Robert J. Sawyer

I love the Planet of the Apes apes figures in this 12-inch series from Sideshow Collectibles (I’m not keen on the human figures, though — to me, they look nothing like Charlton Heston and the rest, suggesting that Sideshow didn’t have rights to their likenesses). But the apes are excellent, particularly the Zira and Cornelius figures.

You can get them in Toronto at Silver Snail, and I’m sure at other comic-book and memorabilia stores worldwide; also, lots of eBay dealers have them. Really nice figures, at around US$40 a piece. (I also have the 18-inch-high Lawgiver statue they make; it’s excellent.)

The biggest honour a writer can pay to another human being is to dedicate a book to him or her.

I have been touched and deeply moved to have books dedicated to me before by Edo van Belkom, James Alan Gardner, and Mike Resnick. And I can tell you now from experience that the thrill doesn’t diminish over time.

On Saturday, my great friend Marcel Gagné presented Carolyn and me with the very first copy he’d received of his new book Moving to Free Software from Addison-Wesley. It’s dedicated to Carolyn and me, with these words:

The comment refers to the fact that I suggested Marcel write his first “Moving To” book, which was called Moving to Linux: Kiss the Blue Screen of Death Goodbye! The current book is his fifth in the “Moving To” series.

Many, many thanks, Marcel!

I’ve had an insanely busy — but very pleasant — last couple of weeks. The highlight was this past Friday night, December 15. Carolyn and I hosted a party in honor of two of this year’s Hugo Award winners: my editor David G. Hartwell, who won for Best Editor, and my great friend Robert Charles Wilson, who won for Best Novel (for his remarkable Spin).

David was in town for an H.B. Fenn sales conference (Fenn is Tor’s Canadian distributor), and he stayed overnight at our place (as did our other very special guest, Kirstin Morrell, the managing editor of Calgary’s Red Deer Press, publisher of Robert J. Sawyer Books, who was in town for her own sales conference).

The party was a blast, with a who’s-who of Canadian SF in attendance. We had a total of four Hugo winners (the other two were myself and Mike Glicksohn, who won the Best Fanzine Hugo in 1973), and three other Hugo finalists: artist Taral, and writers James Alan Gardner (who had come to the party directly from London, England — he came straight from the airport to our place) and Pat Forde. Also on hand were such luminaries as Merril Collection head Lorna Toolis, Canada’s great editor John Robert Colombo, authors Karl Schroeder, Terence M. Green, Phyllis Gotlieb, and many more.

The evening was doubly special, in that it was also Robert Charles Wilson’s birthday. Great conversation, lots of food, good friends — what more can one ask?

David G. Hartwell, Sharry Wilson, Robert Charles Wilson

Kirstin Morrell plants a wet one on Caesar

Phyllis Gotlieb and Kelly Gotlieb

The Senior Pajamas writer’s group: Pat Forde, Robert J. Sawyer, James Alan Gardner, Suzanne Church

Robert Charles Wilson’s birthday cake

Janice Beitel and Karl Schroeder

Robert J. Sawyer and Robert Charles Wilson with their Hugos
 

I’m doing another marathon of interviews for CBC Radio stations coast to coast today. This time, it’s about the future of the Web — perfect for my upcoming WWW trilogy. The news hook is Time magazine having named “You” (all us bloggers, YouTubers, MySpacers, and so on) as its “Persons of the Year.”

I’ll be on these CBC Radio One stations; all times listed are MY time (Eastern Time; same as New York), NOT the local station time. You can hear the interviews (each live, each different) online here; again, I believe all the stations are Radio ONE:

4.20
QUEBEC CITY

4.30
VICTORIA

4.40
THUNDER BAY

5.00
YELLOWKNIFE

5.10
MONTREAL

5.20
SUDBURY

5.40
OTTAWA

5.50
WINNIPEG
 

The Canadian bookselling chain Chapters / Indigo / Coles asked 150,000 members of its iRewards loyalty program to pick the top 100 Canadian-authored books of all time. Only one book published as science fiction made the list: my Calculating God, coming in at number 79. You can see the whole list here (I’m on page 4).

