Robert J. Sawyer

At least in novel form. See here.

(I love Thunderbirds — I even love the live-action movie!)

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

That was the tally consumed at Carolyn and my open party for members of science-fiction fandom and fans of my books tonight (Friday, February 9) — plus various fruit trays, cheese trays, veggie platters, etc. etc.

Well over a hundred people showed up, starting at 3:30 p.m. and going to 1:00 a.m. Everyone seemed to have a great time, and, as always, nothing got broken or damaged. :) All in all, a terrific day. I’ll try to get some more pictures up shortly, but the one above shows people in Carolyn’s office.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

Forty years ago today, Thursday, February 8, 1968, the original Planet of the Apes arrived in theaters. It is, in my opinion, one of the very best science-fiction films ever made, and was hugely influential on me and my career.

Its stature wasn’t always obvious to everyone, though, and, indeed The New York Times was rather dismissive in its review (written by the then 29-year-old Renata Adler), which appeared the next day:

“PLANET OF THE APES,” which opened yesterday at the Capitol and 72d Street Playhouse, is an anti-war film and a science-fiction liberal tract, based on a novel by Pierre Boulle (who also wrote “The Bridge on the River Kwai”). It is no good at all, but fun, at moments, to watch.

A most unconvincing spaceship containing three men and one woman, who dies at once, arrives on a desolate-looking planet. One of the movie’s misfortunes lies in trying to maintain suspense about what planet it is. The men debark. One of them is a relatively new movie type, a Negro based on some recent, good Sidney Poitier roles — intelligent, scholarly, no good at sports at all. Another is an all-American boy. They are not around for long. The third is Charlton Heston.

He falls in with the planet’s only human inhabitants, some Neanderthal flower children who have lost the power of speech. They are raided and enslaved by the apes of the title — who seem to represent militarism, fascism and police brutality. The apes live in towns with Gaudi-like architecture. They have a religion and funerals with speeches like “I never met an ape I didn’t like,” and “He was a model for all of us, a gorilla to remember.” Some of them have grounds to believe, heretically, that apes evolved from men. They put Heston on trial, as men did the half-apes in Vercors’s novel “You Shall Know Them.” All this leads to some dialogue that is funny, and some that tries to be. Also some that tries to be serious.

Maurice Evans, Kim Hunter, Roddy McDowall and many others are cast as apes, with wonderful anthropoid masks covering their faces. They wiggle their noses and one hardly notices any loss in normal human facial expression. Linda Harrison is cast as Heston’s Neanderthal flower girl. She wiggles her hips when she wants to say something. — R.A.

In 2001 the United States Library of Congress deemed the original Planet of the Apes “culturally significant” and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry.

Odd, from four decades on, to see what a first viewer picked up on, and what she missed.

That it is a liberal film is very true, I think, but the reviewer seems to sneer the term, making it the pejorative it so often is in the US today; it is good, though, that she saw it as an anti-war film, since it is very much indeed that.

The exterior of the spaceship, I think, is absolutely lovely, one of the nicest ever put on film (and based very much on NASA’s winged Gemini variant that had been on the drawing boards then); to call it “most unconvincing” seems groundless.

The comment about the “Negro” astronaut, of course, is of its time — but the notion that the character is based on other movie characters is wrong-headed; the portrayal of a black astronaut, and a black scientist, was a significant social statement (one Stanley Kubrick utterly failed to echo in 2001, which came out the same year). The dismissiveness in the review is … well, may we all be forgiven for things we wrote decades ago.

Even in 1968, there was no way at all that any educated person could say that the humans portrayed on screen where “Neanderthals.” This relates to discussion elsewhere in my blog about why people look down on genre fiction: genre expects a familiarity with a canon beyond just a handful of works, and an understanding of science. A person who confuses a Neanderthal with a Homo sapiens simply is using big words that he or she doesn’t understand.

