Robert J. Sawyer

My buddy Mark Leslie is auctioning off the right to be murdered in his online serial, in order to raise funds for literacy. Details are here.

DAW author Edward Willett “in praise of science-fiction writing,” in this article in the Regina Leader-Post.

When the chips are down (kind of a pun in this context …), SF fandom always comes through: there will indeed be an Internet lounge at Worldcon this year.

Details

See here for the full review by John Joseph Adams.

An excerpt:

… kudos to Robert J. Sawyer for making this book available via his imprint at Red Deer Press. Books like this one remind us that the small press is of vital importance to the field, and remind us that it’s up to us, the readers, to support them to ensure that someone will be around to publish the books that fall through the cracks.

A Small and Remarkable Life is at once beautiful, heartbreaking, and profound. It’s a must-read for SF fans and non-genre readers alike. Like Tink Puddah, DiChario’s novel is small (just 208 pages), but it is also just as remarkable.

Left to right: Stewart Brand of the Long Now Foundation, Google co-founder Larry Page, and SF writer Greg Bear at Rob’s brainstorming session

Yes, it’s officially true: my life rocks!

I spent this past weekend (August 11-13, 2006) at the Googleplex, the headquarters of Google, in Mountain View, California. I was a participant at Science Foo Camp, an invitation-only gathering produced by Nature (the international multidisciplinary science journal) and O’Reilly Media, the famed publisher of computer books. (FOO in this context stands for “Friends of O’Reilly.)

A hundred of us were invited to attend. The purpose: “to encourage cross-fertilization of ideas — and to have fun.”

The invitees were (according to the invitation) “a fascinating crowd of world-class biologists, chemists, physicists, earth scientists, clinicians, historians, technologists, and writers.” I was honoured to be one of four science-fiction writers participating (the others were Greg Bear, Cory Doctorow, and Vernor Vinge).

When we arrived, we were shown a big grid with room names and their capacities written across the top, and hour-long timeslots down the left side. We were invited to grab a square and write in a description of a topic we wanted to discuss.

I decided to pick a modest-sized room that putatively held eight people (the smallest held four; the largest, 125), and invited those who wished to join me to come talk about the possibility of the World Wide Web gaining consciousness once it reaches a sufficient level of complexity — which, as I explained, is the theme of a trilogy I’m now working on.

To give you a sense of the caliber of people at Science Foo Camp, among the overflow group that came to my room were Google co-founder Larry Page, Stewart Brand from the Long Now Foundation, futurist Esther Dyson, Sun Microsystems chief researcher John Gage, and my buddy Greg Bear.

The feedback was amazing: high-level, brilliant, and very, very useful. And I was very encouraged by how warmly my ideas were received.

And that was just one session! I also attended great sessions on robots based on insect designs, the future of human evolution (led by Greg Bear), collaborative web tools for health sciences, geobrowsers, the visual representation of data (presented by fellow Torontonian Michael Friendly of York University), Vernor Vinge on semiconductors as a potential single point of failure for civilization, a great talk about Project Orion presented by George Dyson, and a very lively discussion on science and religion.

Google put us all up at a very nice hotel (the Wild Palms in Sunnyvale) and provided shuttle service back and forth. And Google’s legendary food-services people just kept feeding us!

Conversations over the 90-minute breakfast, lunch, and dinner breaks were fascinating. I enjoyed getting to meet nanotech pioneer K. Eric Drexler, Clinton Science Advisor Tom Kalil, Tom Knight from MIT’s artificial intelligence lab, and many others.

Tim O’Reilly (the CEO of O’Reilly) and Timo Hannay from Nature were wonderful hosts, and the event fully succeeded at meeting its stated goal of being “an informal but intense eye-opening weekend.” I loved every minute of it.

My friend Don Wilkat drew this to my attention, from today’s Globe and Mail — one misplaced comma in a contract that ended up costing a company millions of dollars.

I’m off on Tuesday for a trip that will ultimately take me to Califonia for a meeting with my film agent — and one of his favorites of my books is Flashforward.

And so, for this week’s Monday spotlight — a day early! — a few words about writing Flashforward.

Maclean’s: Canada’s Weekly Newsmagazine asked me to recommend a book for this summer. My pick appears on page 83 of the August 14, 2006, double issue, now on sale. Here’s what I had to say:

Summer is the perfect time for people watching — on the beach, at the mall, in the park. Nothing makes that more entertaining than recognizing the basic primate behaviour and mannerism that we exhibit in group situations, in interactions with members of our own gender, and when dealing with those of the opposite sex.

