Robert J. Sawyer

Busy three days, all related to BookExpo Canada.

On Saturday, Danita Maslan, author of the novel Rogue Harvest, which I published under my Robert J. Sawyer Books imprint, flew to Toronto from Calgary, and Carolyn and I picked her up at the airport. Saturday night, we hosted a reception for the authors I’ve published under my imprint, which was a huge success.

Sunday morning, we headed down to the Metro Toronto Convention Centre (same place the 2003 Worldcon was held) and did a group signing at the Fitzhenry and Whiteside booth at BookExpo Canada. All of my authors were on hand: Marcos Donnelly, Andrew Weiner, Karl Schroeder, Danita Maslan, and Nick DiChario, plus Terence M. Green, whose book I will publish next.

We had the single best giveaway at all of BookExpo this year, by far: normally, if you stand in line at a booth for an autographing, you get one book (and all the books are free at BookExpo — the idea is to get them into the hands of booksellers, so they’ll learn about your wares). But those lucky people who came to the Fitzhenry and Whiteside booth got SIX books each — two hardcovers and four trade paperbacks.

Sharon Fitzhenry really wanted to show the industry that Robert J. Sawyer Books had arrived, and so everyone got an autographed copy of my short-story collection Iterations (the book that began my association with Red Deer Press, which is now owned by Fitzhenry and Whiteside) and an autographed copy of Karl Schroeder’s short-story collection The Engines of Recall and an autographed copy of Marcos Donnelly’s novel Letters from the Flesh and an autographed copy of Andrew Weiner’s novel Getting Near the End and an autographed copy of Danita Maslan’s novel Rogue Harvest and an autographed copy of Nick DiChario’s novel A Small and Remarkable Life.

Later that afternoon, there was a celebration of Fitzherny’s 40th anniversary — woohoo!

Sunday night, we took Danita back to the airport, but I went into BookExpo again today (the trade show runs for two days). Ran into lots of great people. Among others I chatted with Ruth and John Robert Colombo, Rick Blechta, the president of the Crime Writers of Canada; Brian Bethune, the books editor for Maclean’s; Martin Levin, the books editor for The Globe and Mail; lots of people from H.B. Fenn and Company (who just signed a new six-year agreement to keep distributing Tor books in Canada); Michelle Sagara West (who was autographing copies of her latest reissue from BenBella); agent John Pearce; Cynthia Good, who used to be publisher of Penguin Canada; Jonathan Schmidt, formerly of Tor and now managing editor of Key Porter Books; two recent Canadian Writers of the Future prize winners; big-name fan Lloyd Penney, who was working at the show; and many, many more. All in all, a great few days — but exhausting!

A new interview with me has just gone online at Meme Therapy: Life From a Science Fiction Point of View.

I’ve been involved in a lot of discussions lately about potential panels for the science-fiction Con-Version 22 in Calgary this August. I have a long-standing special relationship with Con-Version: I was Author Guest at the mini-con Con-Version 21.5 held last summer in conjunction with Westercon, Canadian Guest of Honour at Con-Version 20, Toastmaster at Con-Version 19, Special Guest at Con-Version 15, and Canadian Guest of Honour at Con-Version 14.

Anyway, I pointed them to an existing list of panel topic suggestions I had on my web site, and added a whole bunch of new ones in literary areas, which are appended at the end.

I can’t say whether any of these will be on the final programming at Con-Version, but for those who’ve never been to an SF convention before they give a taste of the sorts of discussions one might expect to see at one, and I offer them up as this week’s Monday Spotlight, highlighting one of the 500+ documents on my website at sfwriter.com:

Convention Panel Suggestions

I plum forgot to renew my subscription to New Scientist, which is my single most important science resource for my science-fiction writing. Not only do I really enjoy the magazine, but I’m constantly turning to the full-text online archives for research. Must renew right away, ’cause now I’m locked out of the archives! Gak!

Ironically, I discovered this on the same day I was contemplating letting my subscription to another weekly science magazine, Science News, lapse. I’ve subscribed to Science News for 22 years now, but whereas New Scientist makes its archives available for free to subscribers, Science News doesn’t (although you can search for the reference online, and then dig through your stack of back issues to find the actual article). That’s so last millennium!

