From my friend bookseller Dan Foster:
“On Wednesday of this week at two minutes and three seconds after 1:00 in the morning, the time and date will be 01:02:03 04/05/06.”
(Dan’s an American; in Canada and most of the rest of the world, which logically writes dates as day/month/year, the magic date will be May 4, not April 5.)
Woohoo! I just got the go-ahead to commission an all-new cover painting by five-time Aurora Award-winning artist Jean-Pierre Normand for the trade-paperback reissue of Karl Schroeder’s The Engine of Recall, which we published last year in hardcover under my Robert J. Sawyer Books imprint.
Jean-Pierre has done covers for Analog, Asimov’s, and On Spec. You can see a gallery of his work here.
Got it!
The ape head package is quite large; maybe 3/4 lifesize. Look at the picture above, with the DVDs in front — that gives you an idea of the scale. The head is well made, but to me it just doesn’t look like Caesar; the likeness in the much, much smaller (6″ body height) Medicom Caesar figure is a lot closer. Still, it’s impressive. I bought this in Canada from a Canadian source [Costco, Canadian$149], and the packaging here says that 2,000 sets, with their own run of limited serial numbers, have been produced for the Canadian market — on top of the 10,000 for the U.S., so this isn’t quite as rare as Fox is making it out to be.
(Given that the population ratio of Canada to the US is 10:1, it’s interesting that they chose to do a 5:1 ratio for runs of this product — it implies that they think PLANET OF THE APES is twice as popular on a per capita basis in Canada as it is in the U.S.)
The set has the additional footage for BATTLE that’s not been seen in a North American DVD release before, but it’s still missing the prologue that was filmed but never shown from ESCAPE (Cornelius, Zira, and Milo in the cockpit of Taylor’s ship). I emailed my friend Eric Greene, who included a still from that scene in the trade-paperback edition of his wonderful PLANET OF THE APES AS AMERICAN MYTH (Eric’s text commentary also appears on the POTA DVD in this set) to see if that footage still exists; he says he’s never seen any sign that it still does, sad to say — the still may be the only thing that’s survived.
Anyway, a cool collectible, and I’m glad I bought it.
Just got back from Ad Astra, Toronto’s annual SF convention. As usual, there was much SMOFing about the Aurora Awards (SMOF: Secret Master of Fandom, a person who is influential behind the scenes in fanish activities), and so I thought it might be time to dust off this piece I wrote back in 1997 entitled “What’s Wrong with the Aurora Awards?” for this week’s Monday spotlight, highlighting one of the 500+ documents on my website at sfwriter.com.
(The Aurora Awards website is here, at the memorable URL of www.sentex.net/~dmullin/aurora/.)
Ad Astra — Toronto’s science-fiction convention — celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary this past weekend. I had a terrific time. Highlights included the launch of Nick DiChario’s book A Small and Remarkable Life, a wonderful lunch with members of my Yahoo! Groups discussion group, another wonderful lunch with Del Rey editor-in-chief Betsy Mitchell, seeing old friend Terry Brooks, spending time with so many of my writing students and with members of The Fledglings, the writers’ workshop I formed with the most-talented people who came to see me when I was writer-in-residence at the Merril Collection, Saturday-night dinner with good friends, lots of great parties, and more. Truly, a very fine con.
Curious about the future of ebook-reading devices? This is the site you should read.
We had the launch party tonight for Nick DiChario‘s first novel, A Small and Remarkable Life, the latest (and fifth) title under my Robert J. Sawyer Books imprint. Damn, but the book looks gorgeous — and we had cover flats for the new trade-paperback editions of Marcos Donnelly’s Letters from the Flesh and Andrew Weiner’s Getting Near the End, and they look gorgeous, too. Our designer/art director, Karen Petherick, is absolutely terrific.
Of course, I didn’t need the drama in my life of Nick’s books arriving — if you’ll excuse the pun — just in the nick of time; they should have been back from the printer a couple of weeks ago, instead of showing up literally just in time. But, in the end, the launch party, which was held at Toronto’s Ad Astra science-fiction convention, came off fabulously. This marks the second anniversary of RJS Books, and the third consecutive Ad Astra at which we’ve held a launch party.
I’m delighted to have accepted an invitation to be a presenter at this year’s Surrey International Writers’ Conference, being held just outside Vancouver, British Columbia, October 19-22. Also on the program: Donald Maass, who is one of the top agents in the science-fiction field.
