I have an op-ed piece on Michael Crichton’s tendency to bend the truth in his fiction in today’s Ottawa Citizen, the largest circulation newspaper in Canada’s capital city. You can read it online here.
(An op-ed piece is an article that appears opposite the Editorial — that is, on the facing page; it’s an opinion piece by someone other than the newspapers’ editors.)
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Barbara J. King is just about to come out with a book entitled Evolving God. As it happens, that particular title wording was one of the working titles I used for my own novel Calculating God, as you can see here.
Why did I change it, given that it was apt? Because if your eye runs over it quickly, Evolving God can look like Loving God.
Dr. King’s book is about the scientific origins of religious belief, which, as anyone who has read Hybrids knows, is a particular interest of mine.
By the way. Carolyn and I listened to a wonderful anthropology course by Dr. King a while ago from The Teaching Company — in fact, earlier we’d listened to and very favourably rated her audition lecture for The Teaching Company (which has customers review potential new courses).
Dr. King’s book comes out on Tuesday; I’ve got it on pre-order from Amazon.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
A very nice review of Boarding the Enterprise, the Star Trek essay collection edited by Robert J. Sawyer and David Gerrold, is online now at Talebones. Check it out.
I have excellent publicists at Tor and H.B. Fenn (Tor’s Canadian distributor); Alexis Saarela is my publicist at Tor and Janis Ackroyd is my publicist at Fenn.
But I also always do up a press release of my own for my novels, in addition to the ones they do. And that press release for Rollback is now online as a web page and as a very pretty PDF.
As I’ve said on my website in an article on getting good press, it’s important to find a news angle for your story, because no one but your mother cares that you’ve written a novel. For Rollback, I’m stressing the prospects for extending the human lifespan …
With all this talk about my upcoming novel Rollback, I wouldn’t want to forget good old Mindscan, my current book.
And, as it happened, I saw a very nice new review of it today, from Kliatt, the principal reference used by schools and libraries for choosing young-adult material. Says the reviewer, Dr. Lesley Farmer:
Want to read a SF story that creates a movie in your mind? Then Mindscan should be your choice. Jake Sullivan is the appealing protagonist. This is high-quality, clever and thought-provoking near-future SF. The characters are nuanced, and the plot is believable. The story is a nonstop feast and inspiration for a great movie. Recommended.
The cover for Rollback has been slightly revised. The illustration is the same, but the typography is different, and even nicer). The new version looks like this:
My name is now in a typeface called Minion, and the title of the book is in Yearling Light.
The old version looked like this:
You’ll find a high-res version of the new cover, in all its glory, here — your browser may shrink it; if so, click on the image to see it full size. Note that there’s subtle detail in the background — it’s not uniformly black; you may have to turn up the brightness on your monitor to see this.
Many thanks to Irene Gallo and her team at Tor for another wonderful cover!
This Monday, January 15, 2007, the Ottawa Citizen — the largest-circulation newspaper in Canada’s capital city — will carry an op-ed piece by me, Robert J. Sawyer, on Michael Crichton’s tendency to blend fact and fiction in his books.
(An op-ed piece is an article that appears OPosite the EDitorial page; it’s an opinion piece by someone other than the newspaper’s editors.)
Lots of nice news in the last 48 hours. First, I’m going to be this year’s Guest of Honour at GenreCon, the nifty one-day genre-fiction con held in Sarnia, Ontario; the date is Saturday, May 12. Robert Charles Wilson and I were at GenreCon two years ago for the Rob and Bob Tour for Mindscan and Spin, and we had a blast.
Second, A.Y. Jackson, a high school in Toronto, has selected my Far-Seer as the book for its school-wide “Jackson Reads” program; I’ll be going in to spend a day with the students in April.
The Ottawa Citizen commissioned another op-ed piece from me — more about that later.
Got a reprint story of mine accepted for the limited-edition anthology being put together by Stephen Jones for the Toronto World Horror Convention.
Got asked to appear on the Toronto radio program Benmergui in the Morning on Jazz FM91, to talk about the future of music-listening technology; I’ll post the air date here as soon as I know it.
Received my membership reimbursement from last year’s Worldcon (panelists have to buy a membership like anyone else, but if the con makes money, they get a refund).
Betsy Wollheim of DAW Books phoned, just to thank me for blurbing one of her upcoming books.
A friend gave me DVDs with copies of most of the episodes of Search, a 1972 TV series I loved that’s never been released commercially on VHS or DVD.