I’m very pleased with this cover for the hardcover of Rollback, which will be published by Tor in April 2007.

There’s actually a lot of detail in the dark background; if you can’t see it, turn the brightness and contrast up on your monitor.

Click on the small version above for a bigger version; note that your browser might scale down the bigger version for display — click on the big version to see it full size.

The notation about this being a “SciFi Essential Book” refers to this cross promotion with the SciFi Channel.

The fund-raising book fair for the World Fantasy Convention in Calgary in 2008 sponsored by Calgary’s writers’ workshop IFWA was a great success. Lots of money raised, lots of good books swapped or acquired. Plans are in the works for an even bigger such event next year.

Tomorrow is a big party day for me: the Christmas parties for Fitzhenry and Whiteside (parent publisher of Robert J. Sawyer Books) and of my speakers’ bureau, Speakers’ Spotlight, take place one after the other.
 

David Suzuki is a leading Canadian science broadcaster, geneticist, and environmentalist, but if you didn’t know that and read the bio note on his article on page 18 of the 23 September 2006 New Scientist, you might think he was a raving ego-maniac, since it’s completely self-referential. :) It says, in its entirety:

David Suzuki is chair of the David Suzuki Foundation in Vancouver, Canada (www.davidsuzuki.org). His latest book, David Suzuki: The autobiography, is published by Greystone.

A nice write-up about the Neanderthal Parallax trilogy is here at bTALK. Thanks, guys!
 

Carolyn and I will be spending three months next summer in Canada’s far north. We’ll be living at Berton House, the childhood home of famed Canadian nonfiction writer Pierre Berton, in Dawson City, Yukon Territory; Dawson City was the heart of the Klondike Gold Rush, and is at latitude 64 degrees north, about 100 km due east (along The Top of the World Highway) from the Alaska border.

Berton House is administered as a writers’ retreat, sponsored by the Klondike Visitors Association. Established Canadian writers apply to live there for three-month terms — and I was just accepted. This will be a real chance to get away from it all, and concentrate on my writing.

Carolyn and I will head there early in July, and stay until the end of September, 2007. (I’ve been to the Yukon once before, as an instructor at the Yukon Writers Conference in Whitehorse during February 2002, and I fell in love with the people and the geography.) My plan is to come back at the end of September with Wake, volume one of my WWW trilogy, completed.

Because of this residency, we will miss the World Science Fiction Convention in Japan, and we’ll also miss the NASFiC (North American Science Fiction Convention, which is in St. Louis in 2007). But we will be at the World Horror Convention in Toronto in the spring of 2007, the World Fantasy Convention in upstate New York in the fall, plus all these other events (and I will be back to Toronto in time for Word on the Street on the last day of September).

I’m very excited about this!

The fundraising dinner I was at last week was in support of Berton House, by the way.

More information about Berton House is here (click to enter) and here.

More about Dawson City is here.

Biographical details about Pierre Berton are on his website, in The Canadian Encyclopedia, and at Wikipedia.
 

We Canadians grew up with Coles Notes; Americans are used to Cliffs Notes, Barron’s Notes, and SparkNotes or Spark Notes (the brand that Barnes and Noble sells) — study guides for various scientific and historical subjects, or for great works of literature and plays.

Well, the full text of all the SparkNotes are now online for free (you pay only if you want to download a whole book as a single PDF file). A cool reference source, I must say. And they’ve also got all those handy review charts, but you have to pay to download those.

Also free on the same site: a searchable style guide (punctuation, grammar, etc.). Sadly — from my point of view — it agrees with the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition, on not italicizing punctuation marks following italicized words, as I wrote about here.

A moment later: Hey, whattaya know! CliffsNotes offers something similar — free online viewing; pay only if you want to download a PDF. Cool!
 

IFWA Christmas Book Festival!

(in conjunction with the Calgary 2008 World Fantasy Convention)

Come one, come all to the first ever IFWA-sponsored Christmas Book Festival. Food! Fun! … and Books!