The notion that Linda Harrison is overtly sexual in the film (“wiggles her hips”) is simply not supported by what was on screen. It’s a kind of reviewing I hate — when the reviewer decides he or she has a line that will make him or her look oh-so-clever and so shoves it in regardless of whether it is an accurate response to the work in question.

And, of course, the attempt by the reviewer to spoil the fun — to draw attention to the question of what planet this really is — is simply unfair, in my view. A reviewer is welcomed to say that the ending sucked; a reviewer is not entitled to spoil the ending so that he or she can affect an ennui-laden yawn and look down his or her nose at the reader and say, “Oh, come on, surely you saw it coming!”

“I’m a seeker too. But my dreams aren’t like yours. I can’t help thinking that somewhere in the universe there has to be something better than The New York Times. Has to be.” — Colonel George Taylor, more or less

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

Lawsuit alleges over a billion dollars a year improperly diverted at Oral Roberts University.

I think I’ll have an institution called Anal Peters College in my next novel …

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

Interesting question, and it came up today as I was asked to vet ad copy for something I’m involved with.

The genre is “science fiction,” with no hyphen, but when used in the phrase “science fiction writer,” “science fiction” then becomes a compound adjective (two or more words that together form a single modifier for a following noun), and so, according to many authorities, they should be hyphenated: “science-fiction writer.”

The classic example from Strunk and White’s The Elements of the Style is this: “He was a member of the leisure class and he enjoyed leisure-class pursuits.”

(How can you tell if two words are a compound adjective? My trick is to rerverse the order and see if they still make sense: “a big red ball” and “a red big ball” are equally comprehensible (although the former perhaps comes more trippingly to the tongue), but while “a science fiction writer” makes sense, “a fiction science writer” does not.)

For many years, one of the principal academic journals in the field, Science Fiction Studies, rendered its name with the hyphen: Science-Fiction Studies. Eventually, though, the editors apparently decided their journal was stuffy and pedantic enough without being picayune about punctuation in the title. :)

And for a time, SFWA was styling its name as “Science-fiction and Fantasy Writers of America,” although that seemed more out of a desire to preserve what I call their “burnt-matchstick” logo (below) after the decision was made to add “and Fantasy” to the organization’s name; the full name is now mostly styled without the hyphen and with two capital Fs.

I tend to use “science-fiction writer” (and “science-fiction novel,” etc.), in normal prose, but on my web site, I usually don’t hyphenate the phrase, as I want all search engines to find me when people search for science fiction writer.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

Carolyn and I went to see Richard Thomas (of The Waltons) in the play Twelve Angry Men this afternoon (despite the snow storm!), and on the way we stopped at Bakka-Phoenix Books, Toronto’s venerable SF specialty store, and I signed a mountain of copies of the mass-market paperback of Rollback there … get ’em while they’re hot!

Bakka-Phoenix Books
697 Queen Street West (just west of Bathurst)
Toronto

(Oh, and the play was excellent!)

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

My Robert J. Sawyer Books imprint is published by Calgary’s Red Deer Press; I edit the line, and Richard Dionne has been the publisher since September 2007. In addition to securing the services of Nalo Hopkinson as editor of her own fantasy imprint, Richard has just announced the promotion of the terrific Valerie Burke-Harland to Associate Publisher of Red Deer Press (and, therefore, to associate publisher of my line). Congrats, Val!

I’m also delighted to see my colleague and friend Peter Carver returning to Red Deer Press as children’s / YA editor.

Our next book under my imprint is Nick DiChario’s Valley of Day-Glo, coming in May 2007.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

Despite the heavy snowfall expected this afternoon in Toronto, the readings I’m part of at the Rowers Pub tonight (Wednesday, February 6, 2008) are still going ahead. :)

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

This showed up in my email box today:

I have what may be a silly question: what is the difference between genre writing and literary writing? I have asked many people/authors and I’m still confused. At first I thought a genre work couldn’t be literary, but I have a friend who published fantasy novels that were considered literary. So apparently it’s possible to be both.