(UPDATED: Thanks to my friend H. Don Wilkat for reprocessing the videos into smaller files.)
For those of you with entirely too much bandwidth on your hands, Marcel Gagne has provided me with two video recordings from the most recent open fandom party we held at Carolyn and my place, on Saturday, January 14, 2006. They both play nicely in Windows Media Player.
This one is 22 megabytes, and lasts about a minute and a half. It shows lots of people, and is a walk-through including my office, my living room, my sun room, and my kitchen.
And this one is just 2 megabytes, and shows all the shoes lined up outside my door.
In addition to the other formats I’ve previously had my current Hugo and Nebula Award finalist “Identity Theft” available in, I’ve now added it as a plain, ordinary HTML web page, for those who like to read in a web browser:
http://www.sfwriter.com/identity.htm
All the available formats can be accessed here:
SciFi Wire, the news service of the SciFi Channel, has a nice write-up about the sale of serialization rights for my upcoming Rollback to Analog:
The speakers’ bureau I work with — the wonderful Speakers’ Spotlight — has updated their page about me.
If you read Bulgarian, you might enjoy these authorized translations of my short story “Gator” and my essay “The End of Science Fiction.” And there’s a bit more about me here.
![[Analog logo]](http://sfwriter.com/analog.gif)
Stanley Schmidt at Analog Science Fiction and Fact has bought serialization rights to Robert J. Sawyer‘s seventeenth novel, Rollback. Analog will run the book’s full text in four installments, in its October, November, and December 2006 issues, and its January-February 2007 double issue. The first installment will be on sale August 1, 2006.
“I’m thrilled to be back in Analog,” says Sawyer, whose last appearance there — with the short story “Shed Skin” in the January-February 2004 issue — won the Analytical Laboratory Award, voted on by Analog‘s readers, for best short story of the year; “Shed Skin” was also a Hugo Award finalist.
“The single most important thing a book needs is word-of-mouth,” says Sawyer. “The beauty of serialization is that on the day Rollback hits the stores in hardcover, 40,000 people will have already read it. You can’t beat that kind of exposure.”
That exposure has paid off handsomely for Sawyer’s previous Analog serials. The Terminal Experiment, which Analog ran under Sawyer’s preferred title of Hobson’s Choice, won the 1995 Nebula Award for Best Novel of the Year, and was a finalist for the Hugo Award. Sawyer’s Starplex was the only 1996 novel to be a finalist for both the Nebula and Hugo Awards. And his Hominids won the 2003 Hugo Award.
Rollback is Sawyer’s fourth novel to be serialized in Analog — a record for serial sales to Stanley Schmidt, who has been the magazine’s editor since 1978. Analog is the largest-circulation SF magazine in the world.
“For me, Analog has always been the very definition of science fiction,” says Sawyer. “I started buying it when I was 12, at a corner store next to my junior high school in Toronto; the clerk kept ordering it in each month just for me after that. I fondly remember waiting eagerly for the next installment in whatever serial the magazine was then running — and it thrills me to think that people are going to be doing that with Rollback.”
Following its serialization, Tor Books will publish Rollback in hardcover in April 2007 — marking 10 years of Sawyer being with Tor; it’s his ninth new novel for them, and the second book on a two-book contract that began with Mindscan, which has just come out in paperback after a successful run in hardcover. Sawyer’s editor at Tor is David G. Hartwell.
Here’s a sneak peek at the dustjacket blurb for Rollback:
Dr. Sarah Halifax decoded the first-ever radio transmission received from aliens. Thirty-eight years later, a second message is received — and Sarah, now 87, may hold the key to deciphering this one, too … if she lives long enough.
A wealthy industrialist offers to pay for Sarah to have a rollback — a hugely expensive experimental rejuvenation procedure. She accepts on condition that Don, her husband of sixty years, gets a rollback, too. The process works for Don, making him physically twenty-five again. But in a tragic twist, the rollback fails for Sarah, leaving her in her eighties.
While Don tries to deal with his newfound youth and the suddenly huge age gap between him and his wife, Sarah struggles to do again what she’d done once before: figure out what a signal from the stars contains. Exploring morals and ethics on both human and cosmic scales, Rollback is the big new SF novel by Hugo and Nebula Award-winner Robert J. Sawyer.