Life be good. :)
CBC Television’s The Hour with George Stroumboulopoulos has posted the clip of me — Robert J. Sawyer — talking about the future of transportation which first aired Monday, January 2, 2007.
It’s a funny clip in a way. They recorded me in front of a green screen, and then simply keyed in a plain white background (rather than shooting me in front of a white background to begin with). And although it’s a canned piece, they played it to The Hour‘s live studio audience, so it ends up with a silly (but appreciative) laugh track. Anyway, here it is. (3 minutes, 45 seconds)
Behind-the-scenes bonus: Robert J. Sawyer’s three-minute audio pitch (MP3) for Rollback, prepared for the sales force of H.B. Fenn, Tor’s Canadian distributor (a short presentation by Rob on the book and its marketing, one of several such presentations about the season’s major titles that the sales people receive to listen to in their cars.)
The opening chapters of Rollback are now available to whet your appetitie on my website as a web page, a Word document, an RTF file, and a PDF. Read ’em online, download them, print them out, or synch them to your PDA or ebook reader.
The book comes out April 3, 2007, from Tor.
My buddy Edo van Belkom put me onto Authors’ Booking Service, which specializes in getting authors gigs in schools and libraries in Ontario. So, if you’re a teacher or librarian who’d like to have me come visit, have a look here.
Today’s Toronto Sun, along with Sun newspapers across Canada, has a long, very good article by Vivian Song, in which Robert J. Sawyer, Karl Schroeder, and Richard Worzel predict what the remaining decades of this century have in store.
(You can skip the “astrologist’s” predictions that appear at the end — the Ottawa Sun wisely chose to do just that in their version, as did the Winnipeg Sun in theirs.)
The London Free Press also has a version of the article — woohoo!
This is completely separate from the CBC television thing I mentioned earlier, by the way.
Hey, all you newsmagazines and other media outlets that did their “2006-in-review” news coverage earlier this month: Don’t you think that the execution of Saddam Hussein was one of the top news stories of 2006? Yeah, well, people looking back at your coverage would never know it. A polite request: leave writing about the future to us science-fiction writers. Thanks.
CBC Television’s The Hour with George Stroumboulopoulous, which airs at 11:00 p.m. local time coast-to-coast in Canada, is doing a three-part series on the future to kick off the new year.
The three segments will air Tuesday, January 2; Wednesday, January 3; and Thursday, January 4. Each segment features a different theme, and a different person making the predictions. One segment is on the future of transportation, and SF writer Robert J. Sawyer is interviewed; another is on the future of warfare and SF writer Karl Schroeder is interviewed; the third is on the future of humanity, and George Dvorsky of the Toronto Transhumanist Association is interviewed. But which segment will air on which night hasn’t yet been determined.
The Hour is a national current-affairs show produced by CBC Television in Toronto. The segments in question are produced by Nick McCabe.
How can you not love this show? The episode I watched today, “Gavin’s Pipe Dream,” includes an appearance near the end by Robby the Robot (an absolutely spot-on perfect recreation of the robot from Forbidden Planet).
It also has a funny bit in which Christopher Lloyd’s ex-NASA-scientist, who never throws out anything that’s still good (he has a garage full of Tang), pulls out his cell phone, and it’s one of the original, gigantic 1973-vintage Motorola cell phones.
(For another cool Robby the Robot appearance, see this AT&T commercial on YouTube.)
My friend Kirstin Morrell drew this fascinating article entitled “How the anti-copyright lobby makes big business richer,” from The Register, to my attention. In general, it’s about how the web has been demolishing the ability of creative people to make a living; in particular, it’s a photojournalist’s perspective on that. In light of all the mindless bandwagoning for the opposite perspective, it’s a very interesting read.
In today’s edition of The Globe and Mail: Canada’s National Newspaper, the books section is devoted to “Books of the Year.” Among the 38 people The Globe asked to discuss their picks are yours truly, plus Jane Urquhart, Freeman Dyson, Jack Whyte, Emily Pohl-Weary (Judith Merril and Fred Pohl’s daughter), and Ronald Wright — plus two of the stars of Canada’s top sitcom, Corner Gas, Brent Butt and Gabrielle Miller (who are pictured on the cover of the books section, as seen above).
The whole shebang is available online here. My pick, which is Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion, is discussed on this page, where I say:
Early in The God Delusion, British biologist Richard Dawkins discusses a print ad for a TV series he was recently involved with in the UK. The headline, with a nod to John Lennon: “Imagine a world without religion.” And the image: the skyline of Manhattan — with the Twin Towers intact.