I’ve also heard that literary writing is writing that is good for writing’s sake, so that a literary writer is good with writing as an art form. Does that mean literature is good by virtue of the way it is written and not necessarily by the content of what is written? That seems to go against what I learned in high school about content being integral to good writing.

Do you consider yourself a literary writer?

And here’s my three-minute response (because that’s all I had time for); I’m not wedded to these observations, and please don’t expect me to defend them to death, but I think they’re a good first approximation of the right answer, and certainly a decent starting point for discussion:

I am a commercial fiction writer (meaning I write books to make money, and my publisher publishes them with that end in mind).

I am also a genre fiction writer (meaning I work in one of the specially labeled categories you see in bookstores: science fiction, fantasy, mystery, romance, horror, western, etc.; commercial fiction that does not fall into these categories is called mainstream fiction).

Literary publishing is done without hopes of making a lot of money, and often in small print runs produced by small publishers.

Commercial fiction tends to emphasize characterization, plot, action, and dialog, and may, or may not, include beautiful, or highfalutin, or arch language, and may, or may not, have an overall theme.

In contrast, literary fiction usually gives short shrift to plot and action, but often has a theme (a statement other than a plot synopsis describing what the story is about).

However literary merit is often found in commercial fiction including that subset of commercial fiction called genre fiction.

But having literary merit is not a requirement of successful commercial fiction, and doing well commercially is not a requirement of successful literary fiction.

In any event, to call oneself a “literary writer” has always stuck me as either a silly redundancy (I’m a “woody carpenter”) or pretentious; if the person saying that means that his or her work has literary merit — sorry, that’s for others to judge. :)

By the way, nine years ago, I was approached by an academic (whose biases I think were quite evident from the questions he asked) about whether or not I considered myself part of that special form of literary publishing known as Canadian literature (or “Canlit”). I absolutely do consider myself part of that, for the reasons I gave him, which you can read here.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

Today — February 5, 2008 — is the official release date of the mass-market paperback edition of my 17th novel, Rollback. The book had a very successful run in hardcover, and I’m delighted that it’s now going to be even more widely read.

The opening chapters are here, and plenty more about the book is here.

Direct links to bookstore pages for buying the paperback edition at Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, Amazon.co.uk, BarnesandNoble.com, Booksense.com, Borders.com, Chapters.Indigo.ca, and McNally Robinson, are here.

If you’d like to buy an autographed copy directly from me, info is here.

Among Rollback‘s honors to date:

• A Main Selection of the Science Fiction Book Club
• Currently on the Preliminary Nebula Award Ballot
• One of the American Library Association‘s Top Ten SF Novels of the Year
• One of the Kansas City Star‘s Top Five SF Novels of the Year
• On Quill & Quire‘s list of the Best Books of the Year of any type

Some reviews:

“Extraordinarily fresh and thought-provoking, with some of the most memorable people you’ll ever meet.” —Analog Science Fiction & Fact

“A story that is so poignant that I found myself in tears. Sawyer has written another classic.” —The Davis Enterprise, Davis, California

“One of those books you can’t put down … truly engrossing human drama; characters that are totally realistic. It’s got mainstream appeal but is also a great read for fans of thought-provoking science fiction. ***** [out of 5]” —SF Signal

“Beyond the SF trappings, Rollback is a story about love and commitment, about humanity at its most basic — a novel to be savoured by science-fiction and mainstream readers alike.” —The Globe and Mail: Canada’s National Newspaper

“A dynamite science fiction novel; a wholly satisfying story.” —January Magazine

“Above all, the author’s characters bear their human strengths and weaknesses with dignity and poise. An elegantly told story for all libraries; highly recommended.” —Library Journal (starred review)

“An early candidate for sci-fi book of the year.” —Kansas City Star

“Rollback gets my vote as SF novel of the year. A joy to read.” —Jack McDevitt, author of Odyssey

