… is Dario Rivarossa, and besides being a great translator, he’s also a great photographic artist. Check out his website here, with his art and info about his translation services.
And note that the samples of his translations skills are two passages from my Hugo Award-nominated 2003 novel Humans. the first passage in Italian is here, and the second is here.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
I received today copies of the eighth mass-market paperback printing of my novel Calculating God, a Hugo Award-finalist first published in 2000 (and first in paperback in 2001).
So, those of you who’ve had trouble finding it should have trouble no more.
Amazon.com, which had been showing it as unavailable for the last few months, now shows it again as “in stock” right here.
(Sadly, Tor made no movement on the cover price: it’s still US$6.99/Cdn$8.99, exactly the same as the first edition seven years ago … so, the good news is no inflation; the bad news is no adjustment for the rising value of the Canadian dollar.)
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
There are many ways to convert DOS word-processing files to Windows formats, but one I never see mentione involves using the Windows file-viewing program Quick View Plus. It is, in fact, a quick-and-easy tool for that. (As many of you know, I still write with WordStar for DOS, for all the reasons I explain here.)
The conversion is based on the same conversion filters that shipped with WordStar for DOS 7.0 (System Compatibility Corporation’s Software Bridge, which was rebranded as Star Exchange for bundling with later versions of Wordstar for DOS).
Now, Quick View Plus does not allow you to “Save As” any other format — but what it does do is this:
If you use it to open a WordStar for DOS file (or a word-processing file from any other program), it displays the file’s formatted text in a Windows window, with all the same formatting intact that Software Bridge / Star Exchange would have preserved: print attributes (bold, italics, etc.), tabs, centering, etc. (but not information coded in WordStar’s paragraph style sheets).
If you then do Ctrl-A (or Edit | Select all) and Ctrl-C (or Edit | Copy), the displayed file’s contents are copied into the Windows clipboard in RTF (Rich Text Format), with all formatting (bold, tabs, etc.) intact. You can then just open a Windows word processor and paste the contents of the clipboard in with Ctrl-C, as normal.
Voilà! A WordStar for DOS file converted to Word.
I’ve used Quick View Plus 7.0 for many years, and yesterday I gave the latest version, 10,0, a try. Except for adding some new file formats (7.0 supported viewing files through Word 2002 and StarOffice Writer through 5.2; 10.0 supports viewing files through Word 2007 and StarOffice Writer through 8.0), there are no differences in the program — no new features. Note: you don’t need a more recent version of Quick View Plus to paste into these later versions of programs; you only need a more recent version to view documents created under those programs in the Quick View Plus file viewer.
But what is new is that Avantstar, the current owners of Quick View Plus, have finally given it a reasonable price: it used to be that Avantstar charged over a hundred bucks for it; it’s now $46. There’s a free 30-day trial, and Vista support is promised for the end of July 2008.
Check it out here, and see if it works for you.
Quick View Plus supports the following DOS word-processing file formats, plus viewing most graphics formats (although not WordStar / InSet’s .pix format), and most DOS and Windows spreadsheet and database formats:
(The program’s name is sometimes styled as “QuickView Plus,” so I’m including that here so Google will find it in searches for that, too. Quick View Plus was previously owned by Systems Compatibility Corporation (and an earlier version was marketed as Outside In). SCC changed its name to Inso; the current owners are Avantstar.)
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Thomas M. Disch, a great American science-fiction writer and critic, killed himself four days ago.
My admittedly small relationship with him involved a couple of memorable miscommunications. In late 1980, when I was 20, the Ontario Science Fiction Club (OSFiC), which my friends Carolyn Clink, Ted Bleaney, and I had recently joined, was to devote a meeting to the novels of a great writer. Somehow, Carolyn, Ted, and I got word that the writer in question was Thomas M. Disch, and we went out and read his Camp Concentration, The Genocides, and On Wings of Song.