(IFWA is the Imaginative Fiction Writers Association, Calgary’s venerable SF&F writing workshop.)

View the poster (with map) here.

From high noon through 4:00 p.m. we’ll have an assortment of All-You-Can-Eat food and drink! Bring along your orphaned books for trade with other avid readers at Honest Ivan’s Book Exchange! (Our own Ivan Dorin.)

Special Events:

• At 1:00 p.m. Special Guest Hugo Award winning author Robert J. Sawyer will be on hand to lead a discussion on how near-future technology will save Mankind.
• At 2:00 p.m. Cliff Samuels will moderate a Book Discussion on new and old books worth reading.
• At 3:00 p.m. we’ll hold our Enormous Book Raffle! We have a mountain of SF&f hard covers, trades, and paperbacks. And even a few non-book items.

Raffle Tickets available throughout the afternoon: $1 each; 6 for $5; 15 for $10.

We’ve also been warned that Satan Claus, that devilish old saint, will put in an appearance and reward all the bad little boys and girls. He knows who’s been naughty … and approves!

When: Saturday, December 9, 2006, from 12:00 noon to 4:00 p.m.
Where: Danita Maslankowski‘s Recreation Centre / Party Room*
Cost: $10

*Party Room is the center building of Richmond Meadows Co-op, 4940 – 39 Ave. SW in Calgary. Please park on 39th Ave. or in the Co-op Shopping Center parking lot.

No big deal, but I was playing around a bit with Yahoo! Answers, to see if it might be a substitute for the defunct Google Answers (it’s not; it’s a quite different beast, although interesting in its own right). And in the process of testing it, I answered the question: “What effect, if any, has the original Star Trek series had on your life?” And the asker of the question ranked mine as the best answer. I said:

It made me decide to become a science-fiction writer (which is what I now do for a living): http://sfwriter.com

More, though: it taught me tolerance, that it is cool to be a pacifist, and that you should apologize when you’re wrong. I mean this in all sincerity: I’m a better person because of that show, and I think that’s true for a lot of us who grew up with it (I was six when it debuted).

All the other answers are here (scroll down past mine).

A provocative question: “What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?” Edge Foundation asked that of 120 scientists, philosophers, and futurists. The answers make fascinating reading. Very, very stimulating stuff. Check it out

(All 120 answers are free at the above site; eReader.com also has them collected in an easy-to-navigate ebook for under ten bucks.)
 

I must have been one of the very last people to use Google Answers, the service through which freelance researchers answered tough questions for those who couldn’t find what they were looking for with Google on their own.

Four days ago, I needed to find a document that my keyword searching wasn’t turning up, and so I offered $10 on Google Answers to anyone who could find it for me — and a fine fellow named Rainbow found it, very, very quickly. I’m a good online researcher, but I thought this was a good service (and much-touted when it first came out). But I noticed today that the service is “retired,” with a notice saying:

Google Answers is no longer accepting questions.

We’re sorry, but Google Answers has been retired, and is no longer accepting new questions.

I’m sorry to see it go. For the curious, here are the question I asked over the years:

Subject: Suicide illegal
Category: Relationships and Society > Law
Asked by: rjsawyer-ga
List Price: $25.00 Posted: 14 Dec 2003
Question ID: 287230
[Research for MINDSCAN]

Is it true that successfully committing suicide is illegal in the United States? Is this a federal law, or something that’s set individually by each state, and, if the latter, in which states is killing oneself actually illegal? Are there any penalties for killing oneself (I personally can’t see how there could be, but laws often have strange provisions)? Note of reassurance: I’m not depressed or planning to kill myself; I’m a novelist, and this is a point I need to pin down for a book I’m currently writing.

---

How late in pregnancy can conjoined twins form through refusion?
Asked by: rjsawyer-ga
Price: $10.00 Posted: 17 Jan 2004
Question ID: 297395
[Research for MINDSCAN]

Recent research (see below) indicates that conjoined twins are not formed by the arrested fission of monozygotic twins, but rather by the re-fusion of already separated monozygotic twins.