Our Inner Ape by Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal — just out in paperback [from Riverhead, an imprint of Penguin] after a successful run in hardcover — lets you see the hidden chimp, bonobo, gorilla, and orangutan lurking in the background of everything we hairless apes do.

Given all the headlines about evolution vs. intelligent design, it’s fascinating to reflect on exactly what it means to share a common ancestor with the great apes. Witty, charming, and deeply compassionate, de Waal enlightens while he entertains.

Another rave for Nick DiChario‘s A Small and Remarkable Life, published under my Robert J. Sawyer Books imprint. The review is from SciFi Dimensions. The review concludes, “This is a pearl of a first novel; DiChario rocks.” As editor, I couldn’t agree more.

That provocative question was the springboard for my 1995 novel The Terminal Experiment, which went on to win the Nebula Award: how do we decide whens someone is gone for good, so that it’s appropriate to harvest their organs. Here’s a snippet from that book:

     “Let’s go,” said Mamikonian.

     A nurse moved in and injected something into Enzo’s body. She spoke into a microphone dangled on a thin wire from the ceiling. “Myolock administered at 10:02 a.m.”

     Dr.Mamikonian requested a scalpel and made an incision starting just below the Adam’s apple and continuing down the center of the chest. The scalpel split the skin easily, sliding through the muscle and fat until it banged against the breastbone.

     The EKG shuddered slightly. Peter glanced at one of Hwa’s monitors: blood pressure was rising, too.

     “Sir,” said Peter. “The heart rate is acting up.”

     Mamikonian squinted at Peter’s oscilloscope. “That’s normal,” he said, sounding irritated at being interrupted.

     Mamikonian handed the scalpel, now slick and crimson, back to the nurse. She passed him the sternal saw, and he turned it on. Its buzzing drowned out the blipping from Peter’s EKG. The saw’s rotating blade sliced through the sternum. An acrid smell rose from the body cavity: powdered bone. Once the sternum was cut apart, two technicians moved in with the chest spreader. They cranked it around until the heart, beating once per second, was visible.

     Mamikonian looked up. On the wall was the digital ischemic counter; it would be started the moment he excised the organ, measuring the time during which there would be no blood flowing to the heart. Next to Mamikonian was a plastic bowl filled with saline. The heart would be rinsed in there to get old blood off it. It would then be transferred into an Igloo container filled with ice for the flight to Sudbury.

     Mamikonian requested another scalpel and bent down to cut through the pericardium. And, just as his blade sliced through the membrane surrounding the heart–

     The chest of Enzo Bandello, legally dead organ donor, heaved massively.

     A gasp escaped from around his ventilator breathing tube.

     A moment later, a second gasp was heard.

     “Christ–” said Peter, softly.

     Mamikonian looked irritated. He snapped his gloved fingers at one of the nurses. “More Myolock!”

     She moved in and administered a second shot.

     Mamikonian’s voice was sarcastic. “Let’s see if we can finish this damned thing without the donor walking away, shall we, folks?”

It’s still a gray area today, more than a decade later, as this story entitled “Not brain-dead, but ripe for transplant” from the August 4, 2006, New Scientist makes clear — and, interestingly, the test case they’re talking about involves a vehicular accident in Ontario, just like the one in the opening of The Terminal Experiment.

And a Toronto connection, to boot.
 

Being an author is kinda cool sometimes. :) Today I got recognized not once, not twice, but three times in public — a record to date.

It happened first at BestBuy, where a sales associate in the computer department told me how much he’d enjoyed my books, including Factoring Humanity and Calculating God.

Then it happened at the World’s Biggest Bookstore in Toronto. The cashier there played it cool. When I handed her the four copies of the October Analog I was buying, which has my name prominently on the cover, she said, without missing a beat, “Don’t they send you contributor’s copies?” (Yes, they do — but I wanted more.) We had a nice little chat after that.

Later, I was out at the monthly First Thursday fannish pub night, which we were holding in a new venue this month. A fellow entered the pub we were in, did a double-take when he saw me, and came over to say he really enjoyed my interviews on TV, and vividly remembered some comments I’d made about cyberpunk.

Nice! :)

Just learned that my Rollback will be the SciFi Essential Book for April 2007. Cool!

Charming, I’d say! :) A bigger version (PDF) is here.

