My friend Andrew Zimmerman Jones points out that I’m referred to in this article over on Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show. On the topic of how to move out of the slush pile, my editor David G. Hartwell says: “Get a personal recommendation. If Robert J. Sawyer comes up to me at a con and says I know this talented writer and you’ve got to read her right away, I will.”
Talk about an unlikely place for an SF review! The current issue of the Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice (Volume 47, Number 4), published by the Canadian Criminal Justice Association, reviews my novel Hybrids, calling it “a useful book to any student or instructor of criminological theory.”
My friend Paul E. Martens has just drawn to my attention that tonight’s episode of Nova on PBS is about whether a mummy found in Niagara Falls might be that of Ramses I.
Well, I’d dealt with that very issue in my Hugo-award nominated Humans, published in 2003 — science catches up with the Rob-man! In Humans, I wrote this, involving my character Mary Vaughan:
Daria Klein — one of Mary’s grad students — had clearly been in repeatedly during Mary’s absence, though. Her work area had been rearranged, and the chart on the wall showing her sequencing of the ancient Egyptian Y chromosome she was working on had many more spaces filled in.
Arne Eggebrecht of the Pelizaeus Museum in Hildesheim, Germany, had recently suggested that an Egyptian body purchased from an old Niagara Falls tourist attraction might in fact have been Ramses I, founder of the line that contained Seti I, Ramses II (the one portrayed by Yul Brynner in The Ten Commandments), Ramses III, and Queen Nefertari. The specimen was now housed in Atlanta’s Emory University, but DNA samples had been sent to Toronto for analysis; Mary’s lab was world-renowned for its success in recovering ancient DNA, a fact that had led directly to her involvement with Ponter Boddit. Daria had made considerable progress on the putative Ramses in Mary’s absence, and Mary nodded approvingly.
And, later on in the book:
“Daria!” exclaimed Mary. “How good to hear from you!” Mary pictured the slim brown-haired girl’s angular, smiling face.
“It’s nice to hear your voice, too,” said Daria. “I hope you don’t mind me phoning. I didn’t just want to send an e-mail about this.” She could practically hear Daria jumping up and down.
“About what?”
“About Ramses!”
Mary’s first thought was to quip, “You know, they’re only ninety-seven percent effective,” but she didn’t. Daria was obviously referring to the ancient Egyptian body whose DNA she’d been working on. “I take it the results are in,” said Mary.
“Yes, yes! It is indeed a member of the Ramses line — presumably Ramses the First! Chalk up another success for the Vaughan Technique!”
Mary probably blushed a bit. “That’s great,” she said. But it was Daria who had done the painstaking sequencing. “Congratulations.”
“Thanks,” said Daria. “The people at Emory are delighted.”
“Wonderful,” said Mary. “Great work. I’m really proud of you.”
In response to many requests, Carolyn and I are hosting another of our occasional open parties for members of science-fiction fandom and fans of my books on Saturday evening, January 14, 2006, at our home in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada. If you’re reading this, you’re invited! E-mail me at sawyerrj@sfwriter.com for all the details …
Happy New Year, Everyone!
Looking for a truly swanky night out in Toronto? The Toronto Public Library Foundation is holding its first-ever black-tie Book Lover’s Ball on Thursday, February 16, 2006, and I’ll be one of the attending authors.
The web site is attractive but terribly designed, in that almost all the text is actually graphics, making it impossible to cut-and-paste. But I swiped this desccription from the ticket order-form PDF:
Join a veritable Who’s Who of the world’s most celebrated authors for a stunning evening. Mix and mingle with authors and other guests at an old-fashioned mystical Library cocktail reception. Savour a divine meal prepared by celebrity chef authors. Enjoy a fabulous novel-inspired designer fashion show, and much more!
Ticket Price: Cdn$5,000 per table, Cdn$350 per person (tax receipt for maximum allowable)
Nice way to start a new year: Stephen Hunt’s SFCrowsnest, Europe’s most-popular SF site, just posted a review the recent Tor reissue of Fossil Hunter, the second volume of my “Qunitaglio Ascension” trilogy, calling the book “a delightful read.” (Please note that the review has major spoilers for the first volume in the trilogy, Far-Seer.) The review is by Geoff Willmetts.
To my absolute delight, I got an email this week from Seymour Rubinstein. He was the founder of software maker MicroPro International, and co-creator (with Rob Barnaby) of WordStar, the great old wordprocessing program (originally for the CP/M operating system, and later for MS-DOS).
To this day, I still use WordStar for DOS 7.0, Revision D (the last version, released 13 years ago this month); I find it much more efficient than Word. Seymour had run across this essay of mine about WordStar that’s been up on my website for years, and he liked it! Woohoo!
If that wasn’t enough for WordStar connections, I also just got an email from a librarian who used to work in tech support for MicroPro, asking me if I might be interested in doing a reading at his library in Indiana …
^KS forever!