The Spring 2006 issue (#98) of The New Quarterly: Canadian Writers & Writing contains a trio of essays about science fiction:

• “Uncle Hugo’s Legacy” by Robert J. Sawyer
• “The Exuberance of Science Fiction” by James Alan Gardner
• “Science Fiction’s Literay Fusions” by Patrick Forde

The picture of me above (which I like to caption, “Alas, Prehistoric!”) accompanies my essay.

Two friends sent me this about the same time: film producer Bonnie Jean Mah in Vancouver, and lawyer Ariel Reich in Palo Alto. I just totally love it, especially since I have all the Art Asylum Star Trek action figures that are used in this one-minute promo for Classic Trek on G4 TV:

Star Trek Cribs: The Director’s Cut

As we slide into summer, people’s minds often turn to reading. Twelve years ago, I was asked by Now, Toronto’s weekly entertainment paper, to suggest some Science Fiction for People Who’ve Never Read SF Before. I still recommend all the choices on the list, and I offer it up as this week’s Monday Spotlight, highlighting one of the 500+ articles on my web site at sfwriter.com.

I guess the ad-copy deadline for the June Locus, which arrived in the mail today, was prior to the Nebula Award winners being announced 27 days ago, ’cause the back-cover ad for the forthcoming mass-market paperback of Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell calls it “An utterly compelling epic tale that won both the Hugo and the Nebula Award.”

Not so. It did indeed win the Hugo, but my buddy Joe Haldeman’s Camouflage beat if for the Nebula last month …

Can’t blame the copywriter, though — my money would have been on Susanna Clarke winning, too. :)

And I’m very pleased to see that the North American paperback will be a Tor book — I’m always glad to see cash cows in my publisher’s stable … :)

(Susanna Clarke’s book did win the Locus Award last year — and I got to accept on her behalf; it also won the World Fantasy Award.)

I’ve just accepted an offer to be one of the author guests of honor at Chattacon 2007, being held January 26-28, 2007, in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

In other news, just sold Czech rights to my short stories “Fallen Angel,” “Ineluctable,” and “Shed Skin.” Woohoo!

I’m delighted to announce that I will be giving the keynote address at the Surrey International Writers Conference, in Surrey, British Columbia, Friday, October 20, 2006. This is in addition to the seminars and blue-pencil cafe work at the conference. Looking forward to it!

CBS News sends out a daily newsletter called “Inside Scoop,” with highlights about the day’s news coverage. It always begins with the “Quote of the Day,” and today’s quote is this:

“Learning to ignore things is one of the great paths to inner peace.”
— Robert J. Sawyer

Woohoo! The quote is from Chapter 14 of my novel Calculating God, and the speaker is Hollus.

Way, way cool! (For more on the quotable Rob Sawyer, see this earlier blog entry.)

Many thanks to my friend Chicago lawyer Howard Reich for drawing this to my attention.

I’m pleased to announce the sale of Spanish rights to my Mindscan to Ediciones B.

Back in 1999, Ray Kurzweil published a fascinating book called The Age of Spiritual Machines. Rather than do a traditional review, The Ottawa Citizen newspaper invited me and A.K. Dewdney — who used to be Scientific American‘s games columnist — to have a dialog between us about the book.

That piece was great fun to produce, and I think it still makes good reading, so I’m offering it up as this week’s Monday Spotlight, highlighting one of the 500+ articles on my website at sfwriter.com:

On Ray Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines

I’m delighted to announce that I’m nominated for not one, not two, but three Aurora Awards this year — one nomination in each of the three English-language professional categories. This hasn’t happened since — well, since the last time I did the same thing, back in 1998. :)

My nominations this year are:

• Mindscan for Best Long-Form English;
• Identity Theft for Best Short-Form English;
• The radio drama “Birth,” scripted by me and Michael Lennick and produced by Joe Mahoney for CBC Radio One, for Best English Other.

The full ballot in all categories is here.

