I’ve accepted an invitation to be Guest of Honor at MileHighCon 38 in Denver, Colorado, October 27-29, 2006.
This on top of the invitation I accepted six days ago to be Guest of Honor at To Be CONtinued in Chicago. Woohoo!
Time for another RJS Monday Spotlight, calling out one of the 500+ documents on my website at sfwriter.com.
Back in 2000, Borders Books asked me to write an essay to help promote my novel Calculating God. I was glad to oblige, and this provocative little piece, entitled “Science and God” was the result … I think it makes interesting reading today, because it pre-dates by several years the recent “Intelligent Design” controversy.
(This documents came to mind because I was just asked if it could be used as a handout for a panel at the science-fiction convention MidSouthCon in Memphis; of course I said yes.)
Here’s a lovely page of tributes to Arthur C. Clarke by other SF authors. The tributes are alphabetical by author; scroll down to see mine, which says:
Arthur C. Clarke has been the single greatest influence on me, and, in fact, I just quoted one of Clarke’s dicta on writing (‘the best way to end a novel is by opening up a new vista that allows the reader to write the sequel in his or her own mind’) to my editor. Indeed, given that so much of my own work is based on exploring the science-vs.-religion conflict, I’d have to say that the stories ‘The Nine Billion Names of God’ and the ‘The Star’ (plus the essay ‘God and Einstein’ from ‘Report on Planet Three’) had a bigger impact on me than anything else I’ve ever read. Clarke’s liberal humanism also meant an enormous amount to me, and was a needed antidote, at least in the eyes of this bleeding-heart-liberal Canadian, to the conservative politics I was seeing in so much American hard-SF. Long live Sir Arthur!
Needing a break from a day of furious editing, Carolyn and I watched the first episode of The Time Tunnel on DVD this evening. Of course, the show has all sorts of logical problems, but it’s still enormous fun. The first episode features Michael Rennie (Klaatu from The Day the Earth Stood Still) as the captain of the Titanic and the irresistible Susan Hampshire (Fleur Forsyte from the 1960s version of The Forsyte Saga, which I’ve watched through in its entirety three times in my life). The art direction is fabulous.
We also skipped ahead to the best parts of the third episode, when Halley’s Comet gets accidentally pulled into the Time Tunnel, and Dr. Newman comes home — ten years early. Cool stuff!
There are a couple of other episodes I’m very fond of: the one with Nehemiah Persoff as the inventor of a Soviet Time Tunnel in the 1950s — that one is included in this DVD boxed set of the first fifteen episodes — and “The Last Patrol,” with Carroll O’Connor (later, Archie Bunker). Also, the one about the walls of Jericho was the first science-vs.-religion exploration I ever saw, and obviously went on to influence my own writing.
The show deserves enormous kudos, by the way, for casting Lee Meriwether as a brainy female scientist. She happens to be very attractive (the actress is a former Miss America) but she’s way more in control and sensible than any of the miniskirted females aboard the Enterprise on classic Star Trek, which was in production at the same time. Never does she become the love interest, or do anything gratuitously sexy; she’s just brilliant and competent and level-headed (in the third episode, she saves a man’s life while all the other male characters stand around ineffectually). Full marks, and, if you’ll forgive me, way ahead of its time …
A writer friend is contemplating going to a science-fiction convention (“a con”) to promote a first novel from a small press. Here’s the advice I offered:
I feel I should say a few words, one writer to another, about going to conventions on one’s own nickel.
The upcoming con you’re thinking of going to will doubtless be a wonderful event: you’ll have fun and you’ll meet neat people. But I should point out that last year, when I went to the same con, just as a panelist, as far as I could tell, not one single copy of my new novel Mindscan sold in the dealers’ room. And even for a guest of honor at a con, selling ten copies of a book over the course of a weekend is a lot.
