… for a third year, by Toronto producer Scott Calbeck. I’m delighted!
Mindscan, which won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Novel of the Year, is a story of transferred human consciousness and attempting to define what it means to be human.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
I mentioned a while back that Audible.com had issued me a seven-book (!) contract for audio versions of my novels (the entire Neanderthal Parallax trilogy, the entire WWW trilogy, and Calculating God); those are still forthcoming (and the first of them should be out next month).
But Audible.com has also just released an audio version of my 1995 Nebula Award-winning novel The Terminal Experiment, wonderfully narrated by Paul Hecht. The Terminal Experiment is the story of a biomedical engineer who finds scientific proof for the existence of the human soul.
You can get it (as well as a reading of my Hugo-nominated short story “Shed Skin”) right here (a permalink to all the Robert J. Sawyer titles available at Audible.com).
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
More or less: a synthesized, simulated Neanderthal vocal tract has now produced the sound of a Neanderthal saying “E.” New Scientist has the scoop.
I fondly remember interviewing cognitive linguist Phil Lieberman, who is involved with the research mentioned above, for two hours on November 4, 1999, at his office at Brown University to discuss Neanderthal speech, as I was beginning work on Hominids.
(Neanderthal difficulty in pronouncing the long-E phoneme figures in Hominids and its sequels, and is why Ponter, the Neanderthal, always calls Mary Vaughan “Mare.”)
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
I’m thrilled to be participating in this year’s Blue Metropolis Literary Festival in Montreal.
My full schedule is here.
My main event is a solo reading by me, with commentary, hosted by Claude Lalumière.
The event is Saturday, May 3, 2008, at 8:30 p.m., at the Delta Centre-Ville hotel in the Versailles Room (details are here — see event #112). Admission is $10, and tickets should be purchased in advance.
I’m also on event #22, a panel about time:
“Is writing about another time a variety of travel writing? Lindsey Davis travels back in time to Ancient Rome with her toga-wearing gumshoe Marcus Aurelius Falco. Gary Geddes and Padma Viswanathan moves back into the early twentieth century and Robert J. Sawyer travels into the future in his science fiction. Hosted by Juliet Waters.” [Thursday, May 1, 2008, at 5:30 p.m., $10]
And I’m part of #64, which should particularly be of interest to wannabe writers, as I’m participating in it in my guise as editor for Robert J. Sawyer Books:
“So how does that manuscript you’re been working on finally get published? This is your chance to find out at our publishers’ event, back by popular demand. With Robert J. Sawyer, Kim McArthur, Patricia Aldana, Jon Paul Fiorentino. Hosted by Carolyn Marie Souaid.” [Friday, May 2, 2008, at 8:30 p.m.; $5]
Again, my full schedule is here.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Today’s mail brought my author copies of the German edition of Flashforward, published as simply Flash. The cover is lovely, I think.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Just received a copy of The Coming Convergence by Stanley Schmidt, Ph.D., the editor of Analog Science Fiction and Fact. The book’s subtitle is “The Surprising Ways Diverse Technologies Interact to Shape Our World and Change the Future.” It’s a terrific book, and, on the “Advance Praise for …” page, you’ll find this blurb from me:
Stanley Schmidt is our advance scout, journeying ahead to the glorious, complex future that awaits us all, and he reports back in this fabulous book, chock-full of the same kind of lucid and insightful commentary that has made his Analog editorials must-reading for three decades now. Schmidt gives us the same kind of clear-headed thinking and cleanly written prose that we associated with Asimov and Sagan.
The Amazon.com page for the book is here.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
I received today, hot off the presses, the first copies of my new short-story collection Identity Theft and Other Stories, and I have to say it looks fabulous. Red Deer Press has always been known for beautiful books, and this one is no exception.
The cover and interior design are by Karen Petherick Thomas. Amy Hingston shepherded the book through production. Fiona Kelleghan copyedited the manuscript. Richard Dionne is the publisher of Red Deer Press, and Sharon Fitzhenry, who bought the book, is publisher of the parent company, Fitzhenry & Whiteside. The introduction is by Robert Charles Wilson.