In the Long-Form English category, four of the six finalists — Julie E. Czerneda, Edo van Belkom, Robert J. Sawyer, and Robert Charles Wilson — have previously won the award, and Karin Lowachee and Caitlin Sweet are major authors, so it’s going to be quite the race.

In the Short-Form English category, I’m not just thrilled about my own nomination, but also Karl Schroeder’s for “Alexander’s Road,” since that was the one original story in his collection The Engine of Recall published under my Robert J. Sawyer Books imprint — making this the first award nomination for a work in that line.

This is the fourth award nomination for “Identity Theft.” It’s already won the 6,000-euro Premio UPC, and been nominated for both the Nebula and the Hugo.

And, as happens more and more these days, I’m competing with my own students: in the Short-Form English category, Derwin Mak, Douglas Smith, and Hayden Trenholm have all taken workshopping courses I’ve led.

I’m delighted to see my friend Randy McCharles get a long-overdue Aurora nomination for Fan Organizational. And I’m especially thrilled to see the anthology In Places Between: The Top Five Stories of the Robyn Herrington Short Story Contest 2005 be nominated for Fan Publication. Not only was Robyn one of my writing students, but she was also one of my dearest friends; my upcoming novel Rollback is dedicated to her.

Voting deadline is June 26, 2006; winners will be announced at the SF convention TT20, being held in Toronto July 7-9, 2006. Any Canadian may vote; the voting fee (which helps cover the cost of manufacturing the very nifty trophies) is Cdn$6.

My great buddy Edo van Belkom just won the Ontario Library Association’s Silver Birch Award. His winning book was Wolf Pack, which also won last year’s Aurora Award. The Silver Birch is a gigantic award in Canada, and I’m totally thrilled for Edo.

The Silver Birch is voted on by kids in Ontario:

The Silver Birch Awards are given by Grade 4, 5 and 6 students in a spectacular ceremony held annually in May before fifteen hundred of their peers. The children choose winners in Fiction and Non-Fiction when they cast their ballots on the province-wide Voting Day earlier in the same month. It is the most democratic and unbiased process possible when the children make their choice. The program is administered by the Ontario Library Association and run by teacher-librarians and teachers in schools and by children’s librarians in public libraries. But the choice belongs to the children. And, in their tens of thousands, they know what they are doing.

They most certainly do. Way to go, Edo!

Had a wonderful two-hour lunch today with Tommy Yune, co-director of the recently completed movie Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles. To my absolute delight, Tommy told me I get a “thanks to” credit at the end of the film.

Why’s that, you ask? Well, back in early 2003, I was hired by Harmony Gold to write a series bible for a potential revival of Robotech. I worked very closely with Tommy on that (he flew to Toronto from Los Angeles so we could work together at my home from Sunday, February 15, to Friday, February 21, 2003).

As often happens in Hollywood, the project ended up going in other directions, and my proposal (called Robotech: Rendezvous with Destiny) was never made. But Tommy says it was an important part of the development process for the final film they did end up producing. I haven’t seen the full film yet (it was just screened at Cannes!), but the excerpts I’ve seen look amazingly good.

I’m tickled pink about all this: I have nothing but fond memories of the time I spent working on reviving Robotech, and Tommy and I have remained great friends ever since. (He’s in Toronto right now for Anime North, Canada’s biggest anime convention.) Mecha forever!

I stumbled across this today: an interview (transcribed from audio tape) done by Therese Littleton for Amazon.com when Robert Charles Wilson and I were on book tour together the first time, back in 1998, when he was promoting his Darwinia, and I was promoting Factoring Humanity.

It’s a great interview: you can read the whole thing here.

I see that Barry R. Levin Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature — the world’s leading SF rare-book dealer, located in Santa Monica — has named Jack Vance this year’s recipient of The Collectors Award from Most Collectable Author of the Year. And an excellent choice he is, too!