My question: how late into a human pregnancy can this re-fusion occur? That is, what is the latest that a pregnancy that seems to be going normally toward producing separate identical twins can end up producing fused conjoined twins?

As a reference, here’s the study that said re-fusion is in fact how conjoined twins are formed (note Dr. Spencer is now retired, but a Google search showed that she had impeccable credentials):

>>

From: Clinical Anatomy (Volume 13, Issue 1 , Pages 36 – 53, year 2000)

Title: “Theoretical and analytical embryology of conjoined twins:
Part I: Embryogenesis”

by Rowena Spencer *
Louisiana State University School of Medicine and Tulane University School of Medicine, New Orleans, Louisiana

Abstract

A review of over 1,800 publications concerning the embryology and pathologic anatomy of conjoined twins provides convincing evidence that they all result from the secondary union of two originally separate monovular embryonic discs. This fusion theory seems to be confirmed by the adjustments to union and the pattern and incidence of specific anomalies at the proposed sites of conjunction in more than 1,200 cases, all of which can be arranged in two uninterrupted series of cases, the one united dorsally (in the neural tube) and the other, ventrally (over a shared a yolk sac). No theoretical fission of the vertebrate embryo at any stage of development, in any plane, in any direction can explain (1) the selection of the observed sites of fusion, (2) the details of the union, or (3) the limitation to the specific areas in which the twins are found to be joined.

---

Subject: Dolphin experiments disproves sophisticated dolphin Asked by: rjsawyer-ga
List Price: $10.00 Posted: 10 Nov 2005
Question ID: 591500
[Research for ROLLBACK]

In 1964, Jarvis Bastian did an experiment in dolphin communications, described here:

http://whales7.tripod.com/policies/levasseur/levass2c.html

I believe I read in the last year or so of a recent, more decisive follow-up to this work, in which the premise that dolphins do not have a sophisticated language was shown by essentially replicating Bastian’s experiment with more mature dolphins. But I can’t find the citation or a discussion of the work anywhere (I probably read about it in NEW SCIENTIST or SCIENCE NEWS, but can’t find the article). So, I’m looking for follow-ups to Bastian’s work, done in the last decade, that reached a definitive conclusion. Thanks!

---

Subject: Literary executor or agent for French science-fiction writer Rene Barjavel
Category: Arts and Entertainment > Books and Literature
Asked by: rjsawyer-ga
List Price: $10.00 Posted: 23 Jan 2006
Question ID: 436814
[Research for ROBERT J. SAWYER BOOKS]

I’m interested in contacting the holder of English-language rights for the out-of-print French science-fiction novel called THE ICE PEOPLE (in its last English-language edition) and LA NUIT DE TEMPS (in the original French) by Rene Barjavel (note that Rene is properly rendered with an accent over the second E; not sure how that affects Google searching). Barjavel died in 1985, and I need to find either a postal or email address for his literary agent or the executor of his literary estate. Help, please!

---

Subject: Identifying that a signal contains language information
Category: Science
Asked by: rjsawyer-ga
List Price: $10.00 Posted: 27 Nov 2006
Question ID: 786044
[Research for WAKE]

I’m trying to find an article I read online sometime in the last two years. It was a report, perhaps in a popular-interest science magazine (and the one I read the most online is NEW SCIENTIST) about language having a distinctive pattern that enables it to be distinguished from noise in signal processing, even if you don’t recognize the language. I can’t remember if the article made a specific parallel with SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), but I think it did: the notion was that we should be able to recognize that a signal contains language (because of the distinctive statistical skew caused by repetition of common words, or something like that) even if we don’t know and can’t decode the language. One of the key words, I imagine, would be “information,” as in information content. Thanks!

Sometimes, life is particularly nice. This evening, Carolyn and I were guests at a $150-a-plate fundraising dinner (I’ll tell you for what in another post). The meal was at a Chinese seafood restaurant — and I’m not a big fan of seafood. But the eight-course dinner included Peking duck and crispy chicken, so I actually really enjoyed the food.