Also, if you’re a small-press author, it’s very likely that dealers won’t have copies of your book; few dealers stock small-press titles. Even if you’re with a major press, you may still find that no one has thought to bring your book; many cons are dilatory about letting dealers know who will actually be on programming. You might want to bring a half-dozen copies of your title on your own, and either sell them directly after your reading or offer them to a dealer to sell for you (normally, dealers take a 40% commission, so you barely break even doing this if you’ve bought copies at your author’s discount, although you do eventually get royalties credited to your account).
I just want you to have your eyes wide open about the return-on-investment of making such an expensive trip. As an author, I can’t say that over the years going to cons has had great financial benefits for me. They’ve been lots of fun, sure — but I figure I spend at least $500 on any out-of-town con, and the return is never even a tenth of that in royalties. I just want to make sure you understand that going to cons is neither required nor expected from a business point of view. You should only do it if it’s something you really want to do for personal enjoyment.
That said, if you are going to go to a con as a pro, I have some tips that I offer to every writer:
More on why writers go to cons
A 37-minute podcast with me and Tee Morris on how writers can get the most out of cons and other ways of promoting their books.
Best of luck!
I’ve accepted an invitation to be Author Guest of Honor at the science-fiction convention To Be CONtinued in suburban Chicago on May 12-14, 2006.
Info about the convention is here.
Came across this transcript of William Shatner’s famous “Get a life!” appearance on Saturday Night Live. Amazing to think that as many years have now elapsed since this skit first aired in 1986 as separated the skit from the debut of Star Trek …
The next book under my Robert J. Sawyer Books imprint for Red Deer Press is A Small and Remarkable Life, by Hugo, Campbell, and World Fantasy Award-finalist Nick DiChario. Check out Nick’s spiffy new website for all the details.
The Winnipeg Free Press, the major daily paper in Winnipeg, Manitoba, ran a brief review of Mindscan yesterday; the review is by David Pitt:
Once again Ontario’s Robert J. Sawyer takes something that seems wildly improbable — the notion of transferring human consciousness to an artificial body — and uses it as a jumping-off point for an exploration of some very nifty ideas.
In Mindscan (Tor, 370 pages, $10), a man with a life-threatening disease transfers himself into a synthetic body. When his biological self (now living in a sort of retirement community on the moon) learns his disease can be cured, he wants to return home. But which of the two Jake Sullivans is the real Jake?
On its surface a very inventive science-fiction story, the novel is actually a rumination on the nature of consciousness and identity. It is another excellent (not to mention surprising) novel from one of the genre’s brightest lights.
Just after midnight here in Toronto, meaning it’s time for another RJS Monday Spotlight!
I’ve long had a great relationship with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, going back to 1985, when I wrote and narrated three hour-long documentaries on SF for their venerable Ideas series. More recently, I did a series of brief commentaries on cutting-edge science for them, under the umbrella title “Science FACTion.” One of these was on the topic of nuclear-waste markers, something that I twisted in a new way involving uploaded consciousness in my novel Calculating God.
Anyway, here’s this week’s Monday Spotlight, my commentary for CBC Radio on “Devising Markers for Nuclear Waste Sites.”
(As you can see, the script called for the use of the wonderful John Williams theme from the old Irwin Allen TV series The Time Tunnel, the first fifteen episodes of which just came out on DVD — and were promptly snapped up by me.)
My brother Alan dug this up going through some old audio tape. It’s from February 13, 1968, when I was seven years old. The first voice you’ll hear is my father …
The clip runs 45 seconds, and you’ll need Windows Media Player, or something else that plays WMA files, to hear it …
Here’s a look at the cover 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 this fall from BenBella Books to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the debut of Star Trek.
It’s a terrific collection of essays; I’ll post the table of contents later this month (we’re still working out the order the essays will go in). And, yes, I’ve already told the publisher to correct the typo on the cover … :)
A fabulous week on the road come to an end.
On Friday, January 27, 2006, I flew to Edmonton, Alberta, courtesy of the Canada Council for the Arts. That afternoon, I had a terrific get-together with Diane Walton and Danica LeBlanc, both of On Spec: The Canadian Magazine of the Fantastic, at the magazine’s offices in downtown Edmonton. Next up was an interview with Anna Borowiecki of the St. Albert Gazette (which ran this picture of me, taken the next day, accompanying her article). Then it was off to a wonderful steak dinner with local writers Barb Galler-Smith and Ann Marston, and Barb’s husband John.