At the time, all were easy to find in mass-market paperback. Pulling those copies off my shelf today, I see that my Pocket Books paperback of The Genocides was a first printing, dated September 1979; my Bantam paperback of Camp Concentration was February 1980; and my Bantam paperback of On Wings of Song was September 1980: three mass-market releases in the space of a year.
I found all three books fascinating, beautifully written, sad, and memorable — it’s almost 18 years since I’ve read them now, and they all still stick with me, although particularly On Wings of Song.
Well, Carolyn, Ted, and I showed up at the OSFiC meeting at Hart House at the University of Toronto, all set to discuss the books — and discovered the topic was not “The Novels of Thomas M. Disch,” but rather “The Novels of Philip K. Dick” — which none of us had read at that point.
Five years later, in the summer of 1985, I was under commission from CBC Radio’s Ideas series to write and narrate three one-hour documentaries about science fiction. The CBC sent me to Manhattan to interview SF authors, and one of the first I had scheduled to meet was Thomas M. Disch. I was to come to his apartment building — the same one, as I understand it, that he was concerned just before his death about being evicted from.
But, again, miscommunication: somehow I’d written down the wrong apartment number, and there was no buzz-board with the name Disch in the lobby. I had no trouble getting into the building, though and got to the door, and was sure it must be the right apartment: it had a massive lion’s head knocker on the door, an oddly fierce, ostentatious, but bold thing to put on one’s door in an apartment building. I knocked it several times, but no one was home (or, at least, no one answered).
The next day, I did get Disch on the phone, and it turns out that wasn’t his apartment; he was amused to learn that one of his neighbors (on a different floor) has such a knocker, and that I’d thought it indicative of him.
We had a wonderful interview (among other things, he savaged Lester del Rey’s “Helen O’Loy,” and I recall using a clip of that portion in the documentary). I found him a fascinating character: he looked, to me, like a sailor, with big, muscular arms, but he had a strangely high-pitched voice. After, the interview, which we recorded in his apartment, he asked me if I wanted to go for a walk, and we did — a very pleasant walk around his neighborhood.
My final interaction with Tom was on Thursday, June 18, 1998. His wonderful but thorny nonfiction book about science fiction, The Stuff Our Dreams Are Made Of, had just come out, and CTV’s flagship morning television program Canada AM had me on, in studio in Toronto, to essentially debate the points in Disch’s book with him; he was hooked up by satellite from (I suspect — I don’t remember) New York.
I don’t think Disch had any idea that the 38-year-old he was hearing at his end was the same guy as the 25-year-old who had interviewed him in New York all those years ago … nor do I think had he been quite briefed (or maybe it was just too early in the morning for him, or one in a series of interviews he was doing) on the fact that this was to be a debate; he seemed somewhat peeved that he wasn’t being given a simple soapbox to propound about the failings of SF.
In point of fact, I agreed with many of his points, but my brief on that occasion was to defend the genre (and at one point Tom said to me, “You’re giving the Party line,” which indeed, I was). Anyway, it was a good piece of television.
I imagine I have a VHS tape of the Canada AM debate somewhere in one of my storage units (and I still have the raw CBC Radio interview on cassette tape, also in a storage locker somewhere); someday I’ll get around to digitizing all those things — hopefully before they all decay.
Anyway, I liked Disch as a person, and I liked him as a writer. And, as my wife Carolyn has noticed, I’ve been moping around quite a bit these last couple of days since I learned of his suicide. Depression is common among writers, all over the world, and I’ve seen many a colleague struggle with it.
Thomas M. Disch took his own life with his own gun, after being financially devastated by medical expenses during the long illness preceding the death of his life partner. He killed himself on the Fourth of July.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
So, I’ve been reading a lot of game theory and popular economics (including Tim Harford’s excellent The Logic of Life). And tonight I encountered a fascinating example of an interesting economic effect.
