Robert J. Sawyer

Well, I got to see one of the sexed-up Star Trek: The Original Series episodes, with new CGI effects. It was “The Naked Time,” certainly one of the best episodes. There were a number of nice touches — Scotty’s phaser cutting through the engineering bulkhead now has a visible beam; the PSI 2000 research station is now visible in the establishing shot of the snow-clad surface of the planet, the chronometer running backward on the bridge is now a nifty digital display instead of mechanical spinning numbers.

But I’m not sure what I thought of the CGI spaceship shots. They actually looked like CGI to me (as opposed to the CGI shots added to the Director’s Edition of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which still looked like filmed miniatures); there was something flat, and too vivid, about the look (at least on my 50-inch monitor).

Overall, though, I’m certainly intrigued enough to want to watch another one of the updated episodes.

One depressing thing was the advertisements that ran with this episode of STAR TREK, on WNLO in Buffalo, New York: bogus herbal supplements for penile enhancement and weight loss, dubious debt-consolidation services, and so on; it looks like advertisers think the demographic for the enhanced ST:TOS consists of suckers …

As I had a small hand in the revival of Robotech, and receive a “thanks to” credit in Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles, I was delighted to see that the film has won an award.

I’m thrilled to announce that I will be Guest of Honor at Loscon 32 in Los Angeles, November 23-25, 2007 (next year); Loscon is the annual convention of the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society. The theme of the con next year will be paleontology and archeology in science fiction — I can’t wait!

This is my fourth GoH gig lined up so far for 2007; God, I love this job! I’ll be a Guest of Honor at:

Chattacon 32
Chattanooga, Tennessee
January 26-28, 2007
http://www.chattacon.org/Joomla

Ravencon 2007
Richmond, Virginia
April 20-22, 2007
http://www.ravencon.com

Oasis 20
Orlando, Florida
May 25-27, 2007
http://www.oasfis.org

Loscon 34
Los Angeles, California
November 23-25, 2007
http://www.loscon.org

Hi, Folks. Next week, I’m off to VCon 31, the Vancouver Science Fiction Convention, in British Columbia, being held October 6-8. Here’s my programming schedule:

Saturday 3:00 PM
Rob Sawyer interviews Fan Guest of Honour Randy McCharles
Executive Boardroom 1 hour

Saturday 5:00 PM Panel: How Possible Is Time Travel?
Boardroom A 1 hour

Sunday 11:00 AM
Reading from Rollback by Robert J. Sawyer
Boardroom B 1 hour

Sunday 1:00 PM Panel: Where is Everybody? The SETI Conundrum
Executive Boardroom 1 hour

Sunday 2:00 PM Panel: Building Your World from the Microbiological Level Up
Executive Boardroom 1 hour

I’ve just finished my first appointment with a patron at the Kitchener Public Library, in Ontario, where I’m the 10th annual Edna Staebler Writer in Residence until the end of November. The appointment went well, and the patron seemed very pleased. But since we both arrived early, I’ve got some free time before my next appointment. The library has free WiFi throughout — yay! — and I’ve got my trusty Dell laptop with me.

I’m doing a number of public events at the library, in addition to meeting with patrons to go over their manuscripts. You can read about the public events here.

For decades, The Chicago Manual of Style has been the arbiter of how text is presented on the published page. Finally, there’s an online version (by subscription — US$25 a year if you sign up before the end of the month, US$30 a year after that) and a CD-ROM version, which, I’ll note, is much cheaper from Amazon.ca (in Canada) than it is from Amazon.com, for some reason.

Anyway, some writers are indifferent to the sorts of niceties CMS deals with, but I find them endlessly fascinating (which is one of the reasons I put together Notes for the Copyeditor for my novels).

You can get a free trial of the new CMS Online here, and searching on “Chicago Manual of Style CD-ROM” will bring you to the Amazon.ca and Amazon.com listings for it.

My new novel Rollback is currently being serialized in Analog. By coincidence, today I ran across this transcript of an online chat I participated in back in 2003 about serialized novels, conducted by Gardner Dozois; also participating are my buddies Allen Steele and Rajnar Vajra. It still makes good reading.