“Sawyer, who has won Hugo and Nebula awards, may well win another major SF award with this superior effort.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Highly emotional and original — a complex story with sympathetic and believable characters. A riveting book.” —Romantic Times Book Reviews

“A reminder of why Sawyer is one of our most highly regarded writers of speculative fiction, able to handle the demands of the heart and the cosmos with equal skill.” —Quill & Quire

“It’s a shoo-in to be short-listed for major awards.” —SciFiDimensions

“A fascinating human drama, worth reading by genre and mainstream readers alike.” —SFRevu

Rollback
by Robert J. Sawyer
Tor Books mass-market paperback
ISBN-13: 978-0-765-34974-3
ISBN-10: 0-765-34974-4

In stores now!

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

It was announced in the subscribers’ only Quill & Quire Online today that Nalo Hopkinson — World Fantasy Award winner and fellow Toronto writer — has joined the Red Deer Press team as the editor of her own fantasy imprint, a companion for my Robert J. Sawyer Books imprint. Nalo will be doing three books a year for Red Deer Press.

This has been in the works for months now, and I take justifiable pride in it happening, I think, as I’m the one who recommended and introduced Nalo to Sharon Fitzhenry, the publisher of Fitzhenry & Whiteside, Red Deer’s parent company. Welcome aboard, Nalo!

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

Or maybe that’s “cheques” for my Canadian readers … ;)

That’s the cool thing about being a writer: money shows up for work you did years ago. :)

I’m delighted to announce that Divani Films has renewed (for a third year) its option on my 1995 Nebula Award-winning novel The Terminal Experiment.

And I’m also thrilled to announce that we just sold Lithuanian rights to my 2000 Hugo-nominated novel Calculating God to Eridanas.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

As we count down to the official pub date of the paperback of my Rollback — one more day to go! — SF Signal has weighed in with a lengthy five-star review of the book.

A few snippets:

“Thoroughly entertaining (and accessible) science fiction. Moves fast; one of those books you can’t put down … truly engrossing human drama. The content and motive of the alien communication turns out to be a great springboard for philosophical discussions on morality and ethics, man’s place in the universe, abortion, and more; there are several stop-and-think moments. All through this, he gives us characters that are totally realistic. Rollback succeeds at being the kind of book that can attract a wide audience. It’s got mainstream appeal but is also a great read for fans of thought-provoking science fiction. ***** [out of 5]”

The reviewer is John DeNardo.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

Tomorrow (Saturday, February 2, 2008), at 4:00 p.m., I’ll be on TVOntario’s Big Ideas, talking about science fiction in a lecture recorded in October 2007 at the University of Waterloo. On the same show: Steven Pinker! The hour-long program repeats Sunday, February 3, 2008, also at 4:00 p.m.

TVO’s description:

STEVEN PINKER | ROBERT J. SAWYER

Steven Pinker, author of The Stuff of Thought, examines how language reveals the way we think by exposing the physics built into our nouns, the temporal characteristics of our verbs and the manner in which our brains react to profanity.

Also included in this episode, author Robert J. Sawyer explains how Hollywood’s approach to science fiction, starting with George Lucas’s Star Wars, has dulled the edge that made science fiction such a pertinent film genre. Sawyer disects the problematic aspects of the original Star Wars film and shows how science fiction books continue to tackle difficult issues while their big screen counterparts take the easy road of big explosions and small ideas.

More information here.

UPDATE: An MP3 audio-version of my lecture is here.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

In honour of the mass-market paperback release of my 17th novel Rollback, I’m participating next Wednesday in what is probably better known as a poetry reading series, but it should be great fun, so please join us:

Rowers Pub Reading Series

Rowers Pub, 150 Harbord Street, 2nd floor (416 961-6277)
(W of Spadina, just E of Brunswick, on Harbord)
Toronto, Ontario.
Wednesday, February 6, 2008

Doors open at 7:00 p.m. Evening starts at 7:30 p.m.
Free (a hat is passed)

The Rowers Pub Reading Series, which runs the first Wednesday of the month, has as its February features: Robert J. Sawyer (Rollback, Tor Books, 2007); Sarah Sheard (The Hypnotist – Doubleday Canada, 1999); and Priscila Uppal (Ontological Necessities – Exile Editions, 2006).