The first Thursday of each month is one of Toronto’s open science-fiction pub nights. We meet at a place called The Foxes Den. The bar has daily specials, but they’re usually the same on the first Thursday of each month, and, like, forever they’ve been offering a special on a small pizza with three toppings of your choice for $7.99. Usually, two or three people get that (I’m usually one of them, and I get pepperoni, bacon, and onions).
Anyway, tonight, for whatever reason, they changed the special: instead of being any three toppings of your choice, the special was on the “meat lover’s pizza” — with these three toppings: sausage, pepperoni, and beef. It was $7.99, as usual.
Now, in any previous month, you could have ordered that exact same pizza under the special, but tonight when you had to take those three toppings, our group bought nine pizzas (including one bought by me) instead of the usual one or two. Fascinating to see that giving people no choice of toppings moved way more pie than letting them pick the toppings they wanted.
Anyway, it was, as always, a terrific evening. Lots of BNFs (big-name fans), including Murray Moore, Catherine Crockett, Taral Wayne, Hope Liebowitz, Alex Von Thorn, Marah Searle, and Lloyd and Yvonne Penney; two — count ’em, two! — Clinks: Carolyn and David; a trio of Tans (Irwin, Lisa — who is big in Doctor Who fandom — and their son, Ian); three Ph.D.s (Dan Evens [physics], Diane Lacey [chemistry], Charles Levi [History]); and a slew of people who just plain like reading SF. Always a great time, and newcomers are always welcome!
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
It’s always nice to have happy clients, and it seems I do in my sideline as a keynote speaker.
Last month I gave a keynote address in Hunstville, Ontario, for The MEARIE Group (the only Canadian insurance supplier dedicated to the energy industry) and moderated a keynote panel just outside Washington, D.C., for Gartner, Inc. (the world’s leading information technology research and advisory company).
Here’s what the clients had to say:
“Robert delivered a provocative and dynamic address to our conference. Our goal was to choose a keynote who spoke outside the box and Robert delivered. He spoke to the wonders / marvels / complexities of modern technology … how it’s shaped our human history … and how it’s continually shaping us.
“Robert went out of his way to weave our conference theme and industry into his remarks, which only added to his impact on the audience. It’s often difficult to inspire an audience who has been to many conferences and sat through many keynote sessions. Robert, however, did just that. I definitely recommend him.”
— Andrea Dale
Vice-President
The MEARIE Group
“As conference chair for Gartner’s annual Information Security Summit, I contacted Robert J. Sawyer based on a co-worker’s recommendation. I asked Robert to assist in producing, and to moderate, a session called Science Fiction Writers Panel: Information Security and the Sci-Fi Future.
“Robert helped us evaluate suitable panel members for this topic, worked to help us contact and contract with them, and when the big day came, moderated the panel with the highest degrees of professionalism, along with considerable wit, humor and clarity. As they occasionally can do, when the panelists wandered off in flights of fancy outside our topic area, Robert skillfully and diplomatically brought the discussion back to relevance with the main theme.
“I have no doubt about Robert Sawyer’s ability to hold an audience’s attention, either solo or in the more challenging panel discussion format, and recommend him for suitable corporate or other events.”
— Victor S. Wheatman
Managing Vice-President, San Jose
Gartner, Inc.
More client quotes are here.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Woohoo! Rollback by Robert J. Sawyer is now in its third month on the paperback bestsellers’ list published by Locus, the trade journal of the SF field.
I’m doubly pleased because this is the second month in a row that Rollback is the top-selling science-fiction title (all the higher ranked titles are fantasy).
This is also the second month in a row that Rollback is the highest-ranked paperback from my publisher, Tor (and three months ago, the only Tor title to beat Rollback was Steve Gould’s Jumper, while the movie based on it was in theaters).
Here are the lists for the last three months. Numbers following listings are: months on list; position last month. An asterisk means a tie with the book listed (alphabetically) preceding it — so, this month Greg Bear and I are tied for 7th place.