The official launch parties for Identity Theft and Other Stories are:
Canada:
Bakka-Phoenix Books
697 Queen Street West
Toronto, Ontario
Saturday, May 10, 2008, at 3:00 p.m.
United States:
Barnes & Noble
3349 Monroe Avenue
Pittsford (Rochester), New York
Saturday, June 21, 2008, at 7:00 p.m.
(The U.S. launch is a joint launch with Nick DiChario for his new novel Valley of Day-Glo, which I edited.)
This is my 19th science-fiction book: I’ve had 17 previous novels, and this is my second short-story collection (the first was 2000’s Iterations, a new edition of which is coming out this month, in a cover that matches the one for Identity Theft).
(I don’t count Relativity: Essays and Stories in the tally above, because it’s mostly a nonfiction book …)
Onward to number 20, which will be the novel Wake, coming in the spring of next year …
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
A question that showed up in my in-box today:
I have now completed two SF novels and am hard at work on a third. However, I have had no luck whatsoever in piquing the interest of any publishers or agents. Do you have any thoughts on how to attract something more than a momentary “glance” from an agent? I have tried a number of formats for my covering letters, but this seems to have made little difference.
The answer is simple, but not easy. The best way to attract an agent is by having short-fiction credentials. That proves you can write: that you can tell a story with a beginning, middle, and end with a publishable level of competence. When I landed my own first agent, in 1988, I did so by citing short-fiction credentials, including a novelette in the September 1988 Amazing Stories (defunct now, but at one time a major SF magazine, founded by Hugo Gernsback himself).
What you’re doing now is like showing up at NHL tryouts and saying, hey, I’ve never played in a junior league, but give me a shot. Or it’s like writing a cover letter for a job: a potential employer will indeed only just glance at such a letter to see if you have appropriate education or previous work experience, and, if you don’t, they will set it aside no matter what else you say in the letter.
Short fiction is very much a valid art form in its own right, but it is also the way you prove yourself in this genre. The significant SF&F magazines — Analog and Asimov’s and F&SF in the US; On Spec and Neo-Opsis in Canada; and Interzone in the UK — are wide open to submissions from anyone, and their editors make their names based in part on the authors they discover and develop. You don’t need an agent to submit to any of these magazines, and they seriously consider work from newcomers.
Perhaps you’re thinking you don’t want to write short fiction; setting aside the fact that that’s like saying you don’t want to pay your dues, there’s still a way around it: find a standalone excerpt from one of your novels, and submit it (rewritten if necessary) as a short story. You’ve done two novels; you’ve got on the order of 200,000 words of fiction already written — surely some 4,000- or 5,000-word chunk of that works well enough on its own to constitute a short story.
Once you’ve got some short-fiction credentials (or at least one significant one), cite that in your cover letter; it’ll make a world of difference. Indeed, if you do well with your short fiction, you may find agents approaching you: my buddy Edo van Belkom is with Joshua Bilmes, a very fine agent, because Joshua approached him after noticing his short fiction.
Now, yes, there are authors who manage to break in without an agent. Typically, these are authors who have submitted manuscripts over-the-transom (unsolicited) to those few publishers who still read such submissions. Tor certainly does, but be warned that their response time for slush (unsolicited manuscripts) is two to three years; I think DAW still reads unsolicited material, too, as does Baen. Once you get an offer, it then usually is easy to acquire an agent (just don’t agree to anything until after you are represented).
Trying to set up appointments with agents on a trip to New York is very unlikely to bear fruit. Some agents do show up at major SF conventions: the World Science Fiction Convention is in Denver this year and the World Fantasy Convention is in Calgary; both will have agents in attendance. But whether they’ll be approachable is another matter. My own agent goes to the World Science Fiction Convention but doesn’t do any programming and hangs out at the hotel bar not wearing his name badge in part so he won’t be approached by wannabes.
I wish you the best of luck!
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Charlton Heston, who starred in three of the best remembered science-fiction films of the 1960s and 1970s — Planet of the Apes, Soylent Green, and The Omega Man — died yesterday at the age of 84. Rest in peace, Chuck.