Exploring strange new worlds happens as often at a writer’s keyboard as it does at an astronomer’s eyepiece. Join us for a discussion of astronomy in science fiction.

Author Robert J. Sawyer discusses how astronomy and science fiction influence each other Wednesday, October 4, 2006, at 7:30 p.m. (Free). Ontario Science Centre, 770 Don Mills Rd., Toronto, in the Imperial Oil Auditorium. Free admission & parking after 6:30 p.m. Presented by the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, Toronto Centre.

From Sunday, September 17, until Saturday, September 23, 2006, I was teaching science fiction and fantasy writing at the Banff Centre, in Banff, Alberta, as one of four streams in the “Writing with Style” program there. As always, I had a truly fabulous time — Banff is gorgeous (a ski-resort town inside a national park in the Rocky Mountains), and the Banff Centre is an amazing place, a unique and varied facility devoted to arts education.

I had eight students this year, and they were a fabulous and diverse bunch, ranging from 18 years old to 60-something — and one of them came all the way from Costa Rica. My students were:

Eileen Bell
Brendan Fowlston
Bev Geddes
Tyler Harding
Jordan Hemsley
Randy McCharles
Ryan McFadden
Kirstin Morrell

Note those names: I expect you to see them all in print.

(Randy, by the way, is the chair of the 2008 World Fantasy Convention in Calgary, and now holds the record for attending the most workshops I’ve run — this one was his third. Kirstin is the managing editor of Red Deer Press, the company that publishes my Robert J. Sawyer Books imprint. They’re both members of IFWA, the Calgary writers’ group.)

We did roundtable critiquing sessions in the mornings, and the quality of the submitted work was extremely high. The students seemed to get a lot out of the critiques; indeed, I was deeply moved by how effusive some of them were with their praise (“life changing” was a term I heard more than once). In the afternoons, I had private sessions with students, and in the evenings we had student and faculty readings — plus one night out at a terrific pub in Banff. I got a lovely tour of the virtual-reality studio at the Banff Centre on Friday, and the faculty all snuck off to the world-famous Banff Springs Hotel on Saturday for drinks.

I adore my time at Banff: the students are always fabulous, the all-you-can eat buffets are amazing, the mountain venue is invigorating and filled with wildlife, and the accommodations — newly refurbished to modern hotel standards — are extremely comfortable. Whenever I do run a session at Banff, it’s one of the absolute highlights of my year.

I’ve set up a newsgroup for this year’s Banff students (and I did the same thing for last year’s crop), and they’re planning to continue workshopping online, which delights me.

Concurrent with my SF/F section were sessions on travel writing, children’s writing, and memoir writing. The children’s section was run by Tim Wynne-Jones. As we both said, it was astonishing that we’d never met before — he’s cofounder of the Crime Writers of Canada, and I’m a member; he’s won the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Award and I’ve won the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America’s Nebula Award; we’ve both won Arthur Ellis Awards; and we’re both on pretty much the same circuit of Canadian writing conferences. We hit it off fabulously; getting to know Tim was one of the highlights of the trip.

This was my fifth time teaching at Banff (my first was in 2000 — and one of my students then was Caterina Fake, who went on to found the photo-sharing site Flikr). But I won’t be back next year, sad to say. I can’t really complain; I was the only instructor to return from last year’s fall Writing with Style (there’s also a spring session). Still, my students were very upset to hear that I won’t be back next year; several of them had expressed interest in coming back for another year. (Next year, “Nature Writing” is being offered in place of my SF/F section.)

I also won’t be teaching a summer workshop at the University of Toronto next year. U of T ask me back, but they want to put 12 students in a class, and I think that’s too many (Banff caps classes at eight), plus my summer for next year is already shaping up as being quite busy. So, if I do run another writing workshop, it won’t be until 2008 at the earliest. If you’d like to be on the mailing list for notification of my workshops, drop me a note at sawyer@sfwriter.com.

Last year, I left Banff on the Saturday afternoon, going down to Calgary and flying the 2,500 kilometers back to Toronto for the Word on the Street open-air book festival, which is held every year on the last Sunday of April; a bunch of SF writers take a couple of tables each year and sell our wares.