JULY 2008 (data period: April [Locus site]):
1) The Name of the Wind, Patrick Rothfuss (DAW) 1 –
2) Embrace the Night, Karen Chance (Roc) 1 –
3) White Night, Jim Butcher (Roc) 3 1
4) Heart-Shaped Box, Joe Hill (Harper) 1 –
5) Storm Front, Jim Butcher (Roc) 6 –
6) All Together Dead, Charlaine Harris (Ace) 1 –
7) Quantico, Greg Bear (Vanguard Press) 1 –
*) Rollback, Robert J. Sawyer (Tor) 3 3
9) Fortune’s Fool, Mercedes Lackey (Luna) 1 –
10) The Outback Stars, Sandra McDonald (Tor) 2 –
JUNE 2008 (data period: March [Locus site]):
1) White Night, Jim Butcher (Roc) 2 1
2) Into a Dark Realm, Raymond E. Feist (Eos) 1 –
3) Rollback, Robert J. Sawyer (Tor) 2 7
4) Grimspace, Ann Aguirre (Ace) 1 –
5) No Humans Involved, Kelley Armstrong (Bantam Spectra) 1 –
6) Madhouse, Rob Thurman (Roc) 2 8
7) Goblin War, Jim C. Hines (DAW) 1 –
8) Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card (Tor) 20 –
9) Dead to Me, Anton Stout (Ace) 1 –
*) Von Neumann’s War, John Ringo & Travis Taylor (Baen) 1 –
MAY 2008 (data period: February [Locus site]):
1) White Night, Jim Butcher (Roc) 1 –
2) Iron Kissed, Patricia Briggs (Ace) 3 1
3) Command Decision, Elizabeth Moon (Ballantine Del Rey) 1 –
4) Some Golden Harbor, David Drake (Baen) 1 –
5) Jumper, Steven Gould (Tor) 1 –
6) Feast of Souls, C. S. Friedman (DAW) 1 –
7) Rollback, Robert J. Sawyer (Tor) 1 –
8) Madhouse, Rob Thurman (Roc) 1 –
*) The Outback Stars, Sandra McDonald (Tor) 1 –
10) Whitechapel Gods, S.M. Peters (Roc) 1 –
Since Rollback also spent two months on the Locus bestsellers’ list in hardcover, that means the book has now been on the Locus bestsellers’ list for a total of five months. Yay!
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
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Fictionwise.com is having a store-wide sale (that ends today) so I decided to stock up on ebooks for the summer. Here’s what I just bought:
FICTION
NONFICTION
(In Canadian schools, we don’t do much Steinbeck, and so I have to confess to never having read him. My friend Richard Curtis was my first literary agent, and is the best writer of articles about the business of publishing there is. Ira Flatow hosts NPR’s Science Friday, on which I was once a guest for a panel discussion along with Leonard Nimoy.)
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Here’s my schedule, at least as it stands now, for Denvention 3, this year’s World Science Fiction convention, being held in Denver from Wednesday, August 6, through Sunday, August 10:
“Canadian Science Fiction,” Fri, 10:00
“A World Made of Birds — What would the Earth be like if the Dinosaurs Had Lived?,” Fri, 11:30 (moderator)
Kaffeeklatch, Fri, 17:30
“Digging up SF: Paleontology in SF,” Sat, 10:00 (moderator)
“The Evolution of Science Fiction,” Sat, 14:30
Reading from Wake, Sat, 16:00
“Holy Holographic eBooks! Ideas for next gen reading technologies,” Sun, 13:00
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Audible.com has recently released editions of my Hominids, Humans, Hybrids, Calculating God, The Terminal Experiment, and Flashforward. You can get them all here.
This is all part of a big push into science fiction for Audible.com, and over at io9, they have an interview with Steve Feldberg about all this. Check it out.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Geoff Willmetts over at Stephen Hunt’s SF Crowsnest — one of Europe’s most popular SF sites — interviews Robert J. Sawyer right here.