I was honored to get this same honor two years ago. The trophy is stunning and gigantic, a beautiful tower of Lucite surmounted by a polished travertine sphere representing a planet. A complete list of previous author winners:

     2005 (18th annual):   Jack Vance
     2004 (17th annual):   Susanna Clarke
     2003 (16th annual):   Robert J. Sawyer
     2002 (15th annual):   Neil Gaiman
     2001 (14th annual):   J.K. Rowling (2nd time)
     2000 (13th annual):   J.K. Rowling (1st time)
     1999 (12th annual):   Neal Stephenson
     1998 (11th annual):   Peter F. Hamilton
     1997 (10th annual):   Stephen Baxter
     1996 ( 9th annual):   Stephen King (3rd time)
     1995 ( 8th annual):   Lois McMaster Bujold
     1994 ( 7th annual):   Anne Rice
     1993 ( 6th annual):   Michael Crichton
     1992 ( 5th annual):   Stephen King (2nd time)
     1991 ( 4th annual):   Dan Simmons
     1990 ( 3rd annual):   Stephen King (1st time)
     1989 ( 2nd annual):   Salman Rushdie
     1988 ( 1st annual):   Dean R. Koontz

Also given annually: awards to Most Collectable Book of the year, and a Lifetime Collectors award. Information on this year's winners are here, and past winners are here.

Ann Cecil reviews me twice in the current issue of Sigma (May 2006, Issue Number 242), the newsletter of Parsec, the Pittsburgh SF club.

She calls my Mindscan “highly recommended,” and of the anthology Down These Dark Spaceways, edited by Mike Resnick and containing my “Identity Theft,” she has this to say:

This is one of the best anthologies I have ever read. Mike Resnick got an all-star lineup of contributors: the six stories (novellas) are by Resnick, Robert Reed, Catherine Asaro, Jack McDevitt, David Gerrold, and Robert Sawyer. All of them are good, both as mysteries and as science-fiction. I read one right after the other, in each case sucked in by the premise, and yet each story is vivid and memorable.

Best of the lot is the last story, by Robert Sawyer. “Identity Theft” is on the Hugo ballot, and it is easy to see why. The story starts with the classic cliches [of hard-boiled detective fiction] and then twists and twists, until the reader is breathless keeping up. The conclusion is non-stop action — literally slam-bang.

I was just going to dip into this anthology, and instead found myself addicted. Highly Recommended; this one is worth joining the SFBC.

KeyCon in Winnipeg this past weekend was wonderful. At 500 attendees, I’m told it was the best turnout in years. And although this was only KeyCon 23, it was impressive to see preparations already well underway for KeyCon’s 25th anniversary, in 2008.

I’d never met the other guests of honour before, but we all got along famously: fellow author Jacqueline Carey, gaming guest Barron Vangor Toth, and artist guest Ruth Thompson. I was honored and thrilled to be the first repeat author Guest of Honour the con had ever had; I’d previously been there in 2003.

I was worried about my reading, since it was scheduled for the ungodly hour of 10:00 p.m. Friday night, but I had a good crowd. I read a smorgasbord of Sawyer: scenes from Frameshift, Hominids, Humans, Calculating God, and the short-short stories “If I’m Here, Imagine Where They Sent My Luggage” and “Ours to Discovery.”

Saturday afternoon, fabulous local artist Robert Pasternak gave me a tour of his terrific studio, which was filled with amazing science-fiction toys and other great things. After that, the con showed one of my favourite films, Quatermass and the Pit, and I did a half-hour talk about why I like it so much (and gave away hardcovers of Mindscan to those who could answer trivia questions about the film; the books were donated by H.B. Fenn and Company, Tor’s Canadian distributor).

The dealers’ room was good, and Chapters was on-hand with huge displays of Jacqueline and my books. Sunday night’s Guest of Honour dinner was fabulous — and was followed by watching fireworks from the 15th-floor consuite on honour of the Queen’s birthday.

Monday morning was spent SMOFing with John Mansfield (chair of the Winnipeg worldcon in 1994, and part of the Montreal in 2009 Worldcon bid committee) and Linda Ross-Mansfield.

All in all, an extremely well-run, very enjoyable convention. Thank you, Winnipeg!

I’ve just been asked to be one of the Author Guests of Honor at the science-fiction convention Oasis 20, to be held May 25-27, 2007 (next year), in Orlando, Florida.

I was previously Guest of Honor at Oasis 16, and for their 20th anniversary, Oasis is inviting back all its previous GoHs. It’s going to be one hell of a party! Oasis 16 was one of the best conventions I’ve ever been to, so I’m really looking forward to this.

