Robert J. Sawyer

Hugo and Nebula Award-Winning Science Fiction Writer

Hominids on Edmonton Journal Bestsellers List

by Rob - March 15th, 2006

Those Neanderthals just keep rollin’ along. Hominids was number nine on the Fiction bestsellers list published in The Edmonton Journal last weekend; The Journal is the major paper in the capital city of Alberta, Canada. Not bad for a book that’s coming up on four years old!

Fiction

1. (2) Saturday — Ian McEwan

2. (-) Gilead — Marilynn Robinson

3. (-) The Brown Family — Mark Kozub-

4. (3) Angels & Demons — Dan Brown

5. (5) Three Day Road — Joseph Boyden

6. (-) The Continuity Girl — Leah McLaren

7. (-) The Mobile Library — Ian Sansom

8. (-) The Five People You Meet in Heaven — Mitch Albom

9. (-) Hominids — Robert J. Sawyer

10. (-) The Time Traveler’s Wife — Audrey Niffenegger

Non-Fiction

1. (1) The Judgment of Paris — Ross King

2. (-) Hold Onto Your Kids — Gordon Neufeld

3. (-) Night — Elie Wiesel

4. (2) Riding with Rilke — Ted Bishop-

5. (-) Six Words You Never Knew Had Something to Do With Pigs — Katherine Barber

6. (-) Marley & Me — John Grogan

7. (7) Greetings from Cool Breezes — Jeananne Kirwin-

8. (-) The Gift of Reading — David Bouchard

9. (-) A Million Little Pieces — James Frey

10. (-) Collapse — Jared Diamond

Hominids nominated for Ontario Library Association award

by Rob - March 15th, 2006

Headline: Robert J. Sawyer science-fiction novel nominated for Ontario Library Association Award

The Ontario Library Association has unveiled the ten-book shortlist for its second annual readers’-choice Evergreen Award. On the list: the science-fiction novel Hominids by Robert J. Sawyer.

The shortlist was compiled from titles nominated by librarians. Readers will vote for their favorite book during Ontario Public Library Week (October 16-22, 2006) through library Web sites and branch ballot boxes. Between now and then, the shortlisted books will be promoted in libraries provincewide.

To be eligible for the Evergreen Award, books must be by a living Canadian author, and can be either fiction or nonfiction. Sawyer’s Hominids is the only genre-fiction novel to make the shortlist this year. Last year’s winner was the novel Crow Lake by Mary Lawson.

At 12.5 million people, Ontario is the most-populous of Canada’s ten provinces — home to four out of every ten Canadians. It contains both Canada’s capital city of Ottawa and its largest city, Toronto; the 99-branch Toronto Public Library — just one of the systems participating in the Evergreen Award program — is the busiest public-library system in North America, with 325,000 patrons borrowing over half a million books each week.

The complete short list, alphabetical by author last name, is:

Three Day Road
by Joseph Boyden
Fiction
Penguin, 2005

The Greek for Love
by James Chatto
Nonfiction (travel memoir)
Random House Canada, 2005

An Audience Of Chairs
by Joan Clark
Fiction
Alfred A. Knopf, 2005

Snowshoes and Spotted Dick: Letters From a Wilderness Dweller
by Chris Czajkowski
Nonfiction (memoir letters)
Harbour Pub., 2003

Sweetness In The Belly
by Camilla Gibb
Fiction
Doubleday Canada, 2005

The Girls
by Lori Lansens
Fiction
Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2005

Race Against Time
by Stephen Lewis
Nonfiction (CBC Massey Lectures)
Anansi, 2005

Lady Franklin’s Revenge
by Ken McGoogan.
Nonfiction (Biography)
HarperCollins Canada, 2005

Paul Moves Out
by Michel Rabagliati
Young-Adult Fiction
Drawn & Quarterly, 2005

Hominids
by Robert J. Sawyer
Science Fiction
Tor Books, 2002

Hominids previously won the World Science Fiction Society’s Hugo Award — the top international prize for SF writing — and was the “One Book, One Community” choice for Waterloo Region (consisting of the Ontario cities of Kitchener, Waterloo, and Cambridge, and surrounding communities) in 2005. Sawyer is also currently a finalist for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America’s Nebula Award for Best Novella of the Year.