The teaser for the interview says:
Our glorious editor GF Willmetts sits down with Canadian science fiction author Robert J. Sawyer to chat about whether aliens visiting Earth are likely to be friendly or aggressive, dropping pop-cultural references into his books, why Rob’s turning down offers to write short fiction for $1.25 a word, and why what really attracts people to scifi is the need to be amazed.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
On May 31, 2008, in this post, I mentioned I was using the index-card feature in a free program called Celtx to plot out my new novel, Watch.
But I didn’t like doing that, because Celtx provided no way to export the index-card text to an ASCII file, or a word-processing document — I didn’t want all my notes trapped in a specific program. And so I devised a method to export them; in broad strokes, this method is useful for getting text out of just about any application that doesn’t have an export function (or copy-all-to-clipboard function) of its own. Here’s the technique:
Print the index cards using any printer that produces Adobe Acrobat PDF files as output (I happen to use the DocuCom PDF driver, but any PDF printer should work, including the various free ones available online).
Note: it doesn’t matter whether you print card borders or background colors; this method works no matter which settings you choose.
Once the PDF is produced, open it in Adobe Reader (the free Acrobat PDF viewer); I’m using version 8 on an XP machine, but, again, any version should work.
Choose Edit | Select All (or just hit Alt-A)
Choose Edit | Copy (or just hit Alt-C)
The text of all your index cards is now in your clipboard; open a word-processing program or notepad program, and paste it in (usually with Edit | Page, or Alt-V).
Hint: I changed all my Celtx scene tags to have the tag names enclosed in curly brackets. Instead of “Plot A,” I made it “{Plot A},” etc. That makes it very easy to find the end of each card in your exported text file, so that you can add an extra line space, or otherwise break up the text file into individual cards.
For instance if your scene tags all begin with a curly bracket, then in Microsoft Word searching on:
^p{
and replacing it with:
^p^p{
gives you two carriage returns (an extra blank line) at the beginning of each index card’s exported text, since ^p — typed as caret (shift-6) then p — is Word’s code for a carriage return.
(Of course, I’m exporting to WordStar for DOS, not Word!)
It takes longer to explain the exporting process above than it does to do it; the actual process takes only seconds, and works very well, at least for me. Smile
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
This has been a good month for fact catching up with fiction in the novels of Robert J. Sawyer …
Not only is CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, which I wrote abut in 1999’s Flashforward, finally about to come on line, but now the Parliament of Spain has approved a resolution to grant some human rights to apes, under the terms of the Declaration on Great Apes, which I wrote about in my 1995 Nebula Award-winning novel The Terminal Experiment:
When Peter Hobson had taken a university elective in taxonomy, the two species of chimpanzees had been Pan troglodytes (common chimps) and Pan paniscus (pygmy chimps).
But the split between chimps and humans had occurred just 500,000 generations ago, and they still have 98.4% of their DNA in common. In 1993, a group including evolutionist Richard Dawkins and bestselling science-fiction writer Douglas Adams published the Declaration on Great Apes, which urged the adoption of a bill of rights for our simian cousins.
In took thirteen years, but eventually their declaration came to be argued at the UN. An unprecedented resolution was adopted formally reclassifying chimpanzees as members of genus Homo, meaning there were now three extant species of humanity: Homo sapiens, Homo troglodytes, and Homo paniscus. Human rights were divided into two broad categories: those, such as the entitlement to life, liberty, and freedom from torture, that applied to all members of genus Homo, and other rights, such as pursuit of happiness, religious freedom, and ownership of land, that were reserved exclusively to H. sapiens.
Of course, under Homo rights, no one could ever kill a chimp again for experimental purposes — indeed, no one could imprison a chimp in a lab. And many nations had modified their legal definitions of homicide to include the killing of chimps.