Also, it gives me two US guest-of-honor gigs in the States during the first eight weeks of Rollback‘s release, which will be fabulous for promoting the book.

My great friend Jeanne Robinson — wife of writer Spider Robinson — was shortlisted to go into space aboard the Shuttle as part of the NASA’s Civilians in Space program. After the Challenger disaster, that program got cancelled, and Jeanne never got to go into space, where she would have pioneered zero-gravity dance, as described in the novel Stardance that she and Spider wrote together.

But the dream lives on. Spider, Jeanne, and Michael Lennick — producer of Discovery Channel’s Rocket Science and author of the screenplay adaptation of my Illegal Alien — plus Hugo Winning artist Ron Miller and others, have teamed up to make a computer-generated film based on Stardance — and they need your help! Check out how you can become an honorary stardancer by visiting the project’s website at www.spiderrobinson.com/stardance.htm.

I am delighted to report that my Mindscan is a finalist for this year’s John W. Campbell Memorial Award.

The nominees are:

• Transcendent, by Stephen Baxter
• The Meq, by Steve Cash
• Child Of Earth, by David Gerrold
• Mind’s Eye, by Paul J. McAuley
• Seeker, by Jack McDevitt
• Learning The World, by Ken MacLeod
• The Summer Isles, by Ian R. MacLeod
• Counting Heads, by David Marusek
• Mindscan, by Robert J. Sawyer
• Accelerando, by Charles Stross
• The World Before, by Karen Traviss
• Spin, by Robert Charles Wilson

The Campbell Memorial is the only major award given exclusively to science fiction; fantasy works are not eligible. It is also the only major juried award in the science-fiction field. This year’s jurors are:

• Gregory Benford
• Paul A. Carter
• James Gunn
• Elizabeth Anne Hull
• Christopher McKitterick
• Farah Mendlesohn
• Pamela Sargent
• T.A. Shippey

This is my third time being nominated for the Campbell Memorial Award (which is not to be confused with the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, given alongside the Hugos each year). My previous Campbell Memorial Award nominations were for Calculating God and Hominids.

The winner will be announced at Campbell Conference and Awards Banquet, July 6-9, 2006.

People find my website when searching on all sorts of terms. One term that recently brought a nice person to my site was “Sybok” (I know it was a nice person, because he went on to send me a couple of emails). Sybok is the name of Spock’s half-brother in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, and he’s a character I’m rather fond of: the laughing Vulcan. If you’ve read my books, such as Calculating God, you know I’m fascinated by the science vs. religion debate, and Sybok nicely symbolizes that.

Also, back in 2000, I got to work with William Shatner for a few days. He was lined up to be executive producer of a computer-animated TV series I created for Nelvana, a Canadian animation house (a damn good series called Exodus: Mars, that, sadly, never got made); Bill and I went around to various networks in Hollywood, pitching the series together. I found him to be highly creative, highly intelligent, highly pleasant, and highly professional — and, of course, he was the director of Star Trek V.

And so, for today’s Monday Spotlight, highlighting one of the 500+ documents on my website at sfwriter.com, I offer up this little essay from 1991 on Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.

I was born in 1960, which is the same year the kids on That ’70s Show were supposedly born. I had a fondness for this show, when it first started back in 1998, because parts of it echoed my own teenage years. And so I tuned in tonight for the hour-long series finale.

It was just okay. It should have been poignant and moving, but it wasn’t really, even though original star Topher Grace returned for the final few minutes.

In fact, as I sat waiting for the ending credits, I found myself thinking about another, earlier show I’d very much liked, The Wonder Years, about growing up in the 1960s, and that program’s final episode, which still chokes me up whenever I think about it, even though that finalé first aired 13 years ago. Here’s the closing narration from that episode:

Things never turn out exactly the way you planned. I know they didn’t with me. Still, like my father used to say, “Traffic’s traffic, you go where life takes you,” and growing up happens in a heartbeat. One day you’re in diapers, the next you’re gone, but the memories of childhood stay with you for the long haul.