As Dawkins says repeatedly in his sharp and witty book,
whether or not God exists is no longer a subject best left to late-night dorm-room debates. Rather, the pathological belief in a higher being who sanctions horrors is the single biggest threat to humanity’s survival. As a standup comic I saw recently quipped, “I don’t want the guy with his finger on the button believing there’s a better world after this one.” But we do have an apocalypticist in the White House — and other fundamentalists wreaking terror worldwide.Does it really matter whether we teach evolution or creationism in the schools? Not on a grand scale; our species’ past is only of academic interest. But allowing religion to guide governments and terrorists, to sanction persecution and slaughter, to suppress women and minorities — that does matter. Dawkins (who, regrettably, is occasionally unable to keep the sneer out of his voice) flushes out the manifold cruelty perpetrated in the name of religion, while also elegantly proving that it’s possible to be moral and just in its absence.
Using “it’s what our faith teaches” as a get-out-of-jail-free card for atrocities, including infanticide, genocide, and the mutilation of women, is more than just flat-out wrong, he says, it’s mental illness. Of course, few of those who most need to hear Dawkins’s message will read this powerful book, and that’s not just a shame — it’s a deadly reality.
— Robert J. Sawyer is a Hugo Award-winning science-fiction writer in Mississauga; his latest novel is Mindscan, published by Tor.
It was a nice Christmas this year. It was Carolyn and my turn to host the Sawyer family get-together.
Among the goodies I found under the tree:
* The first new series of Doctor Who on DVD
* The second season of The Simpsons on DVD
* The book The Trouble with Physics by my friend Lee Smolin
* The novel Ishmael by Daniel Quinn
* A Chapters / Indigo gift card that is going to become the Season 2.0 and 2.5 DVDs of Battlestar Galactica
* A 2007 daily Scrabble calendar
* A gift certificate for Swiss Chalet, my favourite barbecue-chicken restaurant chain
* A lovely new sweater.
I’m a lucky man. :)
Following up on this earlier blog entry of mine about cash flow, I note for the record that I received today my “on publication” portion of the advance for Boarding the Enterprise, the Star Trek essay collection I edited with David Gerrold for BenBella Books. Publication date was August 1, 2006; today was December 27, 2006, which is 147 days, or getting on to five months later.
Publishers big and small (including, I must say, the one that I edit for) have been taking increasingly liberal definitions of “on publication.” I’m doing all right, but I know lots of other authors who are really being hurt by this tendency. A word to the wise among beginning writers: don’t quit your day job. :)
I’ve watched three episodes now of Stacked, the short-lived Fox sitcom starring Pamela Anderson as an unlikely bookstore clerk, and, you know what? It’s charming, funny, cute, clever, and intelligent.
The show’s characters include a failed novelist, and a physics professor (played by Taxi‘s Christopher Lloyd), and the setting is a lovely little independent bookshop. As someone who writes, and as someone who used to work in a bookstore, I’m actually really enjoying this — and so is Carolyn, so you can be sure it’s not just Pammy that this has going for it.
The creator and head writer is Steven Levitan, who created Just Shoot Me and wrote four episodes of Frasier. The whole series — the 14 episodes that aired, plus 5 more that never did — is now out on DVD. Remember, if you dismiss it at a glance, you’re simply judging a book by its cover … and we all know that’s not fair. :)
I’ve been a member of the The Writers’ Union of Canada for 16 years now. I’ve got nothing to do with the one-day seminars they’re putting on across Canada entitled “Writing as a Profession: How to Get Published and Survive as an Author: Professional Development Workshops for Writers in All Phases of Their Careers,” but, at Cdn$45 for a full day including lunch and lots of free informational booklets, they sound like a bargain, and my buddy Ken McGoogan is one of the presenters. They’re being given at cities coast-to-coast in Canada; details are here.
Here’s the word-verification screen that Blogger offered me this morning. Gee, thanks!
My RCA REB1100 (REB-1100, REB 1100) eBook reading device succumbed yesterday to the dreaded grid of death: a condition in which the internal flash ROM is corrupted, and the device won’t do anything.
After googling around, and an hour or two of trial-and-error on my own, I managed to get the device working again, including getting it to recognize its old serial number and eBook ID, something, as far as I can tell, no one has ever managed before.
I wrote up the procedure for the REB1100 groups on Yahoo!, and thought I’d post a link to it here. Since Google does a good job of including my blog in its search results, I’m hoping others who need the advice will find this posting, and follow this link to the Yahoo! Groups REB1100 files group, where I outline the fix that worked for me in detail.