Adriaan Kortlandt, the first animal behaviorist to observe wild chimpanzees, once referred to them as “eerie souls in animals’ furs.” But now Peter Hobson was in a position to see how literally Kortlandt’s observation should be taken. The soulwave existed in Homo sapiens. It did not exist in Bos taurus, the common cow. Peter supported the simian-rights movement, but all the good that had been done in the last few years might be undone if it were shown that humans had souls but chimps did not. Still, Peter knew that if he himself did not do the test, someone else eventually would …
(Excerpt from Chapter 12 of The Terminal Experiment by Robert J. Sawyer; scene written Thursday, July 29, 1993.)
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Over at SciFi Wire, the news service of the SciFi Channel, John Joseph Adams interviews Robert J. Sawyer about his new collection, Identity Theft and Other Stories.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
OMG, this is the coolest thing ever!
Back on October 2, 2007, I gave a talk at the University of Waterloo entitled “A Galaxy Far, Far Away” My Ass!, about science fiction’s relevance for the here and now.
TVOntario’s lecture series Big Ideas was on hand to record it, and an MP3 of the soundtrack has been online here for a while.
Well, a fine fellow named Evan Steacy has now taken that soundtrack and put images to it, making a wonderful trio of YouTube videos out of my talk. He came up with the perfect image for just about every point I was making.
Episode 1: Planet of the Apes, Star Trek, and Frankenstein (6 minutes, 48 seconds)
Episode 2: H.G. Wells and Jules Verne (4 minutes, 0 seconds)
Episode 3: Star Wars (5 minutes, 17 seconds)
Or you can watch them right here:
Episode 1: Planet of the Apes, Star Trek, and Frankenstein (6:48)
Episode 2: H.G. Wells and Jules Verne (4:00)
Episode 3: Star Wars (5:17)
Many, many thanks, Evan!
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Three of Canada’s science-fiction editors were all together in the same room at Keycon in Winnipeg last month, and Hayden Trenholm nicely took a picture of us all. Left to right:
Robert J. Sawyer, editor of Robert J. Sawyer Books, the science-fiction imprint of Fitzhenry & Whiteside; Rob lives just outside Toronto, Ontario.
Virgina O’Dine, co-publisher of Bundoran Press; Virginia lives in Prince George, British Columbia.
Brian Hades, publisher of Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy and Tesseract Books; Brian lives in Calgary, Alberta.
Click on the photo for a larger version.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Granted, it’s a repeat — from 33 years ago! To commemorate the passing of George Carlin, the first-ever host of Saturday Night Live, that very first episode is being repeated this Saturday night, June 28, 2008, on NBC in SNL‘s usual timeslot — and one of the musical guests on that historic first episode was my friend Janis Ian, who performed her hit “At Seventeen.”
That’s Janis on that SNL broadcast above, and me and Janis at her place in Nashville in January 2007 below.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Just gave a keynote in Huntsville, Ontario, at the Deerhurst Resort — which will host the 2010 G8 summit. The keynote was for The MEARIE Group (MEARIE = “Municipal Electric Association Reciprocal Insurance Exchange”), at a conference on risk management, and I ended my keynote by doing a William Shatner impression, reading what I think is Kirk’s greatest speech from all of Star Trek, this bit from “Return to Tomorrow.”
McCoy: “Then I’ll still want one question answered to my satisfaction: Why? Not a list of possible miracles, but a simple, basic understandable why that overrides all danger. Let’s not kid ourselves that there is no potential danger in this.”
Kirk: “They used to say if man could fly, he’d have wings. But he did fly. He discovered he had to. Do you wish that the first Apollo mission hadn’t reached the moon, or that we hadn’t gone on to Mars, and then to the nearest star? That’s like saying that you wished that you still operated with scalpels and sewed your patients up with catgut like your great-great-great-great-grandfather used to. I’m in command. I could order this. But I’m not — because Doctor McCoy is right in pointing out the enormous danger potential in any contact with life and intelligence as fantastically advanced as this. But I must point out that the possibilities, the potential for knowledge and advancement is equally great. Risk … risk is our business. That’s what this starship is all about. That’s why we’re aboard her.”