Charlton Heston as Col. George Taylor in Planet of the Apes:
And that completes my final report until we reach touchdown. We’re now on full automatic, in the hands of the computers. I have tucked my crew in for the long sleep and I’ll be joining them soon. In less than an hour, we’ll finish our sixth month out of Cape Kennedy. Six months in deep space — by our time, that is.
According to Dr. Hasslein’s theory of time, in a vehicle traveling nearly the speed of light, the Earth has aged nearly 700 years since we left it, while we’ve aged hardly at all.
Maybe so. This much is probably true — the men who sent us on this journey are long since dead and gone. You who are reading me now are a different breed — I hope a better one.
I leave the 20th century with no regrets. But one more thing — if anybody’s listening, that is. Nothing scientific. It’s purely personal. But seen from out here everything seems different. Time bends. Space is boundless. It squashes a man’s ego. I feel lonely.
That’s about it. Tell me, though. Does man, that marvel of the universe, that glorious paradox who sent me to the stars, still make war against his brother? Keep his neighbor’s children starving?
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Five years ago today, one of my week-long writing workshops at the Banff Centre in the ski-resort town of Banff, Alberta, started. I had six students with me for that week, and a terrific bunch they were! I’ve kept in touch with all of them to one degree or another since, and I’m just pleased as punch at their writing successes in the interim:
Kim Greyson (part of the 2008 World Fantasy Convention committee) recently had his first (nonfiction) publication; Ernie Reimer has gone on to publish short fiction in several venues, including On Spec; Ed Hoornaert’s first SF novel, The Trial of Tompa Lee, is out in hardcover from Five Star; and the irrepressible Edward Willett had his novel Lost in Translation published by Five Star, then re-published by DAW, and his second DAW novel (begun in my class!), called Marseguro, is just out — and he’s sold them a third book.
(Meanwhile, Kaye Mason, also part of that class, has finished a Ph.D. in computer science and now works on way cool stuff at EA, the big computer-games maker, and Kevin McIsaac is active with all sorts of community and charitable things in Fernie, B.C.)
That was one of the best weeks of my life, and I’m so glad my students are all doing so well!
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
If you’re a member of this year’s World Science Fiction Convention in Denver, electronic copies (as RTF files, which are readable by almost all word processors) of four of the five best-novel Hugo Award finalists are yours for the asking. See John Scalzi’s blog for the details (and many thanks to John for handling distribution!).
Included in the bundle are Ian McDonald’s Brasyl, Robert J. Sawyer’s Rollback, John Scalzi’s The Last Colony, and (if you live in the United States) Charles Stross’s Halting State.
(The publisher of the fifth finalist, Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, declined to participate in this giveaway.)
And let me publicly say what a stand-up, terrific guy John Scalzi is. He didn’t have to organize this; he didn’t need to make his massively popular web platform available to anyone but himself. But he’s a true gentleman. THANK YOU, JOHN!
(Thanks, too, in my case, to my publisher, Tor Books, which controls the electronic rights to Rollback and authorized the use of the book in this program.)
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
… is my buddy S.M. Stirling, formerly of Toronto. Says Steve, “Since it’s going to be published in the trade press soon, I can say that the advances for the latest contract have gone well into six figures per book and the overall advance for all six books is in the seven figure range; it’s the first time I’ve signed a contract with the world ‘million’ in the payout.”
And indeed, it is in the trades, including Locus (which arrived here in Toronto today): “S.M. STIRLING sold three Change novels and three books in the new A Taint in the Blood series to Ginjer Buchanan at Roc via Russell Galen in a seven-figure deal.”
Steve and I have been friends for over 20 years; as I say, he used to live here in Toronto. I’m absolutely thrilled for him and his wonderful wife Jan.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
On Saturday night at Ad Astra, Toronto’s annual SF convention, I happened to notice that all five of the nominees for this year’s Aurora Award for Best Short-Form Work in English were standing or sitting within two metres of each other at the hotel bar. Photo-op! Here they are:
Left to right: Stephen Kotowych, Tony Pi, Hayden Trenholm, David Livingstone Clink, Douglas Smith. As I mentioned before, I’m very, very proud of this group: four of them have been my writing students, and the fifth — Dave — is my brother-in-law!