Incidentally, I’m rather fond of this five-year-old eBook-reading device (and tons of content is still available for it at fictionwise.com.
Just received the following email, with the subject line “My Friend is an excellent Science Fiction, Military, And “What If” Writer.”
Dear Mr. Sawyer,
I have a Writer Friend who has a great imagination and is an excellent Writer! We met at our Writer’s group and are “Writer Friends.” Do you know of an agent that accepts stories like his? He is very prolific and is always researching, and finding ideas. I am a Writer too, but what I do is Romantic, Family History, Poetry and short stories. Here is a sample of my friend’s work [Word file attached]. Would you let me know.
And here’s my reply:
My lawyer has advised me not to read the work of beginning writers who approach me over the Internet. Sadly, we live in a very litigious world, and the risk is too great that someday someone will claim that something I independently created was influenced by or based on some unpublished work I’d supposedly seen online. And so I have to politely decline to look at the work you want me to read; I hope you’ll understand.
That said, there’s information on finding agents on my web site: http://sfwriter.com/agent.htm
Also, I have to say you’re going about this backwards. You, or your friend, should be reading widely in the field you want to publish in, and identifying which authors are writing similar material, and then finding out who their agents are. Don’t ask others to do your homework for you; your friend needs to know the field well enough to figure out who the appropriate agents to approach are. Now, if you want to come back to me with a question such as, “My friend writes books similar to those of XXXX and YYYY, and I was wondering if you could tell me who their agents are?,” I’d be glad to oblige if I happen to have the answer.
Best of luck.
There’s a lot of discussion in Planet of the Apes fandom about what the back end of Colonel Taylor’s ANSA spaceship looked like. The ship is only ever seen partially submerged in water in the film (at Lake Powell), so the details of the rear end have been left mostly to the imagination. William Creber, the gifted art director who designed it (he also designed the original miniature of the spaceship from Lost in Space, another of my favorite ships) has said in interviews that not a lot of thought was given to the back end because it wasn’t going to be shown on screen.
I’ve never seen the image above anywhere else, and so I thought I’d share it here. Where’s it from, you ask? Actor Roddy McDowall’s home movies of the making of the original Planet of the Apes, from 1967, included on disk number two of the Ultimate Planet of the Apes collection Fox released in an ape-head case earlier this year. Not that the spaceship — which fans have dubbed Icarus, although that name isn’t canonical — is pointed out in the home movies; it isn’t and McDowall doesn’t seem to notice it himself.
The above is a detail of some footage, at about the 9-minute, 10-seconds mark into the home movies, of a helicopter flight from the Fox studios that McDowall was on; the ship, seen standing on its end outside a building labeled “20” is visible for just a few seconds in a small part of the movie frame. Note the white car just to the right of the ship for scale.
I captured this from the DVD, cropped it, and offer it here as my little contribution to the ongoing discussion of what the back end of the ship looked like before it was re-configured to be Brent’s ship in Beneath the Planet of the Apes or truncated, with the rear end shortened and a rounded heat shield added, in Escape from the Planet of the Apes.
As you can see, each of the big fins has what appears to be an engine nozzle sticking out of it, very near the tips of the fins. We know from the final film that the nose cone (the tip at the top) is gold in color; it looks like the engine cones are about the same color here.
Not sure how long it’ll be available on-line but the latest electronic newsletter from Writers of the Future contains my essay “Eight Things New Writers Need to Know,” reprinted from the latest volume in the long-running series. I’m a judge for the contest, and I do recommend beginning writers enter it.
… about a Japanese reader’s visit with me. It’s a meeting I fondly remember, and I’m delighted it meant so much to him, too. You can read what he had to say here.
(And thanks to the friend who drew this to my attention!)
So, on Saturday night, Kirstin, Carolyn, and I watched To Serve All My Days, the new fan-produced Star Trek classic episode from New Voyages.
The previous episode done by this group — In Harm’s Way, with guest star William Windom — was brilliant, with an amazingly clever and interesting script. And this new episode had guest star Walter Koenig (the original Chekov) and a script by D.C. Fontana (who wrote Journey to Babel and other classic Trek episodes).
Unfortunately, this new episode isn’t nearly as good as the last one. For starters, it’s not edited tightly. And the script … well, it does have a very clever central premise (spoilers follow):
In the original Trek episode The Deadly Years, Chekov is the one member of a landing party immune to an aging disease that makes Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and Scott all into old men. Well, it turns out he wasn’t immune, but rather that the onset was simply delayed, neatly allowing the now sixty-something Walter Koenig to play Chekov in a classic-era story.