This issue — dated October — is on sale now, and contains the first of four parts of the serialization of Rollback. The cover art is by John Allemand, and the cover design is by Victoria Green.

In another conversation elsewhere, I’ve been reminded of an old interview I did for the Canadian SF magazine Challenging Destiny. This one’s a transcription of a recorded interview, so it’s kinda loose reading, but it’s still interesting. Oh, and just for the record, nowhere does it say that the science in science fiction is actually bulletproof. :)

The interview, conducted in 1998, is still good reading after all these years. You can read it here.

I’m delighted to announce that I will be the Edna Staebler Writer in Residence at the Kitchener (Ontario) Public Library this fall.

I will be doing free appraisals/critiques of manuscripts of all types, and having private one-on-one hour long consultations with the authors of the works submitted. I’ll also be leading a couple of workshops and giving a reading.

I’m only doing a limited number of appraisals during my residency, and it’s first come, first served. Manuscripts will be accepted starting Monday, August 14, 2006, at the Main Library’s Marketing & Communications department on the Lower Level.

All the details are here.

(Kitchener is a city in southern Ontario, adjacent to Waterloo, and about an hour and a half from downtown Toronto.)

This is my third writer-in-residence stint at a library. I was writer in residence at the Richmond Hill (Ontario) Public Library in 2000, and at the Toronto Public Library’s Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation and Fantasy, in 2003.

Over at Meme Therapy, they have this Brain Parade going on, exploring this topic:

Science fiction isn’t a predictive tool. Do you agree with that statement? And if so why do we fuss over plausibility in science fiction?

The question is illustrated with the picture above of a Star Trek communicator — but there’s no commentary about the communicator. It’s become the iconic symbol of how SF sometimes gets it right, because some cell phones flip open.

But that’s crap, and grasping at straws to prove we got one right. The lid on the communicator was an antenna; today’s cell phones have internal antennae. Cellphones often reside in purses and pockets; surely the real inspiration for hinged cellphones are the other hinged things that already live in there: a wallet, a woman’s compact, a business-card case.

(If cell phones were really supposed to mimic Star Trek communicators, they’d flip open with the same wrist movement that Captain Kirk always used — but they don’t.)

Science fiction isn’t about prediction; it’s about the here-and-now. That said, plausibility — this could be, as opposed to this might be — does add to science fiction’s moral authority to make comments on the here and now.

Back during the 2000 US presidential elections, everywhere you went, people were talking about how the election was going to turn out. If you were at a party and someone said, “You know, if George W. Bush wins, I think his economic strategy is going to be …,” you might lean in and listen.

And if somebody else said, “Yeah, but if Al Gore wins, his foreign policy might be …,” you might also lend an ear.

But when some raving lunatic in the corner says, “Listen, Ralph Nader’s going to take this race, and when he gets into the Oval Office, he’s going to …,” you tune that guy right out, because what he had to say had no chance at all of becoming reality.

It’s the same with the prediction in science fiction. If you want to talk about gender politics, or race relations, or the abortion issue, or world peace, or anything else of contemporary interest through a science-fictional lens, the infrastructure on which you set your morality play benefits from at least appearing to be plausible. But we don’t say George Orwell was a lousy science-fiction writer because his version of 1984 turned out to be nothing like the way the real year 1984 was; instead, we rightly laud him for getting us thinking about a possible future, and making mid-course corrections to (mostly) end up avoiding that future from becoming a reality.

I’ll be interviewed live today on 1370 Connection on WXXI 1370 AM, the National Public Radio affiliate in Rochester, New York. You can listen live here. I go on at 12:10 p.m. Eastern time (9:10 a.m. on the West Coast).

Steven H. Silver has weighed in very kindly on Nick DiChario’s A Small and Remarkable Life, the latest title from my Robert J. Sawyer Books imprint. You can read Steven’s review here.

I’m a huge fan of this free TrueType font, provided by Hewlett Packard as an alternative to the spindly Courier New that comes with Windows. Manuscripts are still routinely done in Courier, and this version is much easier on the eyes.

I finally got my programming schedule for L.A.con IV, the World Science Fiction Convention in Los Angeles. You can see it here.

I mistakenly said it was yesterday in an earlier post. The deadline is tonight at midnight Pacific time. If you’re a Worldcon member, you can vote here. You’ll need both your membership number and your voting PIN, which should be on any progress report (or envelope that contained same) for the convention. Your voting PIN is the same as your nominating PIN.