One of the highlights of the con was the launch for Hayden’s novel Defining Diana. Hayden and his wife Liz were among the six (!) houseguests Carolyn and I had for the Ad Astra weekend.
For my own part, I gave the first public reading of Wake, volume one of my WWW trilogy. Who knew the book was about apes? I did! :) I read several scenes comprising a subplot of the book about ape-language communication. It was the first time I’d read the material out loud, and I was very gratified by how well it was received.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Brian Hades, my good buddy and publisher of EDGE Science Fiction, points out that this headline, over at SFScope, is quite amusing:
Robert J. Sawyer’s Wake to be Serialized in Analog
Hopefully, there’ll be a brief obit in Locus, too … ;)
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
CBC Radio One’s Between the Covers will do a serialized reading of Robert J. Sawyer’s Hugo Award-nominated Rollback later this year. Between the Covers airs across Canada, and presents novels in 15-minute chunks each weekday over several weeks. Billed as “Story Time for Adults,” it has a huge positive impact on physical book sales in Canada.
Americans tend not to understand just how big a deal CBC Radio is for Canadians, but it is a huge part of our national identity. As my friend Terence M. Green, whose Shadow of Ashland was featured on Between the Covers several years ago (read by Michael Hogan, who went on to play Col. Tigh in the new Battlestar Galactica), said, “Only a Canadian understands how nice this is.”
(But for authors in other countries, consider it this way: think of having a 30-second national radio commercial for your book. Now think of having thirty of those in a row. Now think of having that happen on fifteen or twenty consecutive weekdays. And now think of the broadcaster paying you, instead of the other way around, for the privilege of doing this.)
But for a Canadian, this is more about the … recognition, the imprimatur. It’s like … like you’re trying to play hockey, and Wayne Gretzky comes along and says, “Nice shot, kid …” :)
Currently on Between the Covers, you can hear my buddy Paul Quarrington’s comic King Leary, which just won the “Canada Reads” competition. Give a listen here.
So — yay!
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Toronto’s annual SF con, Ad Astra, begins today. I’ll be there tonight and tomorrow (Saturday) and maybe on Sunday. As it happens, all my programming is tomorrow (Saturday):
10:00 a.m. Panel: Near Future vs. Far Future (Gallery Centre)
12:00 p.m. Reading: First ever public reading from Wake (Ballroom West)
1:00 p.m. Panel: Authors who Edit (Ballroom Cente)
3:00 p.m. Panel: Fleshing Out Your Characters (Ballroom Centre)
5:00 p.m. Panel: Time Travel in SF/F (Salon 343)
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
You can download it here.
Ballots should be mailed to:
Prix Aurora Awards 2008
1432 Velvet Road
Gibsons BC V0N 1V5
Online voting should be available soon.
Postmark deadline is 7 May 2008. It costs $5 to vote.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
In the last week, I received two seemingly unrelated emails. One was from a person whose book club is doing my Rollback, and wanted to locate the reference in the novel to the “Trolley Problem,” a standard poser in philosophy and ethics classes that Sarah Halifax mentions in the book.
The other, from an academic, wanted to know my opinion of Tom Godwin’s classic SF short story “The Cold Equations,” which I, in fact, introduced for CBC Radio’s Sunday Showcase when it was adapted for radio, with a script by Joe Mahoney (who, in turn, has a cameo in Rollback), back in 2002.
But, actually, the questions are related, because both Rollback and “The Cold Equations” deal with thought experiments about morality. Godwin’s title suggests that we don’t actually have any volition in these matters (it’s out of our hands; the cold equations of physics or celestial mechanics dictate what we must do); I think there’s a lot more latitude (but am standing on his shoulders, and have the benefit of an awful lot of research/noodling about morality that emerged in the Post-World-War-II period (such as, to give just one example, the famous Milgram experiment, not to mention the Trolley Problem itself).
Anyway, the Trolley Problem is discussed in Chapter 19 of Rollback, and you can read more about it in Wikipedia.
And here’s what I had to say in response to the academic:
I have a sympathetic weariness for “The Cold Equations.”