Sawyer, 45, was born in Ottawa and now lives in Mississauga, Ontario. Hominids was his thirteenth novel; his latest — number sixteen — is MINDSCAN. Both are published by Tor Books, New York, and distributed in Canada by H.B. Fenn and company.

Information about the Evergreen Award is here:

http://www.accessola.com/site/showPage.cgi?page=reading/evergreen/index.html

The online version of the shortlist is here:

http://www.accessola.com/site/showPage.cgi?page=reading/evergreen/selections/2006.html

Information on Hominids:

http://www.sfwriter.com/exho.htm

Book Club discussion group guide for Hominids:

http://www.sfwriter.com/rgho.htm

Interview on author web sites

by Rob - March 13th, 2006

I did a via-email interview today for the newsletter of the Canadian Authors Association on the topic of author web sites:

Robert J. Sawyer of Mississauga, Ontario, is one of only sixteen writers in history to win the science-fiction field’s top two awards: the Hugo Award for Best Novel of the Year (which he won for The Terminal Experiment) and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America’s Nebula Award for Best Novel of the Year (which he won for Hominids). He gave the keynote address at the 1997 Annual Meeting of the Canadian Authors Association, and wrote the article about science fiction for The Canadian Writer’s Guide: Official Handbook of the Canadian Authors Association.

1. When do you think is a good time for a writer to create his or her web site?

You need a website a few months before your first book hits the stores. Prior to that, it doesn’t really do any good — no one is going to go looking for it. Yes, there are occasional stories of writers who have posted work on the web, and then found a traditional publisher via that route, but that is about as common as winning the lottery — and, just as likely, a print publisher will say they don’t want your book now that it’s been given away on the web.

2. What features are necessary? What unnecessary features do you commonly see on other writers’ web sites?

Most necessary of all: an easy, memorable URL. I have both sfwriter.com and robertjsawyer.com registered, with both pointing to the same website. When I started out, my website was at ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/sawyer — and, quite rightly, no one went to see it; my buddy Kevin J. Anderson made his wordfire.com about that time, and I realized I needed something short and sweet, too. Don’t use a name that’s tied into your current book, though. My friend John E. Stith did that with neverend.com back when his current novel was Reunion on Neverend, but now that’s hardly the book people think of when they think of him.

Unnecessary: a “welcome” page — one of those silly “click here to enter” things; Flash animation or other visual distractions.

3. What three items are most important to place on a web site?

You need: a bio; a good, publication quality author photo (linked from a smaller thumbnail) — see mine at sfwriter.com/photo.htm; sample chapters; the book cover; and an email link for yourself. Everything else is optional.

4. How has your site help your career and exposure?

It’s been huge — but, remember, I’ve had the site for over ten years now, and it’s got over a million words of material on it. I sell thousands of dollars worth of copies of my own books through my website each year, have had speaking engagements and writing assignments worth tens of thousands of dollars come to me because of it, been quote in a page-one article in USA Today because of it (and been that newspaper’s online edition’s Writer of the Month because of it), and, of course, most important of all, attracted a lot of new readers.

5. What was the biggest hurdle in creating your site? in attraction visitors?

Creating the website: zero hurdles. It’s easy, inexpensive, and anyone can do it.