Seated at our table was my old friend Bob McDonald, the host of CBC Radio’s Quirks and Quarks.

Seated at the next table was Canadian comedy legend Don Harron (who portrays the character Charlie Farquharson). MC was talk-show host Vicki Gabereau, and the entertainment included renowned Canadian singer Catherine McKinnon and standup by Alan Park from the Royal Canadian Air Farce.

Also on hand were a bunch of my literary colleagues, including writers Lawrence Hill and Ken McGoogan, powerhouse agent Bev Slopen, and Trevor Owen, the impresario of Canada’s famed Writers in Electronic Residence Program, of which I was part of in its early years.

Great food, great company, great entertainment. Life be good.
 

I’m pleased to note that my novel Calculating God is now in its seventh mass-market paperback printing.
 

This is excellent: Arts News Canada — the publishing news section. A great way to keep up with what’s happening in the wacky world of Canadian writing, updated frequently.

(They cover all areas of the arts, not just publishing: for the whole shebang, go here.)

… but it isn’t. Mobipocket’s Ultimate Handheld Classic Library.

I’m not happy with this at all. Instead of giving you a separate file for each book, the books are clustered into giant files, one per author. If you want to read Dickens, you better have TEN MEGABYTES free on your device, ’cause that’s how big the Dickens file is. Here are the actual 23 files you get (these aren’t zips containing smaller files; these are single giant Mobipocket files containing several books or works):

Alexandre Dumas – 5092KB
Alfred Lord Tennyson – 2051KB
Charles Dickens – 10176KB
Charlotte Bronte – 1111KB
Edgar Allan Poe – 996KB
Henry W Longfellow – 1002KB
Herman Melville – 1556KB
Jack London – 4960KB
James Fenimore Cooper – 6603KB
Jane Austen – 1470KB
Jules Verne – 986KB
Leo Tolstoy – 3251KB
Louisa May Alcott – 2588KB
Lucy Maud Montgomery – 1756KB
Mark Twain – 5563KB
Nathaniel Hawthorne – 3593KB
Oscar Wilde – 1096KB
Robert Louis Stevenson – 5128KB
Sir Walter Scott – 7118KB
Washington Irving – 2492KB
William Shakespeare – 2109KB
William Thackeray – 5439KB
Wuthering Heights – 282KB

Well, I think it’s safe to say now that they loved me in Kitchener. :)

Tonight was my last event as the Tenth Annual Edna Staebler Writer in Residence at the Kitchener (Ontario) Public Library. Seventy people showed up for the farewell reception, the local Chapters bookstore was on hand to sell books by me, and five of the people who had come to see me while I was writer in residence gave readings from their work: Jennifer Ross, Susan Deefholts, Kimberlee Feick, Heather E. Wright, and Leanne Beattie — and I gave a reading from Rollback.

During my two-month residency I had one-on-one hour-long appointments with 37 aspirant writers. All of them were asked to fill out anonymous surveys after their appointments; 35 of them chose to do so. They rated their experience on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the best. The ratings given were:

• Twenty-three ratings of “10”
• Nine ratings of “9”
• One of “7”
• One “11” from a particularly satisfied patron who added that number to the scale
• One left blank

for an average rating of 9.7 out of 10.

They also commented at length on the program. You can read everything they had to say here.

For my own part, I had an absolutely fabulous time; it was a total joy from start to finish.
 

… and writers have particular needs in that area, as Neil Gaiman points out in his blog.
 

In honour of its 50th anniversary, New Scientist is running a subscription special. In Canada, the deal is one full year — 51 issues — for just Cdn$50, an incredible bargain. To get the deal, you need to access the website here, and select your country.
 

I bought this set of five DVDs, totaling nine hours of interviews with 20 different scientists on the topic of consciousness, and I must say, although I’ve just started watching it, I’m really impressed. It’s just talking-heads interviews, with a guy asking (really well informed) questions, but, so far, it’s great. And at US$29.95, it’s a bargain. The director is Greg Alsbury.