Why? Because the damn thing is being analyzed with a 21st century microscope, even though it’s now 54 years old. Yes, people were sexist, then; yes, we all know now that there’d be so much security no one could sneak aboard a spaceship; yes, it’s contrived; yes, there were dozens of other ways to solve the problem besides ejecting the girl. The story is of its time and should be left there, or should be forgiven its trespasses of modern sensibility because of its vintage (just as we forgive H.G. Wells his racism today).
But if you strip the story to its bare essentials, and cast it as a philosophy-class thought experiment, it has some merit:
A child, not knowing that by stowing away aboard a spaceship, he/she will doom a rescue mission to save three stranded astronauts because of his or her extra weight. Because of the way the spaceship works, and the laws of physics, you have only two possible solutions: abort the mission (meaning those who are to be rescued will die), or jettison the child (killing him/her) and continue with the mission. What do you do? And, even if you decide on the latter, could you actually, personally, go from being what you set out to do (a rescuer) to something you never intended to be (a murderer)?
Is it any less murder if you talk the child, below the age of majority, and incapable of sophisticated reasoning, into jettisoning himself/herself, rather than you shoving him/her out the airlock?
Now, consider these variations on the scenario:
1) There’s only one stranded astronaut, instead of three. Do you actively kill one person to save another?
2) Same as #1, but the child has no criminal record, and the person you have been sent to rescue is, in fact, a known criminal. Who do you choose to save?
3) Same as #1, but the child is your own child.
4) The child is the child of the person you are to save, and the person you have been ordered to save has told you explicitly he/she would rather die than have his/her child sacrificed in an attempt at rescue.
5) Same as #4, but the person you are to save is your own space colony’s sole doctor — who in turn will be able to save others, whereas the uneducated child is actually of no asset to your colony.
6) Same as #5, but you yourself require treatment by the doctor or you will die
7) Same as #6, but the reason you require treatment is your own damn fault, because you’ve brought on lung cancer, or some futuristic equivalent, through smoking, or some futuristic equivalent, which you knew from the outset was a likely outcome of your own fully volitional behavior.
8) The person you are to rescue in fact became stranded because of his/her own stupidity/recklessness.
Etc. Etc.
So, yeah, I’m weary because this one story has been so talked about, but I’m mostly weary because the analysis in SF circles tends to the picayune (quibbling over the details of the scenario, rather than grappling with the underlying ethics), and most often amounts to the sort of trickery James T. Kirk evinced in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, when he explained how he beat the Kobayashi Maru “no-win” scenario as a cadet:
McCOY: Lieutenant, you are looking at the only Starfleet cadet who ever beat the no-win scenario.
SAAVIK: How?
KIRK: I reprogrammed the simulation so it was possible to rescue the ship.
SAAVIK: What?
DAVID MARCUS: He cheated!
KIRK: I changed the conditions of the test. I got a commendation for original thinking. (pause) I don’t like to lose.
When the analysis amounts to that — avoiding the tough moral issue by tweaking the scenario so that it doesn’t have to be faced — I get tired of the discourse around “The Cold Equations.” But I’ve often said that SF is a laboratory for thought experiments about the human condition, and as such, Godwin’s half-century-old story still bears consideration.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
I was in the audience, and recorded the talk on my trusty iRiver digital recorder, and, with Prof. Kelleghan’s kind permission, I’ve uploaded it to my website. You can hear the whole thing (22 minutes, 20 megabytes) as an MP3 right here. (The talk is introduced by Loren Means, an independent scholar.)
I must say, Fiona’s comic delivery is excellent …
UPDATE: And you can hear her 2009 paper, “Time and Fiction of Robert J. Sawyer: Flash Forward to the End of an Era,” here.
(Pictured: Fiona Kelleghan)
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
[Update: Robert J. Sawyer’s novel Wake is now out in book form — read all about it here.]
Pssst! Wanna be among the very first to read Wake, the first volume of the WWW trilogy by Robert J. Sawyer? Subscribe to Analog Science Fiction and Fact, the world’s top-selling English-language SF magazine.
I’m thrilled to announce that Stanley Schmidt, the Hugo-Award-nominated editor of Analog, has just bought serialization rights to Wake. Stan will be running the full text of the novel in four parts, in the November 2008, December 2008, combined January-February 2009, and March 2009 issues (the hardcover will follow later in the spring of 2009 from Ace Science Fiction in the US and Penguin in Canada).