Woohoo! A delivery man just dropped off two cartons of the Tor mass-market paperback of my Mindscan. It looks fabulous! It should be showing up in stores shortly (it’s a January 2006 title).
I’m pleased that Tor has priced it aggressively. My last mass-market edition, Hybrids, was US$7.99 and Cdn$10.99; Mindscan is the same length (100,000 words), but is priced at US$6.99 and Cdn$9.99.
My 1997 novel Frameshift (a Hugo finalist, and winner of Japan’s Seiun Award), which has just been reissued by Tor in a handsome trade-paperback edition, deals in part with the story of John Demjanjuk, the Cleveland autoworker falsely accused of being Ivan the Terrible, the notorious guard at the Treblinka death camp. The real Ivan the Terrible was actually a man named Ivan Marchenko, who bore a passing physical resemblance to Demjanjuk; Marchenko was never apprehended.
A U.S. immigration judge has just ordered Demjanjuk, now 85, deported to his native Ukraine. The Globe and Mail has the AP story, and there’s also coverage on the CNN web site.
By coincidence, today’s mail contained both the December 2005 issue of The New York Review of Science Fiction and the January 2006 issue of Locus. Both have a decidedly Canadian focus this time out.
The NYRSF features reviews of Peter Watts’s two most recent novels, “Three Snapshots of Canadian SF” by Ursula Pflug (discussing the magazine Neo-Opsis, and recent novels by Marie Jakober and Lisa Smedman), and an article about yours truly by Donald M. Hassler entitled “Robert J. Sawyer in Summer 2005: Mad Play,” which begins: “This past summer I discovered a couple of Robert J. Sawyer’s novels from the last years of the twentieth century, looked once again at his more recent Neanderthal novels, and ended with Mindscan.”
In typical NYRSF fashion the article about me says things like, “At the moment, however, I want to explore a deeper theme in Sawyer’s recent larger fictions. This is the borderless dynamic of narrative and speculative playfulness and joy that distinguishes sf writing from both popular media culture and conventional storytelling and literature … I suppose the high literary theorist, then, would label what follows in my look at Sawyer a study of intertextuality.” I actually quite enjoyed the piece, which touches on Illegal Alien, Factoring Humanity, and The Terminal Experiment, and rather like his description of me as “a gentle giant of a writer.”
The Locus issue features interviews with Canadian writers Geoff Ryman, S.M. Stirling, and Dave Duncan, and short articles about Canadian SF by me, Cory Doctorow, Derryl Murphy, Elisabeth Vonarburg, and Candas Jane Dorsey; my piece is entitled “The Old Pemmican Factory,” and talks about the Canadian fondness for hard SF and space opera. In aggregate, the various piece in the issue provide an interesting overview of that strange beast that is Canadian SF, although I did feel compelled to send this note to Locus:
In the January 2006 Locus, Candas Jane Dorsey says that my imprint, Robert J. Sawyer Books, has only published one book to date; that’s simply not true. We’ve been reliably doing a book every six months ever since our launch in April 2004. Out already are Marcos Donnelly’s Letters from the Flesh, Andrew Weiner’s Getting Near the End, Karl Schroeder’s The Engine of Recall, and Danita Maslan’s Rogue Harvest (the one title Candas mentions). Our fifth book, Nick DiChario’s A Small and Remarkable Life, will be published in April, and our new owner, Fitzhenry and Whiteside, has given me the go-ahead to increase the line to three titles annually.
Editor Mark Leslie Lefebvre has posted the table of contents for North of Infinity II, the second in the series of Canadian SF anthologies published by Mosaic Press.
My story “Forever,” originally published in Mike Resnick’s Return of the Dinosaurs, is included, as are, to my delight, stories by my writing students Karen Danylak and Doug Smith, plus one by Andrew Weiner, whose novel Getting Near the End was published under my Robert J. Sawyer Books imprint:
The book should be out early in 2006.
The problem with being an early adopter is you sometimes get stuck in old ways of doing things. I like to say I’ve had a blog since long before such things were fashionable, and, indeed, since 1990, I’ve been posting regular online updates about my career, first in CompuServe’s Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature Forum (the command “GO SAWYER” would take you there from anywhere on CompuServe), then for a while also on GEnie, and, later, on my own website at www.sfwriter.com — you can find update posts there going back to 1999.
But creating blog posts by hand with an ASCII editor seems a roundabout way of doing it these days, and so I’m switching to Blogger (although the blog will still be physically hosted on my website).
I’m going to start 2006 with this new version of my blog. For those looking for older posts, they’re still available on my website:
If you’re looking for blog entries related to the Rob and Bob Tour — the fourteen days Robert J. Sawyer and Robert Charles Wilson spent on the road together in the spring of 2005, promoting their novels Mindscan and Spin — those entries are here and here.
So, to the future! Happy New Year, everyone!