We acknowledge financial assistance through The Canada Council for the Arts through The Writers’ Union of Canada, and a donation from Alexander McCall Smith. For more information visit rowerspubreadingseries.com.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

My friend Bonnie Jean Mah just drew this to my attention: A very nice review of my 1999 novel Flashforward. Go me! :)

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

McNally-Robinson, a wonderful Canadian bookstore chain, has relaunched its website, and is starting a series of SF&F author interviews. First up: Robert J. Sawyer, interviewed by Kent Pollard. The full text is here.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

I get awfully tired of the dissing of science fiction. In the last hour, I had to deal with it not once but twice. First, a major publisher doing a nonfiction book followed up in email on a bound galley they’d sent me; they want me to blurb the book. I gave them the blurb, but I added this to my commentary:

Let me gently say that I found your existing back-cover text offensive. Someone at your company wrote:

“The stuff of science fiction? Not so. These are actually the reasonable predictions of scientists attempting to forecast a few decades into the future …”

Which implies that what we science-fiction writers do are UNreasonable predictions — indeed, wild-ass guesses — and that “the stuff of science fiction” is a synonym for far-out fantasy. It isn’t — and given that you’re publishing a book by a science-fiction writer, and soliciting blurbs from science-fiction writers, I hope you’ll re-think this ill-advised cover copy.

The careers of serious science-fiction writers such as myself have been all about “reasonable predictions,” and to suggest otherwise is to insult not only your own author but the core readership for this book, by implying they’ve been foolish to listen to what science fiction has to say. If you mean to say, “The stuff of fantasy,” then say that; don’t be unfair to science fiction and its practitioners.

Then a Canadian magazine, which is sponsoring a $110-per-ticket public debate I’d agreed to be part of, sent me their draft ad copy for the event, identifying me as “world-renowned futurist Robert J. Sawyer.” My response:

It’s silly to bill me only as a futurist. I am by far better known as a science-fiction writer. Either say:

“world-renowned science-fiction writer Robert J. Sawyer”

or, if you want to use the word “futurist,” use it in addition to “science-fiction writer”:

“world-renowned science-fiction writer and futurist Robert J. Sawyer”

I’m adamant about this, I’m afraid. I simply refuse to try to pass as someone who should be associated with your magazine by hiding what I do for a living. I am a science-fiction writer, and you either think there’s value in having one such on your panel, in which case I’m happy to participate, or you don’t, in which case I’ll politely bow out.

I can understand people dissing SF out of ignorance, but why people would diss it at the same time they’re coming to an SF writer for a favour is utterly beyond me.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

Sharron Smith is one gutsy lady. There are lots of community-wide reading programs in North America. Every once in a while, one of them will do a science-fiction book … but they always do it stealthfully, choosing books that aren’t labeled or marketed as science fiction.

But when Waterloo Region, almost half-a-million people west of Toronto, chose my Hominids for their “One Book, One Community” program, they made history: a community-wide program to read a science-fiction book that was openly identified as such. It was a bold initiative, and, as I learned during that wonderful year, huge numbers of people who had never read SF before discovered that the genre really did have something to offer them.

One of the key players behind the choice to do Hominids has just been honoured in her own right, and I’m totally, totally thrilled for her: Sharron Smith has just been named Ontario’s Librarian of the Year. That’s Sharron and me above, outside the Mike Lazaridis Lecture Theatre at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, where the press conference announcing the choice of Hominids was held in April 2005.

