If you haven’t yet seen the sorts of things that have been done in remastering classic Star Trek, check out this nice YouTube compilation of stills. The remastered episodes — with all-new effects sequences — are in syndication now, and are forthcoming on BluRay DVD.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
For the rest of this week, the episode of CBC Toronto’s Living in Toronto featuring Robert J. Sawyer is online right here.
The segment with me is the first one in the show.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
My friend Vera Nazarian is up for the Nebula Award for Best Short Story, and the good folks at Fictionwise are giving away her story during the nomination period. You can get it for free right here. Expect to see more Nebula nominees show up for free at Fictionwise over the next few weeks …
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Don’t forget I’m on CBC TV Toronto’s Living in Toronto today at 1:00 p.m. :)
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
The deadline for nominating for the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Awards (“the Auroras”) is fast approaching.
Online ballots must be cast by Monday, March 17, 2008 (one week from today).
Any Canadian may nominate, and there is no charge to do so. The online ballot is here.
A comprehensive list of eligible works to choose from is here (English) et ici (français), at the Canadian SF Works Database.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
I’ll be participating at the Gartner IT Security Summit in Washington, DC, in June 2008.
When Gartner’s Victor Wheatman approached me about putting together a panel of SF authors for the summit, we quickly came up with a dream-team list, and were delighted by who said yes: Sigma chair Arlan Andrews, plus Greg Bear and Bruce Sterling.
More details are in the Wall Street Journal‘s blog.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Some of my upcoming events for 2008:
My events calendar is always available here.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
I’ll be interviewed this coming Monday, March 10, 2008, at 1:00 p.m. on CBC TV Toronto’s program Living in Toronto about my novel Rollback — and I’ll be recommending some other good SF reading, too. The segment with me was recorded a little while ago at Toronto’s Bakka-Phoenix Books, and also features the lovely Chris Szego, manager of the store.
Living in Toronto is the new show hosted by Mary Ito, who used to frequently have me on her old show on TVOntario, More2Life.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
In 2006, I was a participant at the inaugural Science Foo Camp (or SciFooCamp; “Foo” is short for “Friends of O’Reilly,” the giant computer-book publisher).
The event was co-sponsored by O’Reilly and the journal Nature (which published one of my stories back in 2000 — “The Abdication of Pope Mary III,” a little number called “gob-smacking” by Publishers Weekly).
SciFooCamp was held at the Googleplex — the international headquarters of Google — and I loved every minute.
Something a bit similar (and a direct spin-off) is being put together in Toronto this month. Says Timo Hannay of Nature:
Together with a few friends in the Toronto area (including Lee Smolin, who you may have met at SciFoo) I am helping to organize an “Open Source” version of SciFoo, named SciBarCamp, in homage to both SciFoo and BarCamp. The event is being held in Toronto from the evening of March 14 (a Friday) to Sunday March 16.
I’ll be there, and am very much looking forward to it. Unlike the invitation-only SciFoo Camp, SciBarCamp is open to anyone, although there is a cap on attendance.
(The name BarCamp is a sly reference to the original O’Reilly FooCamps; “Foobar” is a common hacker term, and “bar” is what comes after “foo” …)
The idea is that you come and participate for the whole weekend — you’re either in or you’re out, basically, just like summer camp. :) And participate is an important word; this isn’t a passive series of seminars. Rather, people are expected to present or at least engage in Q&A at the sessions that emerge.
In fact, one of the things I like best is that people are penalized for using PowerPoint:
The talks will be informal and interactive; to encourage this, speakers who wish to give PowerPoint presentations will have ten minutes to present, while those without will have twenty minutes.
More info is here.
At the original SciFoo Camp, I led a session the possibilities of the World Wide Web gaining consciousness (and publicly acknowledged that this was brainstorming for my upcoming WWW trilogy).
To give a sense of how high-powered the original SciFooCamp was, the photo above shows a few of the people who came to my session there: Stewart Brand of the Long Now Foundation, Google co-founder Larry Page, and SF writer Greg Bear.
More about my time at the original SciFooCamp in 2006 is here.