To attract visitors you need to rank highly on Google. I wanted to make sure if anyone searched on either “Robert J. Sawyer” or “science fiction writer,” they’d find me (it’s searches on the latter that resulted in most of the good things I mentioned in the previous answer). Learn to use Meta tags (keywords embedded in the code for your web page), and make sure you frequently repeat the terms you want Google to rank you on. Look at my main page at sfwriter.com and count the times “science fiction writer” and “Robert J. Sawyer” appear; there are times when an easier flow for the text might have suggested me writing “SF writer” and just “Rob,” but I don’t do that — I hammer the terms that I want Google to find. The only individual science-fiction writer who has a page rank higher than me on Google right now is Robert A. Heinlein, and I’ll gladly take a back seat to him any day.

Also, put your website name everywhere: on your book’s jacket, in your “about the author,” on your letterhead, and on your business cards (you do have those, don’t you? — if not, get some; mine are from vistaprint.com, but, for God’s sake, pay the few bucks for the ones without their advertising on the back; you’re a professional, not a pauper).

6. If you could caution a writer who wants to build a web site against one thing, what would that be?

Falling into the “Field of Dreams” trap of thinking, “If I build it, they will come.” No, they won’t — not unless you publicize the URL, design a page that Google will rank highly, and, ideally, offer a reason other than just promoting your book for people to come. By far the most popular things on my website, besides the information about my own books, are my columns on how to write: sfwriter.com/owindex.htm

Italian Mindscan

by Rob - March 13th, 2006

I’m pleased to report that Italian rights to my novel Mindscan have sold to Mondadori. Woohoo!

Monday Spotlight: Outline for Neanderthal trilogy

by Rob - March 13th, 2006

There’s a discussion going on right now in my Yahoo! Groups newsgroup about outlining novels — and so I thought it would be approprirate for today’s Monday Spotlight to highlight the outline from which the entire “Neanderthal Parallax” trilogy (Hominids, Humans, and Hybrids) sold to Tor. It was quite a short outline to sell three books with, but, hey, it did the trick! (This article also discusses why I decided to commit trilogy …)

Top ten things to know about Square One

by Rob - March 12th, 2006

When people in the Greater Toronto Area ask me where I live, I tell them, “Just north of Square One” — which is a shopping mall in Mississauga, the 650,000-person city adjacent to Toronto that I live in (Pearson International Airport is actually in Mississauga, not Toronto). Here are ten facts about Square One:

1. With the reclassification of the West Edmonton Mall as an entertainment complex, Square One is now the largest retail shopping centre in Canada.

2. Square One was in existence before Mississauga. With the shopping centre’s grand opening in October of 1973, this makes it one year older than Mississauga, which was incorporated in 1974.

3. Square One is home to the largest Wal-Mart in the world (two floors and 220,000 square feet).

4. Square One was originally to be named “Huron Square”.

5. Nance MacDonald, General Manager for Square One, was the youngest female mall manager in Canada when she was appointed to the position in 1978.

6. Square One cost $44 million to build–a bargain figure, at the time!

7. Before a big meeting to attract Bay Street “suits” to invest in the construction of Square One, one of the members of the original management team had to chase a herd of cattle out of the company’s parking lot!

8. In 1978, Square One received the Energy Conservation Recognition Award for its innovative computerized temperature control system, the first in a Canadian mall.

9. Square One was the official emergency evacuation centre when a freight train carrying propane fuel derailed creating an explosion that threatened the community with its toxic fumes in 1979.

10. In 1980, at their Los Angeles convention, The International Council of Shopping Centres presented a special Maxi award to Square One for its major assistance during the Mississauga Train dereailment crisis.

Table of Contents for Boarding the Enterprise

by Rob - March 11th, 2006

The table of contents for Boarding the Enterprise: Transporters, Tribbles and the Vulcan Death Grip in Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek edited by David Gerrold and Robert J. Sawyer, coming in August 2006 from BenBella Books:

Introduction
Welcome Aboard the Enterprise
Robert J. Sawyer

Foreword
The Trouble With Trek
David Gerrold

Star Trek in the Real World
Norman Spinrad

I Remember Star Trek . . .
D. C. Fontana

All Our Tomorrows
Allen Steele

The Prime Question
Eric Greene

We Find the One Quite Adequate
Michael Burstein

Who Am I?: Personal Identity in the Original Star Trek
Lyle Zynda

What Have You Done With Spock’s Brain?!?
Don DeBrandt

Lost Secrets of Pre-War Human Technology
Lawrence Watt-Evans

Exaggerate with Extreme Prejudice
Robert A. Metzger

To Boldly Teach What No One Has Taught Before
David DeGraff

Who Killed the Space Race?
Adam Roberts

Alexander for the Modern Age
Melissa Dickinson

How Star Trek Liberated Television
Paul Levinson

Being Better
Howard Weinstein

By Dawn’s Early Light

by Rob - March 8th, 2006

I really like this HBO TV movie, which stars (among other people) Darren McGavin, who just passed away, Martin Landau, and James Earl Jones. Gripping from beginning to end, and Amazon.com has it on for $6.99 on DVD. Right up there with Dr. Strangelove and Fail-Safe as far as films about the brink of nuclear war go …

robertjsawyer.com is live

by Rob - March 7th, 2006

I finally got around to installing robertjsawyer.com as a synonym for sfwriter.com — either one will take you to my website. :)

Hugo nomination deadline is this Friday

by Rob - March 7th, 2006

Just a polite reminder for those who were members of last year’s Worldcon in Glasgow or are members of this year’s Worldcon in Los Angeles that the Hugo voting deadline is this Friday (end of the day).

I hope you’ll consider my novel Mindscan, published by Tor, and my novella “Identity Theft” from Down These Dark Spaceways — “Identity Theft” is a current Nebula nominee.

Hugo nominators can find the full text of “Identity Theft” here as a PDF file and here as a Word document.

Of course, I’d be nothing without my editors: David G. Hartwell (who edited Mindscan) and Mike Resnick (who edited “Identity Theft”) are both eligible in the Best Editor category — and Mike, of course, is eligible for his fiction, too. And I have to say that Stephan Martiniere deserves a Hugo nomination for his wonderful work, which included the Mindscan cover.

SF writers and blogging

by Rob - March 6th, 2006

Carol Pinchefsky has written a very good article about SF writers and blogging, which includes quotes from me, for Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show. You’ll find it here.

Monday Spotlight: Jesuit Brothers

by Rob - March 6th, 2006

I used to make my living writing nonfiction. Twenty-one years ago this month, an article I wrote appeared in, of all things, Compass: The Jesuit Journal. I’d been hired by the Jesuits of Upper Canada to write an article about what it’s like to be a Jesuit Brother; back then, I didn’t know any, although today Vatican astronomer Brother Guy Consolmagno is a friend of mine. To do the aritcle, I spent a “Day with the Jesuit Brothers” — two decades on, it’s still a day I fondly remember.

A contest for new writers

by Rob - March 5th, 2006

I think this is a very worthwhile short-story contest for emerging writers. It’s held annually in conjunction with Con-Version, Calgary’s SF convention, but submissions are open to anyone. The contest is named in honour of my great friend and writing student Robyn Herrington, who died two years ago.

Science Friday with Octavia Butler and David Brin

by Rob - March 4th, 2006

A very good half-hour podcast from NPR’s Science Friday is here. It’s hosted by Ira Flatow, and features Octavia Butler, who died last week, plus David Brin and Lawrence Krauss, on the occasion of the opening of the Science Fiction Museum in Seattle.

(I myself was a guest on Science Friday once, along with Leonard Nimoy and John Cramer, back in 1998; that one’s only available in RealAudio, but you can still listen to it here, if you have the free RealPlayer installed.)

Introduction to Boarding the Enterprise

by Rob - March 1st, 2006

The introduction to Boarding the Enterprise, coming in August 2006 from BenBella Books:

Welcome Aboard the Enterprise

by Robert J. Sawyer

Last fall, I got invited to the Singapore Writers Festival, along with fellow science fiction authors Bruce Sterling and Norman Spinrad. Periodically, when we were out sightseeing in that beautiful city, people would notice our fancy name badges, or overhear us chatting about the festival, and ask who we were. At first we mentioned our books, but, of course, the titles elicited blank stares. And so I started simply pointing to Norman and saying, “This man wrote an episode of Star Trek.”