“Robert J. Sawyer is just about the best science fiction writer out there these days.” —The Rocky Mountain News
“One of the foremost science fiction writers of our generation.” —SF Site
“A writer of boundless confidence and bold scientific extrapolation.” —The New York Times
I’ll be out most of tomorrow, so I’m posting this a bit early …
I edit Robert J. Sawyer Books, which is one of Canada’s handful of small-press SF imprints. I’ve been lucky enough to be involved with some of the other ones over the years. Back in 1997, Carolyn and I edited Tesseracts 6 for Tesseract Books (now part of EDGE Publishing), and in 2001 I wrote the introduction for one of the volumes of the Bakka Books imprint, which sadly no longer exists. But that intro is our Monday Spotlight this week, highlighting one of the 500+ documents on my website at sfwriter.com: my thoughts on one of the early classics of Canadian SF, Frederick Philip Grove’s Consider Her Ways.
Sometimes you just need to get away from the ringing phones and all that jazz …
Carolyn and I hopped in the car on Tuesday morning and went down to my dad’s vacation home on beautiful Lake Canandaigua, one of the Finger Lakes in Western New York, for some peace and quiet. The place is perched on a cliff right on the edge of the lake, and the development is mostly deserted in the winter.
Friday night, we tuned into the Sci-Fi Channel (which we can’t get in Canada; we get the terrific Canadian alternative, Space: The Imagination Station, instead), and watched two episodes of the new Doctor Who (the series aired a year ago in Canada, but I didn’t see all the episodes then). Actually, I’d see one of these episodes (the one about the people gathering on a space station to watch the Earth be incinerated as the sun expanded billions of years from now), but the other — with Charles Dickens — was new to both of us. Anyway, they were both terrific.
And on Saturday, we went into Rochester, New York (about an hour away), to catch an absolutely terrific production of one of my all-time favorite plays, Inherit the Wind, at the Geva Theatre. The Clarence Darrow character was played by JG Hertzler, known to Star Trek fans as Klingon General Martok from Deep Space Nine. He was excellent, as was John Pribyl, the fellow who played the William Jennings Bryan character. It was a truly excellent production, much better than the one I saw at Stratford (Ontario) a few years ago. (Pictures.)
Today, we drove home (about four hours) listening to an unabridged reading of The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, which is just terrific.
Tomorrow, I’m off to York University, to speak to Paul Fayter’s class. Paul is teaching Mindscan this semester. And on Tuesday, I’m doing another episode of More 2 Life with Mary Ito on TVOntario — that’s live in Ontario at 2:00 p.m.
Encyclopaedia Britannica has issued a lengthy — and fascinating — rebuttal to the report in Nature magazine that said that Britannica was not significantly better than Wikipedia.
“Nature’s research was invalid. As we demonstrate below, almost everything about the journal’s investigation, from the criteria for identifying inaccuracies to the discrepancy between the article text and its headline, was wrong and misleading. Dozens of inaccuracies attributed to the Britannica were not inaccuracies at all, and a number of the articles Nature examined were not even in the Encyclopædia Britannica. The study was so poorly carried out and its findings so error-laden that it was completely without merit. We have produced this document to set the record straight, to reassure Britannica’s readers about the quality of our content, and to urge that Nature issue a full and public retraction of the article.”
The full rebuttal is here.
This is my tenth Hugo nomination; my third nomination since winning the best-novel Hugo in 2003 for HOMINIDS (subsequent ones were for the novel HUMANS, the short story “Shed Skin,” and now for “Identity Theft”); my third nomination for short fiction (previous ones were for the short stories “The Hand You’re Dealt” from the anthology FREE SPACE and “Shed Skin” from ANALOG and THE BAKKA ANTHOLOGY); and my fourth consecutive year being on the Hugo ballot.
In total, I’ve been on the Hugo ballot in nine out of the past eleven years. My Hugo nominations are:
1996 for The Terminal Experiment
1997 for Starplex
1998 for Frameshift and “The Hand You’re Dealt”
1999 for Factoring Humanity
2000 for Calculating God
2003 for Hominids
2004 for Humans
2005 for “Shed Skin”
2006 for “Identity Theft”
I’m delighted to announce that my “Identity Theft” is a Hugo finalist in addition to being a Nebula finalist. Woohoo! The full list of Hugo finalists is on the Locus Online website.
You can read “Identity Theft” free online through Fictionwise or on my website (the versions on my website are printable). See this entry of my blog for the links.