I’m very much looking forward to SciBarCamp (not the least of which because it’s being held at Hart House at the University of Toronto; for several summers, I taught an intensive course in writing science fiction at Hart House).
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
McNally Robinson, Canada’s second-largest bookstore chain, has bestsellers’ lists for Winnipeg, Calgary, and Saskatoon. Right now the Rollback paperback is #7 on the mass-market list (combined fiction and nonfiction) in Calgary, and it’s #1 in Saskatoon.
Here’s the Saskatoon list:
#1. Rollback
By Robert J Sawyer – $8.99#2. Jumper
By Steven Gould – $9.99#3. The Pillars Of The Earth
By Ken Follett – $10.99#4. Atonement
By Ian Mcewan – $11.99#5. Iron Kissed
By Patricia Briggs – $10.99#6. Cat Who Had 60 Whiskers
By Lilian Jackson Braun – $10.99#7. The Other Boleyn Girl
By Philippa Gregory – $10.99#8. The Gift Of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us From Violence
By Gavin Debecker – $10.99#9. People Of The Nightland
By W. Michael Gear – $7.49#10. Death Comes For The Fat Man
By Reginald Hill – $11.99
(I suspect the web page is dynamic, and may change, but here’s a link to it.)
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Woohoo!
BookNet Canada’s BNC SalesData service has just released its list of the top 20 Canadian fiction titles for the two weeks ending February 24, 2008. BookNet tracks actual point-of-sale purchases at over 650 bookstores across Canada.
The top five Canadian-authored fiction titles for the last two weeks are:
1. Water for Elephants, Sara Gruen
(HarperCollins Canada, $16.50 pa, 9780006391555)2. Rollback, Robert J. Sawyer (Tor Books/H.B.Fenn, $8.99 mm, 9780765349743)
3. The Ladies’ Lending Library, Janice Kulyk Keefer (HarperCollins Canada, $15.95 pa, 9780002006378)
4. Late Nights on Air, Elizabeth Hay (McClelland & Stewart, $32.99 cl, 9780771038112)
5. The End of the Alphabet, CS Richardson (Anchor Canada, $17.95 pa, 9780385663410)
The only other SF/F title on the list is Guy Gavriel Kay’s Ysabel, at number 11.
I am absolutely thrilled, needless to say!
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Penguin Canada has just announced the hiring of the person who will be my Canadian editor — and will head up the commercial-fiction publishing list for the company. (I copied the job listing here back in January.)
Laura Shin, formerly a Senior Editor at Harlequin — where she worked on crime, fantasy, and women’s fiction — will be the Canadian editor for my new WWW trilogy, as well as other science fiction, fantasy, crime, thriller, horror, and women’s commercial fiction titles.
Penguin Canada publisher David Davidar and Executive Editor Nicole Winstanley spent a lot of time looking for just the right person, and I’m very much looking forward to working with Laura.
For those who have paid accounts, there’s a long article about Laura being hired at Quill & Quire; the opening, which nonsubscribers can read for free, begins:
Over the past few years, Penguin Canada has been making efforts to bolster its genre output, signing sci-fi author Robert Sawyer, thriller writer Michael Slade, and several others. Now they’ve taken the next logical step — hiring a full-time commercial fiction editor.
Laura was praised by her Harlequin author Kathleen O’Brien of Florida in an online interview:
My own editor, Laura Shin, is the kind of person you’d like to be stranded on a deserted island with. She’s smart and funny and capable and literate and great fun to talk to! I think that kind of editor creates the best environment for creativity.
I’m very excited about Laura’s appointment, and look forward to working with her. (Guy Gavriel Kay is going to work with Nicole Winstanely, who used to be his literary agent.) Now, as all good penguins do, let’s waddle boldly into the future!
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
You gotta take this with a grain of salt, ’cause I’m one of the few people on the planet who likes the Thunderbirds live-action film … but I also really like 2005 theatrical Bewitched film. I’d seen it before on an airplane, but Carolyn hadn’t, so we watched it on DVD tonight.