This year, I decided to stay for the final Saturday night party at Banff, and headed down to Calgary on Sunday morning — and went to the Calgary version of Word on the Street. But it was tiny compared to the Toronto one, with just a handful of tables and only a few hundred people on site at any one time (the Toronto version attracts 100,000 people over the course of the day).

I did enjoy brief readings by Susan Forest, Marie Jakober, J. Brian Clarke, and saw Brian Hades and his wife Anita; Brian runs Calgary’s Edge Press, which is Canada’s largest SF/F publisher. Still, I missed being at Toronto’s Word on the Street a lot, and the upside of not teaching at Banff next year is that I will be at the Toronto Word on the Street in 2007.

Star Trek is 40 years old this month! In honor of that, this week’s Monday Spotlight — highlighting one of the 500+ documents on my website at sfwriter.com — is my aborted Star Trek novel Armada, begun in 1984 (when Star Trek was just 18 years old … and I was just 24!).

The sample chapters are here, and the outline for the entire novel is here.

That’s the title of a poem by my brother-in-law, David Livingstone Clink, in the October-November 2006 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction, on sale now.

So far this month, I’ve been asked to:

* judge a contest — results needed the following week

* write a newspaper piece about the 40th anniversary of STAR TREK — deadline two days later

* write up answers to questions posed by a foreign publisher for an interview to coincide with the release of one of my books in that language — responses needed in 48 hours

* agree to give a free public lecture on a specific date six weeks from now to help support a cause.

Sorry, folks. I had to say no to all of these. My schedule is packed with things that were booked many months in advance. I’m usually a soft touch to say yes, but the contest has known for many months that it’d need judges; the foreign publisher knew for many months that my book was about to come out; we’ve actually known for forty years now when the 40th anniversary of STAR TREK was going to be; and as you can see by glancing at my upcoming appearance calendar, I book most most appearances many months (and often over a year) in advance.

If you want something of me, please, please, please ask as early as you can. I want to say yes to you; I really do.

Thanks.

Well, the SF-publishing-related portion of the blogosphere is abuzz with the sad story of an author who decided to try a grass-roots campaign to get readers to email the Tor editor to which she’d made her novel submission, encouraging that editor (a very nice person) to buy her book. This, of course, was a very, very, very bad idea.

There’s only one correct way to make a submission. My 1997 “On Writing” column on Cover Letters and SASEs, which is this week’s Monday Spotlight, highlighting one of the 500+ documents on my website at sfwriter.com, explains it.

Most important of all? The final line of the column, which says: “The only way in which you want to stand out from the crowd is by making a proper, professional-looking submission.”

More from me on this in my Yahoo Groups! newsgroup.

Yes, I know, you thought I was done ages ago, when I finished final revisions on the manuscript. But there are many stages in bringing a book to market, and, for the author, the last one is going over the page proofs (advance printouts of the typesetting). Today, I finished going over those pages, looking at large-scale formatting issues and the fiddly bits dealing with a few equations. I’ve now turned the pages over to Carolyn for a final proofread; the next time I’ll see the text is when the book is published in hardcover in April 2007 by Tor.

The barbecue I discussed here has been cancelled, because the Saturday Calgary weather looks crappy. Says 2008 World Fantasy Convention chair Randy McCharles:

Winter has come early.
Well, at least fall has.

Mother Nature has chosen our BBQ weekend to have unseasonably cold weather. I’ve been watching the forecast all week and it has been getting worse each day. Sat. now looks at best to be cloudy and just above freezing, possibly with melting snow from Friday night. It is just as possible it will be raining or snowing Sat.

This will reduce attendance (and fundraising) and make the event less fun for those who do come out, so I’ve decide to postpone it. Possibly we’ll have an indoor event in late November or early December.

A few of us will be at the park from 11:30 – 1:00 to let anyone who doesn’t get the notice and shows up know what happened.
Ah, well.
On the bright side the weather gets back to normal by Tuesday.