But the episode left me unsatisfied for a couple of reasons. First, I was astonished to see a Mary Sue in it. (Mary Sues are characters in fan fiction that are obviously avatars of the female author of the piece; in this case, it’s a dignified female human Federation amabassador who has lots of scenes, but doesn’t really advance the plot.) And, mind-bogglingly, given its auctorial pedigree, the episode hugely violates canon, having Pavel Chekov die during the original five-year mission (and having him pre-decease Kirk). Uh-uh. Chekov goes on to be in seven Star Trek movies, and he outlives Kirk’s demise in Star Trek: Generations. Yeah, his death here is kinda poignant, but it left me more in a scratching-my-head rather than drying-my-eyes frame of mind.
(It also takes Kirk an awfully long time to recognize that a ship that looks Klingon might be Romulan — he should have thought of that at once, since he’d previously seen Romulans using ships of Klingon design. But then, bafflingly, the ship turns out to belong to some race of aliens we’ve never heard of.)
There are some good thing in this, and the notion of a Trek episode exploring economic issues is an interesting one, but although I’ve watched In Harm’s Way four or five times now, I doubt I’ll go back for a second viewing of To Serve All My Days.
Last Saturday, Kirstin Morrell was in town from Calgary. She’s the managing editor of Red Deer Press, the company that publishes my Robert J. Sawyer Books imprint. I took her on a whirlwind tour of Toronto’s sites, with an emphasis on those of interest to an SF fan (which Kirstin most assuredly is: she’s also the chair of Con-Version, Calgary’s SF convention, for 2007).
For starters, we went up the CN Tower. I was shocked to find it’s now $25 a head to go up all the way to the SkyPod, and that a good chunk of the observation deck is now taken up by a cafe that you’re supposed to buy something in if you want to look out the windows. Excuse me! We just paid 25 bucks to look out the windows — this is a total ripoff, and CN management should be ashamed.
Next stop was the museum at the Canadian Broadcasting Centre, national headquarters of the CBC. Since a visit there figures in my novel Rollback, I’ll just quote the description from that book:
The broadcasting museum was tiny, and tucked off to one side, clearly an afterthought in designing the building. Some of the stuff predated Don. The kiddie program Uncle Chichimus was before his time, and This Hour Has Seven Days and Front Page Challenge were shows his parents had watched. He was old enough to remember Wayne and Shuster, but not old enough to have ever thought they were funny. But he’d learned his first French from Chez Hélène, and had spent many happy hours with Mr. Dressup and The Friendly Giant. Don took a minute to look at the model of Friendly’s castle, and the puppets of Rusty the Rooster and Jerome the Giraffe. He read the placard that explained that Jerome’s bizarre color scheme of purple and orange had been selected in the days of black-and-white TV because it had good contrast, and had been left intact when the program switched to color in 1966, giving him a psychedelic look, an unintentional reflection of the times.
Don had forgotten that Mister Rogers had gotten his start here, but there it was, the original miniature trolley from that show, back when it had been called Mister Rogers’ Neighbourhood, the last word notably sporting a U.
Then it was off to lunch at the Duke of Argyle pub, followed by a trip to the three most interesting stores on Queen Street West: Active Surplus, where you can buy all sorts of electronic and computer components; the giant comic-book and action-figure emporium known as the Silver Snail; and, of course, Bakka-Phoenix, the world’s oldest SF specialty store. We were lucky: Michelle Sagara West (who writes novels for DAW and reviews for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction) happened to be in, as did former store owner John Rose.
Then it was off to the Art Gallery of Ontario for the special Ansel Adams exhibition. After that, we hustled up to The Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation and Fantasy, where they rolled out the red carpet for Kirstin, giving us the VIP back-in-the-private-stacks tour, showing us such gems as a first edition copy of Dracula, the first issue of Amazing Stories, and the manuscript for Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars.
We then walked around the Royal Ontario Museum building, looking at the fascinating exterior renovations in progress (embedding part of the old Victoria building inside a funky crystalline shell, making it look like the Borg are assimilating the old building), and we walked through Queen’s Park and looked at the Ontario parliament buildings. A lot to cram into one day, but it was great fun!
(For those interested in a more elaborate tour of Toronto, I wrote up this guide for visitors to the city; it was published in one of the progress reports for the 2003 World Science Fiction Convention.)