Like the live-action Thunderbirds, Bewitched has real affection for its underlying source material, and even uses a few clips from the original series. And it’s a wonderful bit of metafiction — a movie about making a remake of an old TV series. :)
Oh, and the soundtrack is excellent: Steve Lawrence singing the lyrics to the Bewitched TV theme (yes, it has lyrics — good ones, too); Ella Fitzgerald doing “Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead,” The Police doing “Every Little Thing She Does is Magic.”
Nicole Kidman is adorable, Will Farrell is … Will Farrell :), Steve Carell totally channels Paul Lynde — oh, and it’s got Stephen Colbert in a small part, plus great work, as always, by Michael Caine. Give it a try! :)
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Yesterday, Carolyn and I had three friends from high school over for a game of Trivial Pursuit, some ordered-in Swiss Chalet barbecue chicken, and watching some stuff on our big-screen TV.
The friends were Carolyn’s brother David (one of my best friends quite separate from being my brother-in-law), Ted Bleaney (known to fans of my Quintaglio novels as the source name for saurian priests Det-Yenalb and Det-Bleen), and Gillian Clinton; we were all members of the high-school science-fiction club NASFA (after whom Afsan is named in the Quintaglio books) back in the day …
Carolyn and I have an extensive DVD collection, but, to my surprise, we all converged in a matter of seconds on the film we wanted to watch: the 1983 movie WarGames. This is one of my all-time favorite movies. I think John Wood is amazing as Prof. Stephen Falken in that film — a fascinating portrayal of a genius who had trouble dealing with reality. I just saw online that the producers had considered casting John Lennon in the role, and he would have been a very interesting choice, too. But Wood really inhabits the role.
For more nostalgia, I’m reading Barney Rosenzweig’s excellent memoir Cagney & Lacey … and Me, and he makes a comment about how to tell a good script from a bad one that rings true with WarGames. In a bad script, the writer puts everything into dialog; in a good script, the writer leaves room for the actors to act. And Wood acts in this film. There’s a great moment when he’s been told off by Ally Sheedy’s character (“When was the last time you cared about anything?”), in which we simply see Wood’s face. And when he arrives at the Cheyenne Mountain NORAD complex, he stops on a staircase and you see his eyes scanning the tactical displays, and you get that he comprehends it all. A truly wonderful performance.
Also wonderful: Dabney Coleman, as John Wood’s erstwhile research partner John McKittrick; I’d watch him read the phonebook.
Rarely mentioned online is Juanin Clay, who plays Coleman’s assistant in the film (the woman who yells, “They’re clear, they’re clear, hold the door — hold the goddamn door!” as the NORAD complex is being locked down), but she was fabulous in the film (and she shared equal co-starring billing with Barry Corbin, who plays a blowhard general). Sadly, WarGames was her last film role; she died just three years later at 45.
Alley Sheedy is terrific, and so is Matthew Broderick. But it’s John Wood who steals the show for me — the character of Falken, and his performance of it, are both terrific.
And, after all, how can I not love a film that has this bit of dialog:
Stephen Falken: Are either of you paleontologists? I’m in desperate need of a paleontologist.
Jennifer (Ally Sheedy): No, we’re high school students.
Stephen Falken: Pity.
The day was rounded out with watching an episode of The Rat Patrol (which I enjoy only for Eric Braeden’s / Hans Gudegast’s performance, but Carolyn, Gillian, and David were all very fond of when it first aired in the 1960s), and a couple of classic Warner Bros. cartoons: “One Froggy Evening” and “Duck Dodgers in the 24-1/2 Century.”
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Writers live at the mercy of publishers who often take unconscionably long times to pay, but in all my 29 years selling my work professionally, I think a new record for lateness was reached this week. One full year after it was due, Pearson Educational Canada sent me a cheque for a reprint of one of my short stories in a textbook.
Granted, it was a nice reprint fee — $500 to use my 1,400-word story “The Blue Planet,” which was also in David G. Hartwell’s Year’s Best SF 5; that works out to a cool 35 cents a word. But still — a year? WTF? (That’s “Waiting Time Forever,” of course …)
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
I start most mornings by treadmilling for half an hour. I’ve got a portable DVD player with a 10-inch screen mounted on my treadmill’s control panel, and I watch sitcoms to pass the time.