“Oh, wow!” people always replied. “Which one?”

“`The Doomsday Machine,'” I said. And the appreciative nods began. Four decades on, and all over the planet, people still know and love Star Trek — indeed, they know it so well that they recognize individual episodes by their titles.

And of course, everyone is familiar with the catch phrases from the show: “Beam me up,” “He’s dead, Jim,” “the Prime Directive,” “warp factor six,” “At the time, it seemed the logical thing to do,” “phasers on stun,” “hailing frequencies open,” “Live long and prosper” and the most-famous split infinitive in human history, “To boldly go where no man has gone before.”

Those last words, part of Star Trek‘s opening narration, were first heard on September 8, 1966, when the debut episode was broadcast. In a way, that narration was hopelessly optimistic: it promised a five-year mission for the starship Enterprise, but Star Trek was taken off the air after only three seasons.

But in another way, the words also turned out to be enormously shortsighted. Forty years on — time enough for eight five-year missions — Star Trek is such a major part of our culture that it’s almost impossible to imagine the world without it. More people today know who Mr. Spock is than Dr. Spock; the prototype of the Space Shuttle — still the most advanced spacecraft humanity has ever built — was named Enterprise; our cell phones flip open just like Captain Kirk’s communicator; and the original fourteen-foot model of good old NCC-1701 is on permanent display at the Smithsonian.

To date, there have been five primetime television Star Trek series, a Saturday-morning animated Star Trek series, ten Star Trek motion pictures and hundreds of Star Trek books. And it all started when a former cop and airline pilot named Eugene Wesley Roddenberry decided that maybe, just maybe, television audiences were ready for some adult science fiction. His “`Wagon Train’ to the stars,” with its irresistible mix of gaudy sets, hammy acting and sly social commentary, has been warmly embraced now by two full generations of human beings.

Granted, for the first time in two decades, there’s no new Star Trek TV series in production, and, yes, there are no new Star Trek movies currently in the works. But if we’ve learned anything from the voyages of the Enterprise, it’s that even death is not permanent. Star Trek, no doubt, will live again.

And well it should: No TV series of any type has ever been so widely loved — or been so important. Yes, important: Star Trek was the only dramatic TV show of its day to talk, even in veiled terms, about the Vietnam conflict, and it also tackled overpopulation, religious intolerance and race relations (who can forget Frank Gorshin — Batman‘s Riddler — running about with his face painted half-black and half-white?). As William Marshall, who played cyberneticist Dr. Richard Daystrom in the episode “The Ultimate Computer” (Season 2-Episode 24), said in an interview shortly before he passed away, it’s impossible to overstate the impact it had in the 1960s when white Captain Kirk referred to the black Daystrom as “Sir.” Was it any surprise, two decades later, that NASA hired Nichelle Nichols, who played Lt. Uhura, to help recruit the first minority astronauts? Star Trek gave us an appealing vision of a tolerant future that included everyone.

And that future is still compelling. We may not be quite sure how to get there from here but, as Edith Keeler said in Harlan Ellison’s episode “The City on the Edge of Forever” (1-28), Star Trek taught us that the days and the years ahead are worth living for. More than anything else, the series was about hope.

To celebrate four decades of exploring strange new worlds, of seeking out new life and new civilizations, we’ve commissioned these commemorative essays. Some are by the people who actually made Star Trek: Norman Spinrad is here, along with D. C. Fontana, Howard Weinstein and my coeditor, David Gerrold, all of whom penned adventures of Kirk, Spock and McCoy that actually aired on TV. Other essays are by people like me: the current crop of science fiction writers who were deeply influenced by Star Trek, and at least in part took up our profession because of it. Still others are by academics who have found in those original seventy-nine hour-long episodes much worth pondering. Together, in these pages, we celebrate Star Trek with all the over-the-top gusto of Jim Kirk, we analyze it with the cool logic of Commander Spock, and we explore its fallible, human side with the crusty warmth of “Bones” McCoy.