Sharron and I have kept up our association since: I spoke to her library-based book-club (again, readers who normally never read science fiction) when I was the Kitchener Public Library’s Edna Staebler Writer-in-Residence in 2006, and last year I was keynote speaker at an Ontario Public Libraries’ Readers’ Advisory Symposium Sharron chaired.

Below is the press release from the Kitchener Public Library on Sharron’s win. Congratulations, Sharron!

Kitchener Public Library Manager Named Librarian of the Year

Kitchener Public Library is proud to claim one of its own as the Province’s top librarian. Sharron Smith, Manager of Readers’ Advisory Services, was recently selected by the Ontario Library Association for the prestigious W.J. Robertson Medallion. Named in honour of one of the Library Association’s founding members, and more commonly known in the profession as “The Librarian of the Year,” the award formally recognizes the one individual in the profession who has demonstrated outstanding leadership in the advancement of public library service in Ontario.

One look at Smith’s contributions to librarianship and you won’t wonder why she received the award, but rather why it took so long.

Sharron Smith has worked at Kitchener Public Library since 1990 and is currently the Manager of Readers’ Advisory Service, a position she has championed for the past decade. It is Sharron’s passion for reading — and helping others find the perfect great read — that has drawn the attention of librarians not only across the Province, but across the continent. Sharron is a much sought after speaker and trainer on the complex subject of readers’ advisory and has spoken at library conferences in Ontario, Quebec, British Columbia, and in the United States. Sharron is the founding Chair of the Ontario Library Association’s Readers’ Advisory Committee and serves as a member of the same committee for the American Library Association.

Sharing what you know is the hallmark of a true professional. Sharron teaches the art of readers’ advisory to aspiring librarians at the University of Western Ontario’s Faculty of Information and Media Studies; and in 2005, she co-authored Canadian Fiction: A Guide to Reading Interests, a reference book now used by librarians across the country.

Locally, avid readers will know Sharron from her popular Saturday morning library book club and from her regular book-talk appearances on local radio and television programs. Sharron is also a founding member of our Region’s “One Book One Community” Advisory Committee and a key organizer for the popular annual book festival “Word on the Street.”

“Sharron Smith’s name is synonymous with readers’ advisory” says Sonia Lewis, Kitchener Public Library’s CEO. “She has been a true leader in this field, inspiring countless librarians with her knowledge and passion for the fine art of matching readers with good books. When it comes to readers’ advisory, she is the best.”

And it’s because she’s the best that Sharron is to be honoured by her colleagues this year. Sharron Smith will officially receive her Librarian of the Year award on January 31st at the annual Public Library Awards dinner, held in conjunction with the Ontario Public Library Association’s Annual Super Conference.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

For over thirty years, my family had a vacation home near Rochester, New York, and I got pretty plugged into the literary community down there. And the grand old man of Rochester letters was Edward D. Hoch — a real gentleman, and a very fine writer.

Peter Sellers and I published a story by him in our book Over the Edge: The Crime Writers of Canada Anthology (yes, even though he was an American, Ed was a dues-paying member of the Crime Writers of Canada).

Ed had a story in every single issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine since May 1973 — over thirty-four years without missing an issue.

He passed away earlier this month at the age of 77, and he shall be sorely missed.

Here’s the New York Times obituary.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

And I will — for much of October 2008.

October 17-19, I will be Guest of Honour at the SF convention Pure Speculation in Edmonton, Alberta.

October 24-26, I’ll be returning to the Surrey International Writers Conference, in Vancouver, British Columbia.

And October 29-November 2, I’ll be at the World Fantasy Convention in Calgary, Alberta.

Yee-haw!

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

Got a review copy of this fascinating new magazine. As the guy who advocates that our genre should really be called “philosophical fiction” — Phi-Fi instead of Sci-Fi — this is right up my street, and I’m looking forward to reading it. In the meantime, check it out.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

There are two awards named for John W. Campbell, Jr. (pictured above), the great editor of Astounding Stories. One is the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Novel of the Year, and it is the principal juried award in the SF field; I was fortunate enough to win it two years ago for my Mindscan.

