Massachusetts
• Wednesday, July 23, to Sunday, July 27, 2008: Special Guest at San Diego Comic Con
• Wednesday, August 6, to Sunday, August 10, 2008: Denvention 3, the World Science Fiction Convention, in Denver
• Thursday, August 14, to Sunday, August 17, 2008: Writers of the Future workshop and awards ceremony, Malibu, California

Links above are to my programming schedules at the listed events.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

My very favorite ebook-reading software, eReader (formerly, Palm Reader), is now available for the iPhone and the iPod touch. Steve Pendergrast of eReader.com and Fictionwise.com gives a terrific tour in this YouTube video, as well as a great explanation of the eReader DRM system, which I think is the fairest and easiset to use one out there:

And all the other info you might want is here.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

… are a hoot! See here.

(Thanks to my buddy Fergus Heywood of the CBC for the link!)

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

Our great friends Garfield and Judith Reeves-Stevens are in town, and Carolyn and I just came back from a fabulous three-and-a-half-hour dinner with them. Lots of shop talk, lots of pleasant conversation, and lots and lots of good food.

(Here’s a profile I wrote of them when we all guests of honor at MileHiCon in Denver a couple of years ago.)

Life be good. :)

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

I’m a member of a number of online groups devoted to various aspects of electronic publishing, but I probably post the most over in the Yahoo! Groups Fictionwise group, which is over here.

Today, this popped up in my email box:

Rob, I’m not writing to tell you how much I love or hate any of your work; millions of readers do that every day, I am sure. Yes, I am a fan, but I am writing to you to thank you for taking the time to put so much into the Fictionwise group. As an avid e-book reader, I appreciate your working so hard to share your information and experiences with others. You have gone far beyond the level of, “Here, this is what you have to do and then you can read my book.” You interact with the other members in a way that keeps people talking about topics and still solves specific problems for individual readers. I wonder how many other authors who operate at your level take the time to help their readers learn how to do the equivalent of open the book, turn it right side up, turn the page and begin reading!

I feel that what you are doing would be the equal of Keith Richards telling 13 year old boys how to tune their guitars to open g, drop the low e string, bar the strings at the fifth fret, put your second finger below it and strum. When I think of all the messages you have posted about ebook readers, formatting issues, publishers’ practices, etc. it staggers my poor ole mind. OK, now that I have rambled on, here is my message to you: Thank you, Robert Sawyer. Please keep writing thought-provoking books, and keep on helping us idiots enjoy reading those books.

Well, what a nice way to begin the day! My reply:

Thank you!

I got my start in the online world back in 1987 on CompuServe helping others use WordStar (then, a popular word-processing program). And I just love, love, love the notion of ebooks — and want the industry to succeed. So — thanks!

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site