There are lots of programs for the PC, the Palm, and other platforms that make use of Princeton’s WordNet database, turning it into a dictionary (which isn’t what it was meant to be, but still …). Of all the Windows ones, I like WordWeb best — and it’s free. It lives in my system tray, and I use it for quick word lookups.
(In case you didn’t know, “sawyer” means: 1. One who is employed to saw wood, or 2. Any of several beetles whose larvae bore holes in dead or dying trees especially conifers.)
I really like these — and not just because Ivan Semeniuk, my old buddy from Discovery Channel Canada, is one of the contributors:
As part of its promotion of Nebula Awards nominees, my novella “Identity Theft” is now available as a free ebook in all standard ebook formats from Fictionwise.com:
http://www.fictionwise.com/ebooks/eBook37235.htm
For the current week, I’m featured right on the Fictionwise main page: fictionwise.com
And if you prefer other formats, the full text of “Identity Theft” is available thorugh my website as:
an unrestricted (printable) PDF file
an RTF file
Enjoy!
Rob
Time for another Monday Spotlight, pointing out one of the 500+ documents on my web site at sfwriter.com.
I often get writers asking me very basic questions via email, and so I’ve put together a canned response. If you’re a wannabe writer, you might find my Letter to Beginning Writers useful. Best of luck!
Holy Moses! My news group at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/robertjsawyer passed the 25,000-message mark yesterday! The group was founded in May 2001, and now has over a thousand members. Come have a look!
You don’t often see soliloquies in movies, and everyone says you shouldn’t have them in books, either. But I like them — Antony’s funeral oration from Julius Caesar is one of my favorite bits of theater. Well, here’s a nice long soliloquy from an SF film: 621 words spoken uninterrupted by Hal Holbrook as the Director of NASA in one of my favorite films from the 1970s, Capricorn One. It’s all one long speech:
Okay, here it is. I have to start by saying that if there was any other way, if there was even a slight chance of another alternative, I would give anything not to be here with you now. Anything. Bru, how long have we known each other? Sixteen years. That’s how long. Sixteen years. You should have seen yourself then. You looked like you just walked out of a Wheaties box. And me, all sweaty palm and deadly serious. I told everybody about this dream I had of conquering the new frontier, and they all looked at me like I was nuts. You looked at me and said, “yes.”
I remember when you told me Kay was pregnant. We went out and got crocked. I remember when Charles was born. We went out and got crocked again. The two of us. Captain Terrific and the Mad Doctor, talking about reaching the stars, and the bartender telling us maybe we’d had enough. Sixteen years. And then Armstrong stepped out on the Moon, and we cried. We were so proud. Willis, you and Walker, you came in about then. Both bright and talented wise-asses, looked at me in my wash-and-wear shirt carrying on this hot love affair with my slide-rule, and even you were caught up in what we’d done.
I remember when Glenn made his first orbit in Mercury, they put up television sets in Grand Central Station, and tens of thousands of people missed their trains to watch. You know, when Apollo 17 landed on the Moon, people were calling up the networks and bitching because reruns of I Love Lucy were canceled. Reruns, for Christ’s sake! I could understand if it was the new Lucy show. After all, what’s a walk on the Moon? But reruns! Oh, geez!
And then suddenly everybody started talking about how much everything cost. Was it really worth twenty billion to go to another planet? What about cancer? What about the slums? How much does it cost? How much does any dream cost, for Christ’s sake? Since when is there an accountant for ideas? You know who was at the launch today? Not the President. The Vice-President, that’s who. The Vice-President and his plump wife. The President was busy. He’s not busy. He’s just a little bit scared. He sat there two months ago and put his feet up on Woodrow Wilson’s desk, and he said, “Jim. Make it good. Congress is on my back. They’re looking for a reason to cancel the program. We can’t afford another screw-up. Make it good. You have my every good wish.” His every good wish! I got his sanctimonious Vice President! That’s what I got!
So, there we are. After all those hopes and all that dreaming, he sits there, with those flags behind his chair, and tells me we can’t afford a screw-up. And guess what! We had a screw-up! A first-class, bona-fide, made-in-America screw-up! The good people from Con-Amalgamate delivered a life-support system cheap enough so they could make a profit on the deal. Works out fine for everybody. Con-Amalgamate makes money. We have our life-support system. Everything’s peachy. Except they made a little bit too much profit. We found out two months ago it won’t work. You guys would all be dead in three weeks. It’s as simple as that. So, all I have to do is report that and scrub the mission. Congress has its excuse, the President still has his desk, and we have no more program. What’s sixteen years? Your actual drop in the bucket! All right. That’s the end of the speech. Now, we’re getting to what they call the moment of truth. Come with me. I want to show you something.