The other is the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer; it’s given alongside the Hugos at the World Science Ficton Convention. This year, there are four Canadians eligible for the award:

Stephen Kotowych

Tony Pi

Jerome Steuart

Sarah Totton

I point out (cough, cough) that I have personally mentored three of them: Stephen came to see me when I was writer-in-residence at the Toronto Public Library’s Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation and Fantasy; Tony was my writing student at the University of Toronto; and Sarah came to see me when I was writer-in-residence at the Richmond Hill Public Library. Jerome moved to Canada in October 2007.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

Google has digitized many thousands of books, including The Story of My Life by Helen Keller. And apparently she was one flatulent lady. Check out the table of contents Google has extracted from the book.

Ah, the rush to digitize! Even if the technology isn’t quite there yet … ;)

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

Mark your calendars! The Toronto launch party for Robert J. Sawyer’s new collection Identity Theft and Other Stories will be Saturday, May 10, 2008, from 3:00 p.m. on at Bakka-Phoenix Books, 697 Queen Street West (just west of Bathurst Street), Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

Penguin Canada is looking for a full-time editor specializing in science fiction, fantasy, mystery, and other commercial fiction to work out of its Toronto office. The new editor will work on the Canadian editions of Robert J. Sawyer‘s upcoming WWW trilogy, on future books by Guy Gavriel Kay, and on other projects.

The job posting is here.

I had a conversation with Penguin Canada publisher David Davidar about this. This is a real job posting, not a pro forma listing; there is no hidden front-runner, and Penguin Canada is willing to hire from outside of Canada (although you’d have to relocate to Toronto to take the job). The new editor is expected to start work next month (February 2008).

Penguin Canada is a highly successful company, with one hundred million dollars in revenues last year.

(Barbara Berson, who was to have been my editor and had been editing Guy Gavriel Kay, has moved on; hence this vacancy. I wish Barbara all the best!)

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

A high-school student wrote me this evening to say he was doing a project for his English class on my Rollback, in which he was going to explore four major moral issues related to rejuvenation and life prolongation — and he asked me to suggest what those issues might be. And so, in 90 seconds, I banged out these:

Moral issue 1: If the process is expensive, should it be only the rich who should have access to it, or should there be some other mechanism for determining who gets to live forever?

Moral issue 2: If people are going to live forever, meaning they never stop taking up space and consuming resources, should they also still be allowed to breed?

Moral issue 3: In criminal cases, do “life sentences” or the “death penalty” become disproportionately severe if a person is/was going to live forever?

Moral issue 4: If it costs millions or billions to live forever, is it morally right to spend that much to do so when there are still starving people in the world — if you could feed hundreds or thousands of people for a decade for the cost of giving yourself another century of life, doesn’t morality demand that you spend the money helping the greatest number of people rather than spending it on yourself?

Other posers related to Rollback are in the readers’ group / book-club discussion guide for the novel here.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

The American Library Association has announced its 2008 Reading List: Best Adult Genre Fiction, selecting books in eight different categories “that merit special attention by general adult readers and the librarians who work with them.”

The winner this year in the Science Fiction category is In War Times by Kathleen Ann Goonan (congrats, Kathleen!), published by Tor (ISBN 978-0765313553)

But the short list of nine other nominees also included Rollback by Robert J. Sawyer:

• Gibson, William. Spook Country. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2007. ISBN: 978-0399154300
• Kenyon, Kay. Bright of Sky. Pyr, 2007. ISBN: 978-1591025412
• Mackay, Scott. Phytosphere. New American Library, 2007. ISBN: 978-0451461582
• McDonald, Ian. Brasyl. Pyr, 2007. ISBN: 978-1591025436
• Morgan, Richard. Thirteen. Del Rey/Ballantine, 2007. ISBN: 978-0345485250
• Sawyer, Robert J. Rollback. Tor, 2007. ISBN: 978-0765311085
• Scalzi, John. The Last Colony. Tor, 2007. ISBN: 978-0765316974
• Van Name, Mark L. One Jump Ahead. Baen, 2007. ISBN: 978-1416520856
• Wilson, Robert Charles. Axis. Tor, 2007. ISBN: 978-0765348265

What’s staggering is that four of the ten nominees are by Canadians (William Gibson lives in Vancouver, and Scott Mackay, Robert J. Sawyer, and Robert Charles Wilson all live in Greater Toronto).