Saturday, Jaline, the district sales rep for H.B. Fenn and Company, Tor’s Canadian distributor, took me around to various stores for drop-in signings, then it was off to the Chapters superstore in St. Albert (near Edmonton) for a well-attended signing and reading from Mindscan (I read the scene where the uploaded Jake first wakes up in his new body). Dinner that night was pizza with Minister Faust, the brilliant Edmontonian author of Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad.
Sunday morning, it was brunch with my friend Phil Currie, one of the world’s leading dinosaur experts, his wife paleontologist Eva Kopplelhus, and one of their grad students (having earlier in the day met with some more of Phil’s grad students at Phil’s new lab at the University of Alberta, where he’s now working). After that it was time for the main event — my reading at the Edmonton Public Library; I read the examination and cross-examination of Caleb Poe, from Mindscan. The event was very well attended, and the bookseller (Audrey’s Books) sold lots of copies of my books (intriguingly, more hardcovers than paperbacks of Mindscan — they had both in stock). After that, it was dinner with my friends Jeff Krehmer (of Calgary’s Imaginative Fiction Writers’ Association) and his girlfriend Shawn Moore; Jeff then drove me down to Calgary.
On Wednesday morning, I went to the University of Calgary, and spoke to the science-fiction class there. Prof. Ruby Ramraj teaches my novel Golden Fleece, and this was the second time I’d visited one of her classes. The students had lots of great questions. For instance, one of them had read both Golden Fleece (my first novel) and Calculating God (my twelfth), and had noted that the amount of science I expected the reader to be familiar with before starting the book was much less in my more recent title. He asked if this was deliberate, and I said it indeed was — Golden Fleece was designed solely for the science-fiction reader, but, starting with The Terminal Experiment in 1995, I’d been very deliberately trying to make my SF accessible to mainstream readers without alienating the core SF audience; it’s a delicate tightrope walk.
Two of Phil Currie’s grad students came to this class as well, as did Mary Hemmings, a librarian involved with the Gibson Collection, a massive donation of science fiction and fantasy given a few years ago to the University of Calgary. After my talk, she and I and English-department member Christian Bök went out for coffee, then Mary and I went for lunch. Wednesday night was dinner out with Randy McCharles, chair of the 2008 World Fantasy Convention in Calgary, at my favorite Calgary pizza place, Greco.
Thursday was the monthly meeting of IFWA, the Imaginative Fiction Writers’ Association. Beforehand, I dropped by Sentry Box, Calgary’s SF specialty store (and saw there for the first time the cover for Slipstreams, the DAW anthology coming in May that features my short story “Biding Time,” a sequel to my current Nebula Award-finalist “Identity Theft”). Then it was off to pre-meeting drinks at Jackdaws, the pub across the street.
The meeting itself featured a panel discussion by those (including myself) who have taken agent Donald Maass’s terrific “Writing the Breakout Novel” seminar. After the meeting, it was off to a different pub for more food, drink, and great conversation. I spent a lot of time there talking to Danita Maslan, whose wonderful novel Rogue Harvest is the most recent title under the Robert J. Sawyer Books imprint I edit for Red Deer Press.
And now I’m back home in Mississauga. It was a truly terrific trip.
People often ask me to recommend other authors, and I’m always happy to do so. One of my all-time favorites is Jack McDevitt. Locus unveiled its current bestsellers list today, and the paperback of Jack’s Polaris is number one on the list. Congratulations, Jack!
It’s Monday morning: time for another RJS Monday Spotlight, calling attention to one of the 500+ documents on my website at sfwriter.com.
As it happens, I’m in Alberta right now. Yesterday, I did a reading from Mindscan at the Edmonton Public Library, which went over very well. Indeed, people often compliment me not just on what I read but how well I read it, which is nice. There’s nothing more excruciating than sitting through a bad public reading, which is why, back in 1992, I wrote this little guide to doing readings. Enjoy!