Also, the telephone support at Discover This (the vendor) was the most polite, friendly, and patient I think I’ve ever had from any vendor (I had a small problem getting the website to tell me how much shipping for my order from Canada would be; turned out to be US$8, and the order came through without being stopped by Customs).

The 20 interviewed scientists are:

Dr. Stuart Hameroff, M.D. Professor, Anesthesiology and Psychology, Associate Director, Center for Consciousness Studies, University of Arizona.

Dr. Andrew B. Newberg, M.D. Professor, Dept. of Radiology, Division of Nuclear Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, co-author of The Mystical Mind

Nancy J. Woolf, Ph.D. Professor, Laboratory of NanoNeuroscience, Department of Psychology, UCLA

Jack A. Tuszynski, Ph.D. Professor of Biophysics, Condensed Matter Physics, University of Alberta

David Chalmers, Ph.D. Professor, Department of Philosophy; Director, Center For Consciousness Studies, University of Arizona

Dick Bierman, Ph.D. Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Amsterdam, Utrecht University

Vilayanur Ramachandran, Ph.D., MD Director, Center for Brain and Cognition; Professor, Department of Psychology and Neurosciences Program, University of
California, San Diego; Adjunct Professor of Biology, Salk Institute

Paavo Pylkkanen M.Sc., Ph.D. Professor, Consciousness Studies Programme, Department of Humanities, University of Skovde, Sweden

Dr. Petra Stoerig, Ph.D. Professor of Experimental Psychology, University of Dusseldorf

C. Van Youngman, Professor of Psychology, Art Institute of Philadelphia, Department of General Education

Dr. Steven Sevush, M.D. Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Neurology, University of Miami

Stephen LaBerge, Ph.D. Director of the Lucidity Institute and author of Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming

Dean Radin, Ph.D. Senior Scientist, Institute of Noetic Sciences

Tony Bell, Ph.D. Senior Scientist, Redwood Neuroscience Institute

Ellery Lanier, Ph.D. Interdisciplinary Program, New Mexico State University

Gregg H. Rosenberg, Ph.D. Post-doctoral Fellow/Assistant Research Scientist,
Artificial Intelligence Center, The University of Georgia

Christian Seiter, Department of Psychology, Institut fur Umweltmedizin, University of Freiburg

Chester Wildey, M.Sc. The University of Texas at Arlington

Willoughby Britton, University of Arizona, Tucson

Susan Blackmore, Author of The Meme Machine

Adele Engel Behar, Satellite Captiva Ltd.
 

I won’t be there (I’ll be at the Kitchener Public Library, doing my writer-in-residence gig), but Bakka-Phoenix Books in Toronto is having a launch this Saturday, November 25, at 3:00 p.m. for the Canadian SF anthology Tesseracts 10, edited by two of my best friends, Edo van Belkom and Robert Charles Wilson.

A legally blind US reader sent me an email urging me to have my books made into commercial audiobooks, and to also have them produced as talking books by the US National Library Service for the Blind; she also suggested who she thought would make a great narrator. Here’s what I had to say in reply; it pretty much applies to all modern SF writers whose names aren’t Asimov, Bujold, Card, Clarke, Crichton, Heinlein, or Herbert <grin>:

Believe me, I wish my books were available on commercial audio, but I have no say in the matter. Most of the authors done as audio books are New York Times bestselling authors — and I (and most SF writers) are a long way from being one of those.

My publisher — not me — controls the audio rights to my books, and the publisher would gladly license those rights to anyone who was willing to purchase them. But although you’re correct that the audio book market is growing, it’s still less than 5% of the print book market in unit volume, and so only books selling huge numbers of copies in print are attractive to audio-book publishers. And, I must say, even if my books were produced in audio format, I’d have no say in who did the narration; that would be entirely up to the company licensing the books.

Actually, one of my books IS available unabridged commercially on cassette: The Terminal Experiment, from Recorded Books. But that’s the only one, and it was done almost a decade ago. You can find out about it here.

As for the National Library Service for the Blind, again, I have no control over what books they produce. Almost all authors, myself included, give permission in their publishing contracts for their books to be read for free on audio for the visually impaired — beyond that, it’s up to the Library Service to actually do it; I’ve already given the permission.