“Sorry for the inconvenience” — God (From Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy)

Randy

Derek Weiler’s editorial in the October issue of Quill & Quire, the Canadian publishing trade journal, is about the importance of authors taking a hand in the promotion of their own books, and it makes kind mention of yours truly:

If you’re an author, doing what you can may involve courting the media or networking with booksellers. Many authors would no doubt rather simply be writing, and I sympathize with that position, but it’s inescapable that for a book to make an impact on the world, it needs all the help it can get. Canadian science-fiction author Robert J. Sawyer is a good example — a savvy and likeable self-promoter in the very best sense of the word, he’s cultivated a readership that almost any author would envy.
 

Over the next six weeks — between now and the end of October 2006 — I have to take these flight:

Toronto to Calgary
Calgary to Toronto
Toronto to Vancouver
Calgary to Regina
Regina to Montreal
Montreal to Toronto
Toronto to Vancouver
Vancouver to Calgary
Calgary to Denver
Denver to Toronto

Gak! It’s a good thing I’m very good at getting writing done on airplanes!

Among the events requiring all this travel:

Teaching at Banff
The science-fiction convention V-Con
Giving a talk in Regina
Library readings in Montreal
The Surrey International Writers Festival
The science-fiction convention MileHiCon

It’s going to be tiring and hectic — but I just keep thinking of the air-miles I’ll rack up! :)

See this posting over at NewScientist.com

If you don’t know what Gliksins are, you haven’t read enough Rob Sawyer … ;)

… and so do I.

All The Boys Love Mandy Lane had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival this week. Executive Producer is Keith Calder, who, as Variety reported, has optioned film rights to my Hugo-, Nebula-, and Aurora-Award-nominated novella “Identity Theft.”

Carolyn and I didn’t go to the first screening at the festival, which was appropriately at midnight, but we made it to the Monday afternoon screening, at the Royal Ontario Museum. This is an incredibly well-done teen horror film.

Although lots of comparisons come to mind, it reminded me of Carrie, although without the supernatural elements, in its oh-so-painfully-real portrayal of what its like to be an outsider in high school.

The dialog was wonderfully naturalistic (and, at the Q&A following the screening, when the host suggested it sounded ad libbed, director Jonathan Levine quite rightly turned to scriptwriter Jacob Forman and said that it had all been fully scripted — nice to see the writer getting his due!).

A very fine review of the film is here.

The big news from the Festival is that the Weinstein Company just signed a multi-million dollar theatrical distribution deal for Mandy Lane — one of the few big deals inked at the Toronto Festival this year, according to Variety. Congratulations, Keith!

(Pictured: Amber Heard as Mandy Lane)

A press release from Washington University in St. Louis:

Modern humans, not Neandertals, may be evolution’s ‘odd man out’

Looking incorrectly at Neandertals

Could it be that in the great evolutionary “family tree,” it is we Modern Humans, not the brow-ridged, large-nosed Neandertals, who are the odd uncle out?

New research published in the August, 2006 journal Current Anthropology by Neandertal and early modern human expert, Erik Trinkaus, professor of anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis, suggests that rather than the standard straight line from chimps to early humans to us with Neandertals off on a side graph, it’s equally valid, perhaps more valid based on what the fossils tell us, that the straight line should be from the common ancestor to the Neandertals, and the Modern Humans should be the branch off that.

Trinkaus has spent years examining the fossil record and began to realize that maybe researchers have been looking at our ancient ancestors the wrong way.

Trinkaus combed through the fossil record, identifying traits which seemed to be genetic markers — those not greatly influenced by environment, life ways and wear and tear. He was careful to examine traits that appear to be largely independent of each other to avoid redundancy.

“I wanted to see to what extent Neandertals are derived, that is distinct, from the ancestral form. I also wanted to see the extent to which modern humans are derived relative to the ancestral form,” Trinkaus says. “What I came up with is that modern humans have about twice as many uniquely derived traits than do the Neandertals.”

“In the broader sweep of human evolution,” says Trinkaus, “the more unusual group is not Neandertals, whom we tend to look at as strange, weird and unusual, but it’s us – Modern Humans. The more academic implication of this research is that we should not be trying to explain the Neandertals, which is what most people have tried to do, including myself, in the past. We wonder why Neandertals look unusual and we want to explain that. What I’m saying is that we’ve been asking the wrong questions.”