I’ll be in Edmonton, Alberta, this weekend. If you’re in E-town, come and see me signing and reading Saturday at 5:00 p.m. at the Chapters bookstore in St. Albert, or Sunday at 2:00 p.m. at the Stanley A. Milner Branch of the Edmonton Public Library downtown.
Received my contributor’s copy of the handsome new anthology FutureShocks, edited by Lou Anders and published by Roc. It contains my story “Flashes,” which begins thus:
My heart pounded as I surveyed the scene. It was a horrific, but oddly appropriate, image: a bright light pulsing on and off. The light was the setting sun, visible through the window, and the pulsing was caused by the rhythmic swaying of the corpse, dangling from a makeshift noose, as it passed in front of the blood-red disk.
“Another one, eh, Detective?” said Chiu, the campus security guard, from behind me. His tone was soft.
I looked around the office. The computer monitor was showing a virtual desktop with a panoramic view of a spiral galaxy as the wallpaper; no files were open. Nor was there any sheet of e-paper prominently displayed on the real desktop. The poor bastards didn’t even bother to leave suicide notes anymore. There was no point; it had all already been said.
“Yeah,” I said quietly, responding to Chiu. “Another one.”
The dead man was maybe sixty, scrawny, mostly bald. He was wearing black denim jeans and a black turtleneck sweater, the standard professorial look these days. His noose was fashioned out of fiber-optic cabling, giving it a pearlescent sheen in the sunlight. His eyes had bugged out, and his mouth was hanging open.
“I knew him a bit,” said Chiu. “Ethan McCharles. Nice guy — he always remembered my name. So many of the profs, they think they’re too important to say hi to a security guard. But not him.”
I nodded. It was as good a eulogy as one could hope for — honest, spontaneous, heartfelt.
Chiu went on. “He was married,” he said, pointing to the gold band on the corpse’s left hand. “I think his wife works here, too.”
I felt my stomach tightening, and I let out a sigh. My favorite thing: informing the spouse.
Today is a day for work on Robert J. Sawyer Books, the line of SF books I edit for Calgary’s Red Deer Press. Had to do cover copy for the trade-paperback reissues of Marcos Donnelly’s Letters from the Flesh and Andrew Weiner’s Getting Near the End, plus cover copy for our newest title, Nick DiChario’s A Small and Remarkable Life. Also, reviewing cover designs for the Donnelly trade paperback, trying to track down rights to a book we want to reissue, and reading slush. Whew!
My friend Mark Leslie tagged me in his blog to talk about books, so here goes:
Total number of books I’ve owned:
A trickier question than it might seem. I’ve divested myself of a lot of books over the years, and besides all the ones in my bookcases I still have many hundreds in unopened boxes from when I last moved, five years ago. But the number 2,000 sounds about right to me …
The last book I bought:
A trade paperback of Helter Skelter by Vincent Bugliosi, to replace my old mass-market paperback that’s in one of the boxes mentioned above; I needed the book as a prop for my appearance on TVOntario’s More 2 Life discussed below. (Incidentally, I also watched the 1976 Helter Skelter miniseries for the third time this week; much of the acting in it is astonishingly good — way better than typical Seventies television — and it has Alan Oppenheimer in it, whom I’ll watch in anything.)
The last book I read:
Believe it or not, The Sands of Mars by Arthur C. Clarke, which I had never read before. Delightful. It was Clarke’s first full-length novel, and it was fascinating to see the seeds for things he did later in it: the plots of 2010 and A Fall of Moondust are both presaged here.
Five books that mean a lot to me:
Oooh! Let me do six:
The books in my collection where the physical object means a lot to me:
My website at sfwriter.com contains 530 documents totaling over one million words of text. Although a few pages there are hit frequently, lots of the stuff only attracts an occasional visitor. I thought it would be fun to start each Monday by spotlighting what I think is an interesting, but seldom-looked-at, document on my site. So, here is the first weekly RJS “Monday Spotlight,” an essay entitled “Is Canadian SF Different from American SF?”