For this weeks’ Monday Spotlight, highlighting one of the 500+ documents on my website at sfwriter.com, I offer this tribute to Fred Gambino, one of the finest artists working in SF today.

Lou Anders has done up a very nice blog post about the Campbell Conference that took place last month in Kansas. You can read it here.

Hugo Award ballots must be cast by midnight PACIFIC time today. They can be cast here.

Today’s also the last day for getting my Hugo-nominated novella “Identity Theft” for free from me, or from Fictionwise. If you want it, download it now from here.

Lou Anders has a fascinating discussion going on his blog about the state of science fiction. See his posts (and the comments to them) here and here.

I just posted almost 900 words over there on this topic, and thought I’d share them here as well:

We often hear references in discussions like these (as echoed by the new SF reviewer at the New York Times) about today’s SF requiring a degree in physics to understand it. The conclusion often wrongly drawn from that is that, therefore, hard science is what’s bogging down SF. I disagree. It’s eminently possible to write about hard science — including quantum physics, string theory, brane theory, nanotech, subtleties of evolutionary theory, and so on — in an inviting fashion. The nonfiction bookshelves are full of such things: Brian Greene, Stephen Pinker, and recently Seth Lloyd are all doing that to great success.

And the problem isn’t infodumps being antithetical to fiction, despite what the MFA-derived workshopping movement wants to tell us. Michael Crichton and Dan Brown have outsold us all by orders of magnitude without ever once worrying about whether the reader will sit still for background information.

Aside: Lou, I almost titled my story “Flashes, ” which is in your Futureshocks anthology, “Infodumps” instead, so that I could use that as the title of my next short-story collection — reach out and tweak the critics right on the nose. But my wife talked me out of it. :)

Rather than infodumps being a problem, I think the real problem in a lot of books is a deliberate attempt to keep out outsiders. It started when we all thought it was cool to co-opt Ursula LeGuin’s term ansible for any faster-than-light communication system, but it’s gotten way worse than that.

Enormous numbers of SF novels whose plots hinge on nanotech or quantum physics fail to make the needed background self-contained in the book, and therefore exclude readers. Fantasy has to include all needed background in the book; perhaps to survive, science fiction should do this (with wit and charm and elegance, of course).

Instead, SF has become the leetspeak of pop literature: we like the outsider/misfit/subculture label, and set up linguistic barriers to keep newcomers out. Woot! $(13|\|(3 ph!xo|\| 12|_|73z! [Science fiction rules — and maybe it does, but it’s a pyrrhic victory if no outsider can read it. TANSTAAFL, and all that.]

For my own part, I’ve bet my career on trying to write accessible SF — stuff that can be read with pleasure both by those who are intimately familiar with the genre and by people who’ve never read it before. You were there last month, Lou, when I won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best novel of the year — and I was thrilled to get it, as I was thrilled to get the Hugo and the Nebula before that. But in all my career, the following are the two honors that mean the most to me, and they’re what I call juxtapositional honors:

First, I was thrilled that my 2000 novel Calculating God hit number one on the Locus bestsellers’ list — meaning it was doing well with habitual SF readers who shop at the SF specialty stores that provide the bulk of the datapoints for that list — and that Calculating God hit the national top-ten mainstream bestsellers lists here in Canada (in Maclean’s: Canada’s Weekly Newsmagazine and The Globe and Mail: Canada’s National Newspaper) — meaning that it was being scooped up by people who don’t traditionally read SF.

Second, I was thrilled that last year, my Hominids was chosen as the “One Book, One Community” reading selection for a Waterloo Region in Ontario, Canada, and was warmly embraced by huge numbers of readers who’d never read SF before, and that Hominids was serialized in Analog, the bastion of hard-SF. You can appeal to the core SF readership and the mainstream audience — it isn’t an either/or proposition.

Note that none of this requires downplaying the term “science fiction” — I make no bones about who I am and what I write.

Some of my British colleagues have similar experiences with both mainstream and genre acceptance, but not nearly enough American authors — or publishers — are even making a token effort to try for it.

It is possible to cater to both audiences with the same work, but it takes an understanding that this is what’s being undertaken not just by the author but by the publisher as well. Yes, call it science fiction, but don’t put an alien or a spaceship on the cover. I personally happen to like Robert Charles Wilson’s Blind Lake better than his Spin — although both are excellent, and both could easily be read by non-habitual SF readers — but Blind Lake didn’t get nearly as much notice, or, I’d wager, as many sales, because it has, literally, a bug-eyed monster on the cover (see above), whereas Spin has a very mainstream look, and was reviewed widely in and out of genre. Or look at Charles Stross’s Accelerando (US edition) — wonderful packaging that works both in and out of category.