YouTube has the whole exchange here.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Tom Easton, who will retire this year as book reviewer for Analog, reviews Nick DiChario’s Valley of Day-Glo (which was published under my Robert J. Sawyer Books imprint) and my own Identity Theft and Other Stories in the September 2008 issue. The review concludes:
“Fitzhenry & Whiteside is a Canadian house that deserves cross-border attention. I’ve mentioned it in the past in connection with some of Julie Czerneda’s work, and here it is again with two books of very different flavors that are both worth your time and money. If you want absurdity, go with the DiChario. If you want a more traditional, accessible approach, grab the Sawyer.”
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
I received today the page proofs for the first of the four serialization installments of my next novel Wake, which will appear in Analog, starting with the November 2008 issue (which will be out in September). Yay!
I wrote an article today for my alumni magazine, on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of Ryerson’s founding — looking ahead at what the next sixty years might hold. (I graduated from Ryerson in 1982 with a Bachelor of Applied Arts degree in Radio and Television Arts; fantasy author Tanya Huff and I were in the same class.)
And I worked on a keynote I’m giving day after tomorrow in Huntsville (Ontario cottage country) for the MEARIE Group, Canada’s only insurance provider dedicated to the energy industry.
Meanwhile, I got invited to the Frye Festival today, a literary festival in Moncton, New Brunswick, in honour of the great Canadian English professor Northrop Frye; I was delighted to say yes.
Once I finish giving that talk on Wednesday morning, I have nothing at all on my schedule — not even a lunch date — for the next three weeks. All of that time will be heads-down working on Watch the second book in my WWW trilogy.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
On my way to my signing in Rochester yesterday, I stopped at a Borders store to play with the PRS-505, the latest model of eBook reader from Sony. It’s a nice, attractive, solid-feeling unit, and, at $299, not badly priced as these things go.
But it had several showstoppers for me.
Number one (and huge): no dictionary support. Come on, Sony! Even the Rocket eBook a full decade ago let you tap on a word and look it up while reading; not only doesn’t the Sony reader ship with a dictionary (the Kindle does), it doesn’t even offer a way to add one in; there’s no support for looking up words within documents.
Number two: There’s a mirror-like strip of polished metal at the top and the bottom of the case (it looks like a black strip in this photo). There’s no excuse for putting reflective features (glossy finishes, mirror metal) on something that’s meant to be read. This will just reflect room lights back into your eyes.
Number three: crappy page layout. The biggest cost of an ebook reader is the e-ink display, and you should be able to get the most out of the real estate. But the Sony formats books with giant margins, and insists on putting page headers on every page. Thanks, guys, but I know what book I’m reading — and if I’ve forgotten, I can always look. Wasting screen space on headers is dumb, dumb, dumb.
Number four: no way to turn off right justification. It looks lousy at large point sizes, and should be user-selectable; it isn’t.
Number five: proprietary ebook format. Yeah, I know, that’s the way ebook-hardware vendors hope to make their money, but, sorry, I’m not willing to lock my library into devices from a specific manufacturer.
Number six: uncomfortable to hold. See those right-angle corners at the lower left and lower right? They dig into your palm. Corners should be rounded, guys (Kindle makes the same mistake).
Number seven: tiny page-turn buttons. The Kindle probably goes overboard in the other direction, but the ones on the Sony are just too small. (They’re the little half-moon buttons at the far right.)
Number eight: command to switch from portrait to landscape is buried several menus deep. It should be something you can do at any time with the push of a button.
So, the second generation is an improvement over the first, no question. Let’s see what the third generation offers!