I wrote this essay nine years ago, back in 1997, but, given that the cover story in the current Locus wrestles with the very same issue (and features another essay by me), I thought people might enjoy a look at this older piece.
I have two appearances coming up on TVOntario’s More 2 Life with Mary Ito. TVOntario is the educational broadcaster in Ontario, Canada.
This Thursday, January 26, 2006, at 2:00 p.m., horror writer Edo van Belkom and I will be on talking about books that really frightened us (my picks are Helter Skelter by Vincent Bugliosi, The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton, and The Time Machine by H.G. Wells).
And on Tuesday, March 28, 2006, at 2:00 p.m., I’ll be part of a panel discussion about what it means to be human.
Not that anyone’s keeping track, but these will be my seventh and eighth appearances on More 2 Life, and the one this week will mark my 221st TV appearance.
A sad truth about writing short fiction is that the work is so rarely reviewed. So imagine my delight on discovering a site that has reviews of six of my short stories (all of which are available through Fictionwise.com via links on the reviewer’s site). Over at Rainbow Dragon, you’ll find reviews of:
as well as reviews of my novels Hominids and Calculating God.
Lots of other fascinating reviews are available there, too.
My favourite magazine, New Scientist, has just published some fascinating research related to who is telling more lies among the Canadian candidates in the election coming up next week. (Personally, I’m voting Liberal despite Martin.)
Wow! I’m very pleased to see that this blog is currently #1 on the Blogger “Blogs of Note” list, on the Blogger home page. Thanks to those who pointed that out to me — and welcome to all the new visitors!
To my delight, Janis Ackroyd, my wonderful publicist at H.B. Fenn, Tor’s Canadian distributor, has just informed me that last week the mass-market paperback of Mindscan was number 10 on the BookManager New Releases bestsellers list, compiled by BookManager, the company that makes the point-of-sale software program used by the majority of independent bookstores in Canada. I was sandwiched between the romance novel Almost a Lady by Jane Feather at number 9 and the self-help book Life Strategies by Dr. Phil at number 11.
I think this is the coolest thing: Mark Kelly of the Locus website has compiled a directory showing just about every SF&F book and magazine cover from the last year (the wonderful Stephan Martiniere did the cover for my Mindscan, and you can see five more covers he had published in 2005).
The open party Carolyn and I threw yesterday went fabulously!
We had about 120 people go through our doors, and peaked at about 100 people present. Folks started showing up around 6:30 p.m. and the last ones left at 2:00 a.m. Much food was eaten, much beer and soft drinks were drunk, and everyone seemed to have a good time.
It was an eclectic mix of people — old time Toronto fans, including Grant Schuyler (who used to be moderator of the Ontario Science Fiction Club, before I took over, back in the 1970s), Hugo-winning fanzine editor Mike Glicksohn, and Hugo-nominated fan artist Taral; many of my writing students (including a good contingent from The Fledglings, the writers’ workshop that spun off of my tenure at Writer-in-Residence at the Merril Collection ; lots of current convention organizers; lots of members of the USS Hudson Bay (local SF club, of which I’m a proud member); lots of my writing students; many readers of my books who aren’t involved in fandom; and so on.
And, as a testament to what fine people SF fans are, nothing was broken and nobody spilled anything on the rug. :)
If you’re flying American Airlines between now and the end of this month, have a look a their inflight magazine, American Way. The current issue (dated January 15, 2006) is supposed to contain a little write-up in their books section about Robert J. Sawyer Books, the line of science-fiction books I edit for Red Deer Press. The piece is by Tracy Staton.
I won’t be flying AA myself this month, but I’d be very grateful to anyone who could pick up copies for me. My mailing address is:
Robert J. Sawyer
100 City Centre Drive
PO Box 2065
Mississauga, ON
Canada L5B 3C6
Many thanks!
My newsgroup at Yahoo! Groups just signed up its one thousandth member! Woohoo!
Come join us!
I’ve always been a fan of Tom Lehrer, and was delighted to see that there’s a new play about him. Just bought tickets; looking forward to it!