Since the “November” issue actually comes out early in September, and since it takes a while to start receiving subscription copies, now would be a good time to subscribe to Analog. You can subscribe to the print edition here or the electronic edition here (one year) or here (two years).
This is my fifth (!) serialization sale to Analog, and I hold, by far, the record now for sales during Stan’s 30-year tenure as editor of the magazine (no other author has more than three). My Analog serials:
You just can’t beat this kind of exposure. Every single one of my previous serials went on to be a Hugo finalist (and Hominids won the Hugo); in addition, The Terminal Experiment (which Analog ran under my original title for the book, Hobson’s Choice) won the Nebula Award, and Starplex was also nominated for it (and was the only 1996 book to be nominated for both the Hugo and the Nebula).
(Yes, serialization is great for book sales — you just can’t beat having tens of thousands of people doing word of mouth about the novel on the day it first arrives on bookstore shelves.)
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Quandaries, quandaries! Who to vote for? Here are the nominees for the Aurora Award for Best Short-Form Work in English this year:
“Falling” by David Clink (On Spec)
“Saturn in G Minor” by Stephen Kotowych (Writers of the Future XXIII)
“Metamorphoses in Amber” by Tony Pi (Abyss & Apex)
“The Dancer at the Red Door” by Douglas Smith (Under Cover of Darkness)
“Like Water in the Desert” by Hayden Trenholm (Challenging Destiny)
Steve, Tony, Doug, and Hayden are all former writing students of mine — and Dave is my brother-in-law!
Congratulations to them all!
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Hot on the heels of its nomination for the Hugo Award, my novel Rollback has just been nominated for the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Awards (“the Auroras”). Ian Randal Strock over at SFScope has the full list of nominees.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
… my PowerPoint virginity, that is! ;)
I give lots of keynote addresses about science and futurism topics, but I’ve never used PowerPoint before (nor have I ever had any complaints about its absence … oh, organizers sometimes stammer before my talks, “You … you don’t have PowerPoint?,” but after my talks they never mention its absence, and instead praise the speech).
But today’s topic — a primer on ecommerce for the cottage-country area of Muskoka, 200 km north of Toronto — was one that lent itself to this approach, and so I put together my first PowerPoint presentation. The response to the talk was overwhelmingly positive.
Muskoka got buried in snow last night (Carolyn and I drove up yesterday afternoon), and it sure looked pretty, but I’m glad to be safe and sound at home now …
Playing with PowerPoint was actually kinda fun, and I received a nifty remote control / laser pointer as a gift a while ago, which I used for the first time today, so I might do more PowerPoint in the future.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
A letter I received today from a reader:
I just finished reading Rollback, Mindscan, and Humans, and while I enjoyed the stories, one thing seriously annoyed me. WHY do you insist upon identifying every character who comes upon the scene by their race and/or skin color? “A black man entered the room.” “A white woman sat down.” Why do we need to know this? To me, it smacks of racism on your part. What do you have to say about it?
My response:
I think it’s exactly the opposite. To pretend that people don’t have skin colors is to ignore the obvious, and suggests, to me, a suspect delicacy. It’s silly to describe eye color and hair color but be so sensitive about skin color as to be embarrassed/scared to mention it.
If the police asked you to describe a person, you’d mention (or be prodded to mention) their race, hair color, eye color, height, and build. Why on Earth should we be afraid to mention any one of those when describing people in fiction? The police would not believe you if you said you noticed eye color but not skin color, but suddenly if you mention it in providing a description you’re racist?
Now, what is racist is to assume that all characters are, by default, blue-eyed white males, and only mention how they deviate from that — you will never, ever find an example of that in my fiction, although it’s common enough in other people’s writings.
Indeed, by portraying an ethnically diverse society in which people are judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character I am doing my part to fight racism; to allow you (or anyone) to complacently populate the future with people solely of your own race in your imagination would be a failure of social responsibility on my part. You can’t help but see a multicultural future when you read my books, and I’m proud of that.