The first-ever book about Star Trek was the phenomenally influential The Making of Star Trek, published in 1968 when the original series was still in production. Written by Stephen E. Whitfield and Gene Roddenberry, it made possible the Star Trek fan-following that exists today, providing us with photographs of the props that were only glimpsed on screen, official biographies of the characters, blueprints of the Enterprise and the Klingon battle cruiser, and the first ever Star Trek episode checklist. That book ended with these words: “Whither Star Trek? It really doesn’t matter. We have its legacy … all we have to do is use it.”

After forty years, we still don’t know where Star Trek is going. But one thing is sure: it’ll be a wondrous journey. So, come on aboard — we’re about to leave orbit. Mr. Sulu, ahead warp factor one!

Monday Spotlight: Going to Mars

by Rob - February 28th, 2006

Time for another Monday Spotlight, highlighting one of the 530 articles on my website at sfwriter.com.

As NASA continues to struggle with budget cuts, and a presidential vision of spaceflight that came with no guaranteed funding, I’m reminded of the speech the fictitious US president gave in my novel Hybrids. There, the speech is divided into 44 little snippets, with one at the beginning of each chapters. But, for our spotlight today, here’s the whole speech as a single document.

Rob’s "Identity Theft" a Nebula Award finalist

by Rob - February 25th, 2006

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America have just announced the final ballot for this year’s Nebula Awards. My “Identity Theft” is one of five finalists in the novella category. “Identity Theft” has already won the world’s top prize for SF writing, the 6,000-euro Premio UPC.

For the convenience of SFWA members — who now are voting on the final Nebula ballot — as well as for those who might like to read “Identity Theft” as they contemplate what to nominate for the Hugo and Aurora Awards — the full text (all 25,000 words) of “Identity Theft” is available online as a Word document and an Acrobat PDF file.

“Identity Theft” was first published in the wonderful anthology Down These Dark Spaceways, edited by Mike Resnick for the Science Fiction Book Club. This makes me the first person ever to be nominated for a major award for an original Science Fiction Book Club publication, and I’m very proud of that.

The full final Nebula Award ballot is here.

Toronto’s Ad Astra loses three of its Guests of Honour

by Rob - February 24th, 2006

It’ll still be a wonderful con, with authors Terry Brooks and Peter David, editor Betsty Mitchell from Del Rey, and fan David Warren (who, among other things, is also my real-estate lawyer), but the other announced guests have all bowed out. Here’s the scoop from Ad Astra’s website:

As I’m sure some have now noticed, Ray Harryhausen, Ray Bradbury and Rowena have been removed from our website as Guests of Honour for our upcoming convention.

Although this is very disheartening, we could not avoid the situation.

Ray Harryhausen was contacted last year via his British agent. They agreed on attending our convention, even going so far as to waive the normal appearance fee. We were overjoyed. We were also informed that they would be releasing a new book this year in North America, so we were trying to tie in a book launch. Sadly, Ray’s North American agent was not happy with the arrangements, and booked Ray for a conflicting convention. As they were willing to pay a large stipend, and we could not, Ray has been booked with them.

Ray Bradbury has informed us that he has a project in the works that has had it’s deadline changed, and it now also conflicts with Ad Astra. Again, earning a living has won out over a free appearance.

Rowena was forced to cancel when she ran into some difficulties with Canada Customs and importing her work. She has also opted to not attend in order to save herself some money.

So, although it is sad to lose three large guests so suddenly, we certainly understand why they opt to do what is financially best for them, especially in today’s economy.

We wish them the best going forward.