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
The joint reading and signing by Nick DiChario, Nancy Kress, and Robert J. Sawyer at the Barnes and Noble in Pittsford (Rochester), NY, or Saturday night rocked — we all read well, 100 people showed up — it was standing room only (about 70 chairs were filled), and we sold a ton of books. Many thanks to everyone who came out!
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Last week, I posted my comments on the American Film Institute’s list of the top-10 SF films, and suggested some of my own substitutions for that list.
That list only went to ten places, but one that’s on my own list of the top 20 SF films is Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Seriously. If you’ve never seen it, you should. It gets all the time-travel stuff exactly right; all the historical stuff right; and is very, very clever and funny — a much better film than Back to the Future, for my money. And it starred George Carlin.
Carolyn and I went to see George Carlin perform in Las Vegas in 1994. He died yesterday. R.I.P, Mr. Carlin.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
The deadline for voting in the 2008 Hugo Awards is approaching rapidly.
All ballots must be received by midnight (2400 hrs.) Pacific Daylight Time at the end of Monday, July 7, 2008. That’s 17 days from now. :)
And, in case you missed the offer earlier, members of this year’s Worldcon can get free electronic copies of four of this year’s best-novel Hugo finalists right here.
(Included are Rollback by Robert J. Sawyer, The Last Colony by John Scalzi, Halting State by Charles Stross, and Brasyl by Ian McDonald.)
More about this year’s Hugos can be found here.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
It’s my week for podcasts, it seems! Right on the heels of the SMOFcast podcast interview with me going online, Hardcore Nerdity has just put up an interview with me, recorded on Sunday, June 15, 2008, at BookExpo Canada.
The interviewer is Lesley Livingston. The interview with me starts at 19 minutes, 10 seconds (19:10) and goes to 25:10.
And there’s lots of other neat stuff in the podcast, too. :)
Have a listen here — I’m in “HCN# 7: Better Spork Than Spoon Alone!” (Or direct link to MP3.)
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
I’m pleased to announce the sale of French rights to my current Hugo Award-finalist Rollback to Editions Robert Laffont in Paris. The deal was made by Ralph Vicinanza in conjunction with Agence Littéraire Lenclud.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
I’ve been reading a lot of books on human behavior, the economics of daily life, and game theory, as research for my current novel, Watch, and because I often drop references to such things into my keynote addresses.
Although Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner is the most famous recent book of pop economics (and I did quite enjoy it), I think the best of the current lot is The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World by Tim Harford, a columnist for The Financial Times and Slate. The Amazon.com page for it is here.
Harford takes on fascinating topics — starting with the increase in the number of teenage girls performing oral sex! — and explains why each behavior is strictly rational in an economic sense.
Now, yes, the behavior may not be what some people want — but that’s the point of the book: unless social engineers understand why it makes sense for individuals to behave as they do (and Harford’s thesis is that almost all people do what makes best sense for them under their specific circumstances), any hope of changing that behavior is doomed to failure.
Other topics tackled include why it makes rational sense for companies to pay their CEOs what seem to most of us to be obscene amounts of money, and the various forces that contribute to the continuing disadvantaging of African-Americans.
It’s a fascinating read, and it’s also extremely well-written: clear, witty, and well-organized. Highly recommended.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
I was interviewed by the new podcast SmofCast at Keycon last month (18 May 2008), and you can listen to it here.
The interview with me comes on at 31 minutes, 40 seconds (31:40), and ends at 49:12.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
They’ve just added my novel Flashforward to their collection of RJS unabridged audibooks (joining Calculating God, Hominids, Humans, Hybrids, and The Terminal Experiment, plus my Hugo-nominated short story “Shed SKin”).
You can get all my Audible titles right here.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
An article about how Nick DiChario, Nancy Kress, and I all came to be doing a signing together in Rochester, New York, this coming Saturday appears in today’s Canandaigua Daily Messanger. Check it out.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