I remember a time, a place, a particular Fourth of July, the things that happened in that decade of war and change. I remember a house like a lot of houses, a yard like a lot of yards, on a street like a lot of other streets. I remember how hard it was growing up among people and places I loved.

Most of all, I remember how hard it was to leave. And the thing is, after all these years, I still look back in wonder.

That’s good writing.

And I still look back in wonder, too.

I think I should have been an agent. Not only am I spending a lot of my time these days (a) reviewing deals that I’m being offered and (b) negotiating deals with other authors for books under my Robert J. Sawyer Books imprint — but I’m finding I’m actually enjoying the wheeling and dealing.

At the Nebula banquet, Harlan Ellison made a comment about how many authors in this field just ignore the business aspects, to their peril (and, I’d add, to the peril of authors in general, since they create a climate in which publishers and producers are used to being rapacious and getting away with it), but I actually dig all this stuff.

So far this week, I’ve written detailed memos to my agents about two new film option proposals and a request from one of my older publishers to modify the ebook clause in a contract we did years ago, plus done a lot of work (including doing up some accompanying spreadsheets) on a lengthy memo about my next book project, and provided some additional paper work related to my upcoming writer-in-residence gig in Kitchener, Ontario. It’s all kind of fun, actually — I can see why my agents enjoy their work. :)

I received the page proofs from Analog today for all four parts of the serialization of my next novel, Rollback. This is my last chance to make corrections. The whole novel will be serialized in Analog‘s October, November, and December 2006 edition, and the combined January-February 2007 edition, with the hardcover following in April 2007 from Tor. More about the serialization is here.

I don’t have anything to do with these (although I do plan on attending V-Con), but my friend Clint Budd asked me to help spread the word about the Master Classes in Writing Genre Fiction on Friday, October 6, 2006, being offered in conjunction with V-Con, the Vancouver SF convention. You can read more about it on the V-Con website, and a lot of extra detail is in this PDF brochure. The instructors are Barbara Hambly, Matthew Hughes, Alma Alexander, and Lisa Smedman — I know all four of them, and think very highly of them all.

Got asked today to submit details for the two workshops I’m going to lead at the Surrey International Writers’ Conference in British Columbia this October, and thought some people reading this might appreciate an advance peek:

Mastering Point of View: Learn the strengths and weakness of first-person and third-person narration, and how to avoid point-of-view pitfalls. Most beginning writers have a hard time choosing the appropriate point of view for their stories — and an even harder time sticking to it. Printed fiction can be more powerful than film, TV, or stage plays because it allows us to get inside the head of our viewpoint character — to actually become someone in the story. But a poor choice of point-of-view character can leave the reader uninvolved, and violations of the limited perspective provided by a specific point of view can rip the reader right out of the story.

A Top-Down Approach to Science Fiction Writing: Science Fiction is often called “the literature of ideas,” but where do those ideas come from? How do you turn a grandly cosmic vision into an intimately human story? What is the relationship between theme and plot? And how do you take the classic elements of science fiction — time travel, starships, alien beings, artificial intelligence, alternate worlds — and do something fresh with them, when so many other writers have already mined the same topics?

I also volunteered to do twelve 15-minute blue-pencil café sessions, in which I’ll do cold evaluations of three-page (double-spaced) samples of attendees’ writing.

Other speakers with an SF/F connection this year include agents Donald Maass and Rachel Vater, Del Rey editor Jim Minz, Bantam Spectra editor Juliet Ulman, and authors Diana Gabaldon and Jack Whyte.

More Japanese royalties showed up today, this time for Golden Fleece and End of an Era.

And the May 2006 New York Review of Science Fiction arrived recently, with a nice review of my short-story collection Iterations, saying “Sawyer evokes both the classic sense of wonder and the spirit of exploration … and is capable of emotional subtlety and emotional impact.” (The review comes four years after the book’s publication, but, hey, better late than never!)

Tonight is “Third Monday,” one of Toronto’s two monthly fannish pub nights; I try to make it to both when I’m in town — and I’m heading off now (“Third Monday” is at Orwell’s, 3373 Bloor Street West at Islington, starting at 7:00 p.m. — everyone is welcome).