The most unusual characteristics throughout human anatomy occur in Modern Humans, argues Trinkaus. “If we want to better understand human evolution, we should be asking why Modern Humans are so unusual, not why the Neandertals are divergent. Modern Humans, for example, are the only people who lack brow ridges. We are the only ones who have seriously shortened faces. We are the only ones with very reduced internal nasal cavities. We also have a number of detailed features of the limb skeleton that are unique.

“Every paleontologist will define the traits a little differently,” Trinkaus admits. “If you really wanted to, you could make the case that Neandertals look stranger than we do. But if you are reasonably honest about it, I think it would be extraordinarily difficult to make Neandertals more derived than Modern Humans.”

This week’s Monday Spotlight, highlighting one of the 500+ documents on my website at sfwriter.com, is my Press Kit.

Every published author should have a page like this one that gathers together the various bits of background that reporters and other media-types need when doing an interview with you. It’s a lot easier than trying to email the stuff individually; just give ’em the appropriate URL, and they’ve got what they need.

(If you’re less far along in your career, you’ll have fewer things — but the publication-quality author photo is a must, as is a brief bio.)

I get asked all the time if I’ll look at people’s manuscripts and offer an opinion. Another such request just showed up in my email box. Here’s what I had to say:

I’m afraid the answer is no, for a couple of reasons. First, because my lawyer has advised me not to read unpublished manuscripts, except in very narrow circumstances, lest someday I publish something of my own that bears even a passing resemblance to something I’ve been shown, and the person who showed it to me decides to take legal action. It’s just not worth the risk, he says, and he’s probably right. :)

And second because people pay good money to have me critique manuscripts — in July, I was writer-in-residence at the Odyssey workshop, this month I’m teaching SF writing at the Banff Centre in Alberta, and next month I start a two-month stint as Writer-in-Residence at the Kitchener (Ontario) Public Library. It’s unfair to those people (the Odyssey students, the Banff students, and the Kitchener Public Library) who have paid me to critique manuscripts for me to also do freebies on the side — and, no, I’m not looking for money from you; I’ve simply got way to many manuscripts to critique as is for those three gigs (at total of 50 between them) that I can’t take on any more.

So — sorry! But best of luck!
 

During this week of the 40th anniversary of Star Trek, I’ve thinking about which one of the classic 79 episodes is my favorite. My choice has shifted over the years; the pacifist in me has long loved “Errand of Mercy” (with the Organians, and John Collicos as the first Klingon, Kor).

But I actually think the most beautiful writing the series ever saw was in Jerome Bixby’s script for “Requiem for Methuselah” (the one with the thousands-of-years-old human named Flint, who had been Brahms, da Vinci, and a hundred other geniuses, and his quest to make the perfect android woman, Rayna).

It ends with this fabulous little soliloquy by Dr. Leonard McCoy. Captain Kirk has been totally heartbroken, and has fallen asleep, his head in his arms, on the work table in his quarters, while Spock and McCoy look on. Says McCoy (the “him” he refers to is Kirk):

You wouldn’t understand that, would you, Spock? You see, I feel sorrier for you than I do for him, because you’ll never know the things that love can drive a man to: the ecstasies, the miseries, the broken rules, the desperate chances, the glorious failures — and the glorious victories. All of these things you’ll never know simply because the word “love” isn’t written into your book.

As anyone who has been to my home and seen my small collection of replicas knows, I love the props from the classic Star Trek series — and now there’s a fabulous new site devoted to the communicators from that series, discussing in minute detail the differences between each of the ten communicator props originally made for the show.

If you’re into this sort of thing like I am, you have to check out herocomm.com, which went live yesterday in honor of the 40th anniversary of Star Trek.

I couldn’t take seeing ads for PublishAmerica and other outfits I’d never in my life recommend showing up on my blog, so, as of this evening, the Google AdSense ads are gone from here.

I’m very interested in the issue of monetizing a writing career in the decades to come. If it ceases to be possible for most writers to make a living off of selling copies of books, because free digital versions undermine the print-copy revenue model, I’m curious about what other revenue streams might exist for writers; AdSense seemed like a possibility, but without way more control over who advertises, I’m not comfortable with it.