We are currently looking to replace them with other Guests of Honour. At this point, we will not be making any announcements vis-a-vis who we are contacting. Once we have firmed up an appearance, we will make an announcement and update our website.

Apes live!

by Rob - February 21st, 2006

Coming March 28, 2006: Planet of the Apes – The Ultimate DVD Collection – With Ape Head Packaging. All five original movies, the entire live-action TV series, the entire animated TV series, Tim Burton’s remake, and all sorts of extra features. Woohoo!

Hartwell wins Skylark

by Rob - February 21st, 2006

My editor, Dr. David G. Hartwell, won the Skylark Award this past weekend:

The Edward E. Smith Memorial Award for Imaginative Fiction (the Skylark) is presented annually by the New England Science Fiction Association to some person, who in the opinion of the membership, has contributed significantly to science fiction, both through work in the field and by exemplifying the personal qualities which made the late “Doc” Smith well-loved by those who knew him.

Way to go, David!

My GoH streak continues: Winnipeg

by Rob - February 20th, 2006

Accepted another Guest of Honor offer today; this one from KeyCon 23 in Winnipeg, Manitoba. That makes three GoH offers in the last month: To Be CONtinued in Chicago, MileHighCon in Denver, and KeyCon in Winnipeg.

The KeyCon one is particularly sweet, because, I’m told, this is the first time in the 23-year-history of KeyCon that they’ve had the same person be Guest of Honor for a second time (I was also GoH at KeyCon 20). Woohoo!

KeyCon will be held May 19-21, 2006, in Winnipeg. More info is here.

Monday Spotlight: Fermi Paradox

by Rob - February 20th, 2006

Time for this week’s Monday Spotlight, highlighting one of the 530 articles on my website at sfwriter.com.

I’ve always been fascinated by the Fermi Paradox (and offer one fanciful solution to it in my Sherlock Holmes pastiche “You See But You Do Not Observer”, which is available through Fictionwise). Here, in today’s spotlighted article entitled “Where are the Aliens?”, I provide a more chilling answer.

Aurora Award nominations now open

by Rob - February 19th, 2006

Nominations are now open for this year’s Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Awards (the Auroras). Any Canadian may nominate, and there’s no charge to do so.

The ballot, in PDF format, is here.

And more info about the awards is here.

I confess to having Aurora hopes for my novel Mindscan (in the Long-Form English category) and for my novella “Identity Theft” (in the Short-Form English category).

If you’re a potential Aurora nominator, you can find the full text of “Identity Theft” here:

http://www.sfwriter.com/identity.pdf (as an Acrobat file)

http://www.sfwriter.com/identity.doc (as a Word document)

Cheers,

Rob

Interesting website

by Rob - February 18th, 2006

Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies

Mad Scientist at the CBC

by Rob - February 18th, 2006

My friend Joe Mahoney, the producer at CBC Radio who I worked with on the various pilots for Faster Than Light, our aborted series about SF, has uploaded some humorous audio clips that include me to his blog:

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Enjoy!

Public Lending Right

by Rob - February 17th, 2006

Things like the Book Lover’s Ball (see the next entry) are one of the reasons I love being an author in Canada — it’s hard to imagine a genre-fiction writer being so well treated in the States.

Another thing I love is that my federal government sends me a kickback every February to compensate me for royalties lost through the circulation of my books through public libraries. (Most Western countries do this for their domestic authors, recognizing the principle that it’s unfair to tax an author and then use those tax dollars to finance a system that deprives the author of income; the U.S. is a notable exception, in not offering such payments to authors). It’s called “The Public Lending Right,” and the cheque I got was for $2,873.50, which was the maximum any one author was allowed to receive this year.

The system is based on surveying the card catalogs of seven randomly selected mid-sized libraries. If a specific title of yours is in one of the libraries (regardless of how many copies that library has of that title), you get a “hit” worth (this year) $41.05; if you’re in all seven libraries with that title, you get seven times that amount, which is $287.35. You get a half-hit for translated editions. In aggregate, my hits happened to be worth $5,529.46 — but, as I said, there’s a maximum, to keep the most-popular authors from taking all the money out of the pool.