And I’ve just recently finished watching the third and final season of Arrested Development, a wonderful series about a rich family that loses everything because of shady business dealings on the part of the patriarch (the fabulous Jeffrey Tambor). The series stars Jason Bateman as Tambor’s son, trying to keep the dysfunctional family together. Jessica Walter is perfect as the scheming mother; Michael Cera — who lives not far from me, actually — is incredibly natural in his performance as Bateman’s son; the stunningly beautiful Portia di Rossi is excellent as Bateman’s shallow sister.
In fact, the whole cast is fabulous, and the dialog is absolutely first-rate. Arrested Development is one of the new breed of sitcoms without a laugh track; it trusts the audience to know what’s funny, and I frequently found myself in hysterics over the three seasons.
The narrator is Ron Howard (yes, from Happy Days) and his delivery is perfect. And his old Happy Days buddy Henry Winkler frequently guest stars as the family’s lawyer, Barry Zuckercorn — showing just how wonderfully talented Winkler is. Other guest stars: Charlize Theron, Dave Thomas, Justine Bateman, Scott Baio, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Liza Minnelli, Jeff Garlin, Amy Poehler, Ed Begley Jr., Carl Weathers, and James Lipton (from Inside the Actor’s Studio, as a prison warden).
The show is surreal in a lot of ways (one of the family’s few remaing vehicles is a stair car, of the kind used to disembark from airplanes), and it’s full of meta humor (jokes that acknowledge slyly that this is a TV show).
How good is this show? Well, after I finished the third and final season of Arrested Development, I started in on season six of Curb Your Enthusiasm, the brilliant Larry David sitcom … and Curb seems lame in comparison.
Check it out. The DVDs are quite cheap most of the time (Amazon.com has all three seasons in a combined set for $45 right now).
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
I am delighted to announce that today I delivered the 100,000-word manuscript for Wake, my 18th novel, to Ginjer Buchanan at Penguin USA’s Ace Science Fiction imprint and to Nicole Winstanely at Penguin Canada.
I’m sure there will still be another draft, when my editors request revisions, and I’m still waiting for some feedback from experts who are reviewing the manuscript — I’ll incorporate what they have to say in the final draft. But, for now, I can set the book aside, and work on something else — like the sequel! Wake is the first volume of my WWW trilogy; the second volume will be called Watch and the third will be Wonder.
I started writing the actual manuscript of Wake on Friday, November 5, 2004. Back then, I’d conceived of it as a standalone novel. I took a break, wrote Rollback, and came back to the project, re-envisioning it as a trilogy.
The book is scheduled for Spring 2009 publication.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
The unnumbered list takes ten pages in the magazine. I share a page with Geoffrey Taylor, the artistic director of the International Festival of Authors at Harbourfront and with powerhouse literary agents Michael Levine and Jackie Kaiser, of Westwood Creative Artists.
The write-up about me says, “When Penguin Canada snatched up domestic rights to science fiction giant Robert J. Sawyer last year, it felt like the Canuck industry was finally waking up to an entire genre. Not that Sawyer really needed the nod: he already sells more than respectably and has a shelf full of major sci-fi prizes. As a generous mentor to other writers, the proprietor of his own eponymous imprint at Red Deer Press, and a frequent media pundit, Sawyer is the public face of Canadian sci-fi.”
Only three authors made the list: Margaret Atwood, Douglas Coupland, and Robert J. Sawyer.
Others on the list include Heather Reisman, CEO of bookstore chain Chapters/Indigo; Martin Levin, book-review editor for The Globe and Mail; and David Kent, president of HarperCollins Canada.
I am thrilled, honoured, and very pleased.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
I think eReader (formerly PalmReader) is the best ebook reading software out there, better than Mobipocket (and with a much better DRM scheme). Fictionwise.com just acquired eReader.com, and to celebrate, they’ve made all versions of eReader Pro, their premium software, free. You can get them right here, for Windows, Mac, Palm, Pocket PC, Windows Mobile, Symbian, and OQO.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
It’s been many a year since I’ve run into Steven Gould and his wife Laura Mixon, but I’ve always been fond of them — and Steve is living what many novelists dream of just now: his novel Jumper has been made into a major Hollywood motion picture, which premiered last week.