Also, you’re unfair in your examples. These are samples of what I actually said, in Rollback, for instance:
- Lenore looked to be twenty-five — a real twenty-five, no doubt. Her orange hair cascaded down to her shoulders, and she had freckled white skin and bright green eyes.
- A server about Lenore’s age … tall and broad-shouldered, with chocolate brown skin and waist-length blue-black hair.
- Bonhoff was a broad-shouldered white woman of about forty, with close-cropped blond hair.
- Coming toward them was a young couple: an Asian woman and a white man, the man pushing a stroller. Don was wearing sunglasses — as was Lenore — so he felt no compunction about looking at the beautiful young woman, with long black hair, wearing pink shorts and a red tank top.
- The minister — a short black man of about forty-five, with hair starting to both gray and recede — entered, and soon enough the service was under way.
- Dr. Petra Jones was a tall, impeccably dressed black woman who looked to be about thirty — although, with employees of Rejuvenex, one could never be sure, Don supposed. She was strikingly beautiful, with high cheekbones and animated eyes, and hair that she wore in dreadlocks, a style he’d seen come in and out of fashion several times now.
So, I’ve got a black clergyman for a white family, a mixed-race couple, people of all races and both genders holding positions of authority and power, and none of them behaving stereotypically … and you see racism? Puh-leeze. You might as reasonably accuse me of ageism for so often mentioning how old people are.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
But not by me! (Although I do appear in this YouTube video.) See why Robert J. Sawyer endorses Todd McGuinness for a Spacey Award.
(The Spaceys are SF media awards given annually by Space: The Imagination Station, the Canadian counterpart of the SciFi Channel.)
(Filmed in my office Wednesday, June 6, 2007; note the Master Replicas tricorder on the bookshelf behind me.)
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
I’m getting old! I remember when I used to be the youngest guy on the Hugo ballot — now I’m the oldest (or possibly the second oldest). Wikipedia doesn’t have a day and month for Ian McDonald’s birthday, but he was born in 1960, like me.
This year’s best-novel Hugo finalists, in descending order of age:
Robert J. Sawyer: April 29, 1960 (47)
Ian McDonald: 1960 (47?)
Michael Chabon: May 24, 1963 (44)
Charles Stross: October 18, 1964 (43)
John Scalzi: May 10, 1969 (38)
Interesting that we’re all children of the 1960s, though …
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
These are terrific, courtesy of my Odyssey writing student Larry Hodges: Top 10 Reasons Why Rollback Will Win the Hugo.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
I am thrilled, honoured, and delighted that my novel Rollback is one of five finalists for this year’s HUGO AWARD, the world’s top international honour for science fiction.
The winner will be announced Saturday, August 9, 2008, in Denver at a gala awards ceremony concluding the 66th Annual World Science Fiction Convention. The 6,000 members worldwide of that convention will cast ballots to determine the winner.
The full list of best-novel nominees:
My press release aimed at the Canadian media is here, and the official World Science Fiction Convention press release, with a all nominees in all categories, is mirrored here in Microsoft Word format.
Anyone may become a member of the World Science Fiction Convention and vote; it’s $50 for a supporting membership (which gets you all the publications and the right to vote for the Hugos this year and nominate next year), and $200 for an attending membership, which lets you attend the convention, as well. More on the convention is here, and to become a member, see here. Carolyn and I will be attending, of course!
This is my eleventh Hugo Award nomination. I previously won the best-novel Hugo in 2003 for Hominids.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
… and I’m in mourning. I’ve done three radio interviews so far, one for the CBC, and two for the BBC, but it’s hard to do justice to such a great man in sound bites. R.I.P., Sir Arthur. You were, and always will be, my favourite science-fiction writer.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Back in 2005, there was a wonderful academic conference at Brock University entitled “The Uses of the Science Fiction Genre.” I gave the keynote address.
Michael Berman, a philosophy professor at Brock, has now collected papers inspired by that conference into a terrific new book: The Everyday Fantastic: Essays on Science Fiction and Human Being. The book is out now from Cambridge Scholars Publishing. You can find out more about it here, and if you download this sample PDF, you can read the table of contents, Michael’s introduction, and my essay.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