Again, I’m not urging people to escape the SF category; rather I’m urging more at least try to do that tricky walk along the top of the fence around the category. Because it’s only by making new readers feel comfortable in our field that SF will survive.

I was asked the above question a couple of years ago by a guy writing a book with practical advice for unusual situations. I never heard back from him, and don’t know what happened to the book, but here’s my answer:

What to do if an alien shows up in your living room:

First, in the time-honored words of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, “Don’t panic.”

The alien standing in front of you evolved somewhere other than here. That means its biochemistry isn’t like that of earthly organisms — so you don’t have to worry about being eaten; it could no more digest you than you could digest sand.

Also, it’s far less likely that an alien would find you sexually attractive than it is that you’d get turned on by the sight of a squid. Indeed, you’re probably the butt-ugliest thing this alien has ever seen — so there’s no need to worry about guarding your virtue.

Finally, remember that it takes a large amount of energy to move between worlds, and energy costs money, everywhere in the universe. There’s no material object or natural resource on Earth that it wouldn’t be cheaper for the alien to synthesize at home rather than come here to get. The only reason for traveling between worlds is to access the immaterial: other cultures, other points of view, other forms of art.

So, relax, put on a good CD, and calmly set about trying to communicate. The alien might not use spoken language — it could rely on sign language, shifting patterns of skin coloration, or any of countless other methods. But the fact that it came here when we don’t have the technology to go to its world means it has greater technology than we do. The alien doubtless has a small computer on its person, which will observe what you’re doing and figure out how to translate between your spoken words and the alien’s language.

Build up a vocabulary of nouns and verbs by pointing at things and demonstrating actions while saying the appropriate words aloud. Be polite and be patient — although it’s true that the alien is the one in a foreign land, you are the goodwill ambassador for all of us. Do us proud.

Talebones has just posted a nice review of my novel Mindscan, using such terms as “extremely satisfying” and “excellent.” You can read it here (you may have to scroll down as they add more reviews, although right now it’s in their “top five” featured on the main page).

That’s me standing up yesterday at Fort York in Toronto, site of one of the big battles of the War of 1812. I was guest speaker at the “Junior Authors” summer camp hosted by the Harbourfront Centre, home of the world-famous International Festival of Authors. I had great fun talking to a dozen young people, ages 10-15, about writing, and they asked very perceptive questions.

Meanwhile, I spent part of today working on some suggestions for the film adaptation of The Terminal Experiment that’s in development; I’m actually a paid consultant on the film, in addition to the option fee for the underlying literary property. I’ve been enjoying fielding very insightful and tough questions from the director/screenwriter.

Sunday is the annual barbecue for The Fledglings, the writers’ workshop I put together with the best writers who had come to see me when I was Writer in Residence at The Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation and Fantasy, back in 2003.

And on Monday, I’m off to the University of Toronto at Mississauga, where they teach my Mindscan in the summer science-fiction course, to speak to the students. Let’s see if they can ask questions as good as those posed by the ten-year-olds yesterday! :)

So, the wonderful Chris from Bakka-Phoenix, Toronto’s science fiction bookstore, called today with a classic good-news/bad-news bit.

The good news was that the October 2006 issue of Analog, featuring the first of four serialization installments of my latest novel, Rollback, arrived at the store today.

The bad news was that instead of their usual order of 30 copies, the distributor delivered only nine copies. MetroNews, which handles distribution of Dell magazines in Ontario, hastened to add that it wasn’t their fault: Dell has decided to slash newsstand distribution of Analog and Asimov’s here 75% across the board, at least in Ontario, so Bakka-Phoenix was actually doing well to get nine copies. Two of those nine had already been spoken for, and I’ve taken two, so Bakka only has five left.

They could have sold a lot more copies at Bakka-Phoenix, not just of this issue but of the next three as well, because I have oodles of fans who shop there: in 2003, the number-one bestselling hardcover for the entire year at the store was my Humans; the number-one bestselling paperback for the entire year was my Hominids.

It’ll be the same at other retailers in Ontario: they’ll be getting just one-quarter of the copies they used to get. Sigh.