You can tag along with Steve as he enjoys all the excitment by reading his blog.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Jack Kirchhoff of The Globe and Mail: Canada’s National Newspaper does a weekly roundup of notable titles newly in paperback, and this week (Saturday, February 16, 2008) he mentions two science-fiction books with Canadian authors:
ROLLBACK
By Robert Sawyer, Tor, 313 pages, $8.99
The search for extraterrestrial intelligence is backdrop for Sawyer’s investigation of the implications of humanity’s soon-to-be-realized ability to roll back the aging process.
VARIABLE STAR
By Robert A. Heinlein and Spider Robinson, Tor, 352 pages, $9.99
A composer flees a tragic affair, determined to begin a new life for himself in space, only to be derailed by a literally cosmic cataclysm.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
A note I sent to the fine folks at Fictionwise.com:
Might you have a word with your vendors about the fact that it’s wrong to force full justification of text in ebooks? The last two secure Mobipocket ebooks I’ve bought from you have flush-right margins regardless of what setting is chosen in Mobipocket reader. On narrow screens, to me, right-justified text looks awful, and is very hard to read (because of the often huge gaps between words).
The books in question:
I forgave the former book (Nonzero by Robert Wright), because it was released six years ago, but the latter — The Next Fifty Years, edited by John Brockman — just came out as an ebook. Both were published by Random House.
Yes, I know some people like full justification; that’s not the point. If they like it, they can turn it on in Mobipocket; if they don’t, they should be able to turn it off, but these books force it on regardless, and that’s contrary to the spirit of what the ebook reading experience should be: text formatted the way the individual reader likes it.
(Oh, and I would have bought these titles in eReader format, but they weren’t offered in it.)
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
I’m away with eight good friends (including Randy McCharles, chair of this year’s World Fantasy Convention, and Asimov’s and Analog author Susan Forest) on a writing retreat in Banff, Alberta. I happened to be in Calgary this past Thursday, giving a keynote address to the annual professional-development conference for Calgary high-school teachers, and sticking around for this was irresistable, as I slide toward my deadline this coming Thursday for Wake, my 18th novel.
Banff is a wonderful ski-resort town in the Canadian Rockies. We’re staying at the Hidden Ridge Resort, which is gorgeous. We’ve rented a two-bedroom-plus-loft condo (with balcony, fireplace, and two bathrooms) that looks like this. I’m paying extra to have one of the bedrooms to myself (the one just inside the patio door on the ground floor in the floor plan here), but we’re all writing in the living room with laptops: six people around the dining-room table, one more on the floor, and two of us (me and Mike Gillett) on the couch, with our feet up on little coffee tables.
Everyone has been working hard. We were at it until 11:00 p.m. last night, and back at work by 7:30 a.m. this morning. Randy McCharles and a couple of others have taken a break to go outdoor hot-tubbing now, but the rest of us are still pounding away. The only sounds I’ve heard for the last few hours are the soft clicking of keys and mice.
I’m making great progress doing my final-top down edit of Wake. My goal is actually to cut, not add; the manuscript stood at 104,000 words when I arrived, and I want to tighten it to under 100,000 by Monday afternoon, when we leave. I’m also incorporating feedback from some very kind blind people who have been beta-testing the book for me, as one of the book’s main characters has been blind since birth.
Anyway, it’s been wonderfully productive so far — and I should get back to it!
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
On February 13, 1968, a seven-year-old Robert J. Sawyer — then known as Robin — recorded a reading of his short story “Bobby Bug” on audio tape, with the aid of his father (the first voice on the recording). Listen. (45 seconds WMA clip, playable with Windows Media Player, unearthed a couple of years ago by my brother Alan.)
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
I’ve just accepted an invitation to be Author Guest of Honor at Xanadu Las Vegas, a new convention in Las Vegas, Nevada, April 17-19, 2009 (next year). Woohoo!
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
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