If you’re curious about the math of such things, have a look here (a PDF file showing my hit schedule for this year). I was pleased to see that the English editions of every single one of my novels are in every one of the libraries, and even oddball stuff like my small-press essay collection Relativity was in three of the seven libraries searched.

Book Lover’s Ball a success

by Rob - February 17th, 2006

The Book Lover’s Ball yesterday went fabulously, and was a first-class event from beginning to end — valet parking, open bar, amazing food, the works. They’d been hoping to sell at least 200 tickets at Cdn$350 a pop, but actually sold 410. Besides the authors (including Margaret Atwood and Peter C. Newman), notables on hand included Adrienne Clarkson (former Governor-General of Canada), Bob Rae (former premier of Ontario) David Miller (current mayor of Toronto), David Crombie (former mayor of Toronto), Seamus O’Reagan (co-host of Canada A.M.), and Gord Martineau (anchor of CityPluse News).

Everybody sitting at my table got a free hardcover copy of Mindscan, courtesy of H.B. Fenn and Company, Tor’s Canadian distributor.

My home on display

by Rob - February 16th, 2006

Just received the February 2006 issue of The New York Review of Science Fiction. It starts with six black-and-white photos taken during my editor David G. Hartwell’s December 2005 trip to Toronto, during which he stayed at my home. Four of the photos are actually in Carolyn and my penthouse apartment, taken during a reception we held for David’s authors:

  • Me in my office
  • Phyllis Gotlieb, Terence M. Green and son Daniel, Pat Forde, and me in my living room
  • Peter Watts holding forth in front of my fireplace, while Karl Schroeder and others look on
  • Carolyn Clink and Kelly Gotlieb in our living room (in a sort of Batman-villain’s-lair framing, with the camera tilted)

The other two photos are David at a store we visited, and me at Toronto’s Bakka-Phoenix Books.

Cool!

Natural dialogue

by Rob - February 16th, 2006

It’s very difficult for most writers to do natural-sounding dialogue. Whatever skill I have at it came from years of being a freelance magazine journalist, and transcribing hundreds of hours of interviews, and also from the countless hours I spent editing audio tape back in the 1980s, when I was doing some work for CBC Radio’s Ideas series.

Every day, I spend half an hour on a treadmill, and I usually watch something on DVD while doing so. I recently finished watching the entire run of the BBC series The Office, and today finished Season Three of the HBO series Curb Your Enthusiasm. Both are brilliant, and very, very funny, but perhaps the most remarkable thing about them is that they have incredibly natural dialogue.

Interestingly, the techniques by the scriptwriters — Stephen Merchant and Ricky Gervais in the case of the The Office, and Larry David and his team for Curb Your Enthusiasm — use very different techniques to get this effect. The Office has every word, every nuance, scripted (and the scripts are available in book form), while Curb Your Enthusiasm is at least partially improvised. But both are well worth studying.

Although ostensibly a comedy, I found The Office quite poignant in a lot of ways. As Thoreau said, most of us live lives of quiet desperation. The dead-end existences of most of the people in that show are heart-breaking to watch, while at the same time ringing as absolutely true. It’s one of the best TV shows I ever seen.

I did watch one episode of the American version of The Office, just to see how they’d managed the translation; it’s a very faithful adaptation. Ridiculously, though, the guy who adapted it for American television — by doing little more than changing character names and moving the setting from Slough to Scranton — gets higher billing than the people who actually created the show (Merchant and Gervais). Anyway, the US version is decent, but the UK version is the one to see, in my opinion.

Japanese Hybrids

by Rob - February 16th, 2006

Today’s mail brought my author’s copies of the lovely Japanese edition of Hybrids, final volume of my Neanderthal Parallax trilogy, translated, as always, by my friend Masayuki Uchida.