Ah, well. It was an interesting experiment.

Carolyn Clink and I edited Tesseracts 6 … and now Tesseracts 11 is open:

TESSERACTS ELEVEN
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: Tesseracts Eleven, the 2007 volume in the award-winning anthology of Canadian Speculative Fiction, is now open for submissions.

Editors for Tesseracts Eleven are: Cory Doctorow and Holly Phillips.

The Tesseracts anthology series is open to submissions in either English or French from Canadians, landed immigrants, long time residents, and expatriates. French stories will be translated into English for publication if accepted. Tesseracts is open to both short fiction and poetry. While the series has included stories as long as 7,500 words, preferred length is 5,500 words or less. Speculative fiction includes the genres of magic realism, science fiction, fantasy (this term incorporates dark fantasy and supernatural fiction), horror, and la fantastique. In all these areas, the editors prefer not to be presented with genre clichés reworked, but with original, well-written, well-crafted works of art. Send us your best!

The deadline for submissions is ­December 31, 2006.

Manuscripts must be typed double-spaced, 12-point type (preferably Times New Roman or Courier font) on quarto (8 1/2 x 11) or A4 (8 1/4 x 11 3/4) paper, minimum. Please include your name, ­address, telephone number and, where applicable, your fax number and e-mail address on the first page of the manuscript; with a brief identifier as a header or footer on each page as well.

Electronic submissions will be accepted, [tess11@edgewebsite.com] but must be followed by a hard copy. No faxes! Submissions will NOT be returned. Do NOT send originals. We cannot be responsible for submissions lost in transit. If you require acknowledgment of receipt of your manuscript, include a self-addressed stamped postcard.

Mailing address for ­anthology submissions:

Tesseracts Eleven
Attention: Series Editors
c/o Tesseracts Eleven Submissions,
P.O. Box 1714,
Calgary, Alberta, T2P 2L7
Canada

I’m quoted extensively (but not till page two) in this article about SETI, over at National Geographic‘s website. Analog editor Stanley Schmidt is also quoted; the article is by Richard A. Lovett.

Folks, I’m just saying, don’t start your email subject lines with “TOP SECRET!!!!” It looks like spam. I just missed out on the surprise 50th birthday party for my great friend Mark Askwith from Space: The Imagination Station because I didn’t get the email invitation.

The invitation went out while I was at Worldcon, and I don’t know for sure that it ended up in my spam trap, ’cause I wasn’t looking that carefully at stuff while I was on the road, but ALL CAPS and strings of exclamation marks will cause trouble for lots of people’s email filters.

(Email to my sfwriter.com domain is mirrored to two separate mailboxes on other services; at this late date, there’s no sign of the message, but the copy that was forwarded to me today did have a valid email address for me.)

I’m really, really bummed about missing this party, but at least let me say publicly what I didn’t get to say privately: HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MARK!

(Pictured: Mark holding the mike; videographer Don Wright)

Well, it’s nice to know people actually read my blog! I screwed up in the original version of this earlier blog post, and gave the wrong link for Lloyd Penney’s LiveJournal, where you can read all his many wonderful letters of comment to SF fanzines. The correct link is http://lloydpenney.livejournal.com/. Sorry, Lloyd!

First up, there’s my great friend Lloyd Penney (above), one of the most prolific letterhacks in science-fiction fandom. He’s come thisclose to making the Hugo ballot for best fan writer several times and has won an Aurora Award. I suggested he start a LiveJournal so that all his LoCs (letters of comment) that normally appear scattered across dozens of fanzines could be seen in one place, and he has. You can read it here.

Second, Bakka-Phoenix Books, the world’s oldest surviving SF specialty store, and a place I worked at back in 1982 (for, as I pointed out today to Chris Szego, the current manager and one of my favorite people, the princely wage of $4.25 an hour), has a LiveJournal community here. Chris and other members of the staff provide all sorts of fascinating comments not just about the goings-on at the store, but on what’s way cool in SF books, movies, and TV.