As you’ve discovered, in my native Canada, most of my books ARE available as talking books from the Canadian National Institute for the Blind (CNIB). I’d suggest you ask the National Library Service in the US either if they could get the CNIB editions for you, or if they’d do their own; as I said, I’ve already signed the contracts that give them the permission to do so, so they just have to learn that there’s a demand for my books. <grin>

Many thanks for your kind words!

A great library of over 2,100 public-domain ebooks, in Microsoft Reader and Palm DOC formats, is here at the University of Virginia Library’s Electronic Text Center. You can read the Palm versions with your favorite Palm reader (or the Windows versions of eReader or Mobipocket, or — ptui! — in Microsoft Reader).

And check this out: you can search the full text of all these ebooks — what a great way to look for a quote or epigram that isn’t in Bartlett’s.

A few classics that really are worth reading, and are enormously entertaining:

A Christmas Carol (Dickens)
Around the World in 80 Days (Verne)
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Stevenson)
First Men in the Moon (Wells)
Frankenstein (Shelley)
The Invisible Man (Wells)
The Lost World (Doyle)
Tarzan of the Apes (Burroughs)
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (Verne)

The Chicago Manual of Style is the bible for how text is presented in books. The Fourteenth Edition (section 5.4) says this: “Generally, punctuation marks are printed in the same style or font of type as the word, letter, character, or symbol immediately preceding them.”

And that’s the way it should be, in my view (in most of the examples that follow italicized text is also colored green):

Look out! looks right, whereas Look out! looks awkward. Same thing with “Say what?” looking better than either “Say what?” or “Say what?“

But now The Chicago Manual of Style has changed its mind. The new Fifteenth Edition (section 6.3 — “Punctuation and font: primary system”) delcares: “All punctuation marks should appear in the same font — roman or italic — as the main or surrounding text, except for punctuation that belongs to a title or an exclamation in a different font. This departure from Chicago‘s former usage serves both simplicity and logic. For an alternative system, see 6.5.” These samples are given:

Smith played the title role in Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear; after his final performance, during which many in the audience wept, he announced his retirement.

Many editors admire Wired Style: it is both elegant and easy to use.

An Apache Life-way: The Economic, Social, and Religious Institutions of the Chiricahua Indians

Are you saying the wound was self-inflicted?

She is the author of What Next?

For light entertainment he reads King Lear!

The manual Online! is always at my elbow.

We heard his cries of “Help!“

Well, I don’t like that at all. But the Fifteenth Edition’s section 6.5 (“Punctuation and font: alternative system”) doesn’t give you the option of using the system from the Fourteenth Edition. Rather, it says: “According to a more traditional system, periods, commas, colons, and semicolons should appear in the same font as the word, letter, character, or symbol immediately preceding them if different from that of the main or surrounding text. In the first example in 6.3, the first two commas and the semicolon would be italic. Question marks and exclamation points, however, should appear in the same font as the immediately preceding word only if they belong to a title or an exclamation (see examples in 6.3).

So even if you rely on the “alternative system,” Chicago now wants roman exclamation marks to follow italicized words — and that (as seen here) just looks crappy! And what’s up with roman question marks after italicized text? That looks wrong, too.

Hey, Chicago! Are you even listening? Doesn’t it look better like this, with italicized question marks and exclamation marks? Yes, it does!

The alternative:

Hey, Chicago! Are you even listening? Wouldn’t this look a whole lot better with italicized question marks and exclamation marks? Yes, it would!
 

I was Writer in Residence at the Odyssey workshop this past summer, and had a great time. Quotes and photos from this year’s session are now online here, including a fair bit of the wit and wisdom of yours truly, including such pronouncements as, “Acknowledging that a question isn’t answered isn’t the same as answering the question.”

… is here.

An oldie but a goodie, from 1999: “Famous SF Authors & The Future of Sex” — including yours truly.

Part One is here.

Part Two is here (use this link; the one on the Part One page is broken).