SF author David Feintuch died on Friday. I didn’t know him well, but I always enjoyed it when we ran into each other, and I was very fond of him.
Tanya Huff is one of my oldest and dearest friends — we first met when were both students at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute in Toronto in 1979. So I am just so totally tickled pink that Canada’s Space: The Imagination Station has ordered 22 hour-long episodes of a TV series based on Tanya’s popular Blood books. Way to go, Tanya! I’m also thrilled for my mystery-writing friend Maureen Jennings, who got a 13-episode order for a series based on her books. Woohoo! Here’s the Toronto Star report:
Three new series for CHUM
Mar. 17, 2006. 01:00 AMCHUM Television has ordered three new one-hour TV drama series for the fall and cancelled two others.
The Murdoch Mysteries from Shaftsbury Films, starring Peter Outerbridge, has been picked up for 13 episodes. Based on Maureen Jennings’s novels and set in late-Victorian Toronto, the casting may prove to be a problem. Outerbridge already stars in another Shaftesbury series, ReGenesis. Will he be able to fit in two hour-long series a year?
Also picked up is Blood Ties, based on Tanya Huff’s popular Blood novels. This one-hour series has a commitment for 22 episodes and will be shot in Vancouver with casting still to be announced.
Also picked up is the hour drama Across The River To Motor City about an insurance investigator in 1960s Windsor and Detroit. Six episodes have been ordered.
CHUM also cancelled two Canadian dramas. Demise of The Collector was expected but not the stylish Godiva’s, which had garnered some critical praise in its second year, as well as popularity with younger viewers.
— Jim Bawden
I’m pleased to be joining Ray Kurzweil, David Brin, Gregory Benford, and two — count ’em, two — Nobel Laureates (physicist Frank Wilczek and economist Sir Clive W.J. Granger), among others, on the Scientific Advisory Board for the Lifeboat Foundation. The Lifeboat Foundation describes its purpose thus:
The Lifeboat Foundation is a nonprofit, nongovernmental organization, dedicated to ensuring that humanity adopts the powerful technologies of genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics safely as we move towards the Singularity. This humanitarian organization is pursuing all possible options, including relinquishment when feasible (we are against the U.S. government posting the recipe for the 1918 flu virus on the internet), and helping accelerate the development of defensive technologies including anti-biological virus technology, active nanotechnological shields, and self-sustaining space colonies in case the other defensive strategies fail.
Join us for the launch of A Small and Remarkable Life, the first novel by Hugo and World Fantasy Award finalist Nick DiChario, at Ad Astra, Toronto’s annual science-fiction convention, Friday, March 31, at 8:00 p.m. in the Reflections Room of the Crowne Plaza Toronto Don Valley Hotel, 1250 Eglinton Avenue East.
We’ll also be celebrating the second anniversary of Robert J. Sawyer Books. Bakka-Phoenix will be on-hand to sell copies, and we’ll also be unveiling the trade-paperback reissues of our earlier titles by Marcos Donnelly and Andrew Weiner. Refreshments will be served.
“With a persistence and sensitivity worthy of his quirky hero, DiChario quietly explores the big questions: faith, love, hope, and the true nature of reality. A must for everyone who cares about good fiction.” — Hugo Award-winner Nancy Kress
“I’ve been waiting a long time for this book. Hell, everyone has been waiting a long time for this book.” — Nebula Award-winner Mike Resnick, from his introduction
“Nick DiChario has the uncanny ability to evoke strangeness from the commonplace and to make the small loom large indeed. Here is a deeply moral science fiction novel that will appeal to readers of all persuasions.” — Hugo Award-winner James Patrick Kelly
Robert J. Sawyer Books is the science-fiction imprint of Red Deer Press, a Fitzhenry & Whiteside company.
… at least according to Google. To my astonishment, I discovered by accident today that if you search on “sawyer” at Google.com, I’m the first hit. Take that, Diane Sawyer! Bite me, Tom Sawyer! In your face, Sawyer Brown! :)