The full list in all categories is here as a Word document, and more about how the list was created is here on the ALA website; this is the first year the ALA has issued such a list.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

(Left to right: Carolyn Clink, Robert J. Sawyer, Peter Halasz, Shoshana Glick, Robert Charles Wilson)

Shoshana Glick, my dear friend from Seattle, came to stay with Carolyn and me for two days this week (Tuesday and Wednesday), and I played tour guide. On Tuesday, Sho and I went to the Royal Ontario Museum — my first time since the grand reopening last month — to see the new dinosaur gallery (about which more in another post when I have time) and a wonderful display of antique typewriters.

We then spent the evening at The Central (a pub) for the Plasticine Poetry series, where my great friend Halli Villegas was headlining; she read fabulously.

And yesterday, Carolyn and I picked up Hugo-winner Robert Charles Wilson and we all went to Sci-Fi World, one of Toronto’s SF specialty stores, then headed off to rendezvous with SF collector Peter Halasz for lunch at the Sierra Grill, which has Toronto’s best salad bar (Shoshana is a vegetarian — that’s fake fur in the photo).

After that it was off to The Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation and Fantasy (where I used to be writer-in-residence), where the wonderful Lorna Toolis gave us the behind-the-scenes tour (including showing us their copies of the first edition of Amazing Stories and the first edition of Dracula).

After that, I kid you not, it was off to a museum devoted entirely to footwear: The Bata Shoe Museum. It was fascinating, actually, and the displays were very well done, unlike (cough, cough) the new ones at the Royal Ontario Museum.

Then it was time for a little RJS colour: we went to The Duke of York, the pub that Lenore works at in my current novel Rollback. After that, we saw the play “Criminals in Love” by George F. Walker at the Hart House Theatre. After that, we had drinks in another pub, then dropped Shoshana at the bus terminal just after midnight so she could head off for Detroit.

All in all, a very pleasant couple of days! But now — back to work for me …

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

Personhood for great apes is an issue I allude to from time to time in my writings, particulary in my Nebula Award-winning The Terminal Experiment from 1995:

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.

Even though chimps were no longer captured for labs, zoos, or circuses, some were still living in human-operated facilities. The United Kingdom, Canada, the U.S., Tanzania, and Burundi jointly funded a chimpanzee retirement home in Glasgow — of all places — for chimps that couldn’t be returned to the wild. Peter phoned the sanctuary, to find out if any of the chimps there were near death. According to the director, Brenda MacTavish, several were in their fifties, which was old age for a chimp, but none were terminal. Still, Peter arranged to have some scanning equipment shipped to her.

The issue is also touched on in Wake, the novel I’m currently writing.

Well, the question has been addressed in by the Supreme Court in Austria now, and the judgment was that chimps are not people. Read more here, in an Associated Press story.

Me, I say free the apes now, before this all turns ugly.

“Where there is fire, there is smoke. And in that smoke, from this day forward, my people will crouch and conspire and plot and plan for the inevitable day of Man’s downfall — the day when he finally and self-destructively turns his weapons against his own kind. The day of the writing in the sky, when your cities lie buried under radioactive rubble! When the sea is a dead sea, and the land is a wasteland out of which I will lead my people from their captivity! And we will build our own cities in which there will be no place for humans except to serve our ends! And we shall found our own armies, our own religion, our own dynasty! And that day is upon you NOW!”

— Caesar, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site