Robert J. Sawyer's TED Talk

Earlier this year multiple award winning Canadian SF author Robert J. Sawyer spoke at TED x Manitoba on the topic: To Live Forever - Or Die Trying.  It's quite interesting.  If the embedded player doesn't work, you can find the video here.

Robert J. Sawyer's Canadian Book Tour for WWW: Wonder

Robert J. Sawyer has announced the dates for his upcoming book tour to promote book three of his WWW trilogy, Wonder.  The book is out in Canada on March 29th, in the US on April 5th and the UK on May 19th.   Ebook and audio (via Audible) editions will both be out in April.

The dates for his book tour are:

Toronto: Tuesday, March 29
Saskatoon: Thursday, March 31
Calgary: Sunday, April 3
Edmonton: Monday, April 4
Vancouver: Tuesday, April 5
Ottawa: Saturday, April 30
Waterloo: Tuesday, May 3
Winnipeg: Thursday, May 19

 You can find details about the tour events here.  He's also busy with conventions in Canada the US, and even Japan, so check to see if he's coming to a con near you.

Watch, Book Trailer

Robert J. Sawyer's promoting his newest book, Watch, with a book trailer that looks amazing. I've heard great things about the WWW series so far. Take a look and tell me what you think.

Flashforward Review - Take Two

I was so busy in my previous post considering how the book and TV show of Flashforward may differ that I didn't really end up reviewing the book. (It's been that kind of day.)

So, from the top. Flashforward begins with an experiment to discover the Higgs boson, "the particle whose interactions endowed other particles with mass". Something goes wrong and instead of gaining a nobel prize for their discovery, the team launches the consciousness of humanity 20+ years into the future. For two minutes.

The novel is split into three parts: the experiment and its direct results, it's indirect results as time passes and from the time the flashforward showed. The novel focuses on the members of the teams, their visions and either their acceptance that the future they saw is immutable or their fervent desire to change what they did or didn't see.

Specifically, the story follows Lloyd, the head of the project who, if the future is changeable, would be responsible for the deaths of thousands of people and potentially liable for immense damage to infrastructure during the blackout as well as bankruptcies and loss of economy due to information gleaned from the flashforward. And Theo, who had no vision but who discovers that others read about his death during their experiences.

I finished the book several days ago and still can't say whether I liked the book or not. It had some interesting ideas. The science was down pat. And though I didn't agree with a lot of things the characters did, their actions were consistent with their own belief systems (which is more important).

It annoyed me how a 2 minute vision of something 20 years in the future caused so many people to either despair or be ecstatically happy - depending on what they saw. But then, I'm not a believer in predestination to the point that every single moment of our lives is set in stone - which was a major belief in the book. I believe certain things can be considered fate - but how you get to those points in your life is up to you.

In this instance I think the TV show has an advantage. Since the flashforward there is less than a year away, I can see how people will let it rule their lives. Especially once they learn the future is malleable.

In the final analysis, the book made me think of what I might do in such a situation. And makes me glad I'll never be put into it as most people seemed to forget that so much could happen between now and the time of their visions that they forgot to live their lives to the fullest. The lesson not to take the present for granted in your quest for the future (and the fulfillment of your dreams) alone makes reading this book worthwhile. After all, it's the journey, not the destination, that maters.

Flashforward - Robert J. Sawyer

With the TV show airing Sept. 24th at 8pm (or Sept 25th at 8, as ABC has decided to air the premier twice) I decided to read the book. The trailers look amazing. The premise is interesting. So I wondered where the story came from.

The book was originally published in 1999, with the original experiment that is believed to have caused the flashforward happening on April 21st, 2009. It's odd reading a science fiction book, looking to the future, about a future that's just passed. Sort of like reading 2001: A Space Odyssey in 2008 and wondering how humans failed to make all that amazing science come true.

One of the main differences between the book and the show is the time span of the flashforward. In the show it's a mere 6 months in the future that the world glimpses. In the novel it's a little over 20 YEARS. Which caused problems for me. The willingness of people to fundamentally change their lives due to a glimpse of 2 minutes of an (in my opinion) uncertain future 20 YEARS AWAY seemed rather farcical. How can 2 minutes show you enough to tell you your life will be entirely bad/good to the point that you'd need to radically change how you live, etc. now?

*** Minor Spoilers Ahead ***







With a few exceptions. Obviously if you learn that you'll be murdered, as Theo does, you'll want to learn how and by whom. But in general, the number of people going out of their way to affect their futures based on a short glimpse seemed strange. Any number of things could happen to cause those events - and people probably wouldn't consider even a small portion of them (like how you assume you know how a person is about to die in the TV show DEAD LIKE ME and then something totally ridiculous happens that you'd never could have foreseen).

One character commits suicide because he sees himself working at a restaurant in 20 years. That's it. He decides he failed in his dream of becoming a novelist and can't live with that. I was left wondering how that brief glimpse of the future proved he failed. A lot of novelists have day jobs to pay the bills. Getting published is not the same as becoming rich and famous. It seemed that most people came up with one interpretation of their visions and couldn't conceive of any others.

I was also disturbed by the scientist in charge of the experiment's determined belief that the future could not be changed. That whatever people glimpsed, that's what would happen. The idea of free will, of personal accountability, was missing. (On the other hand, I loved the explanation of WHY he was so bent on holding to that viewpoint.)

The ending left me a little bemused at how various characters lives turned out by 2030. Each seemed to get what he/she expected. Those that believed the future was immutable got the futures they saw, those that believed they could affect their futures managed to change them.

In the end, I enjoyed the book more because it made me question my own possible reaction should such an event ever occur than because the book was a scientific possibility regarding our future. In other words, it read more like philosophy than science fiction (though the scientific explanations for the flashforward were based on real science).

Based on what the book managed to do, the TV show has the potential to be a real SF hit.

Check out the official website: http://flashforwardtv.com/ where I got the information about the double airing of the pilot. It also has links to more trailers.

Robert J. Sawyer - Author Interview

Novels:
Wake
Rollback
Mindscan
Calculating God
Flashforward
Factoring Humanity
Illegal Alien
Frameshift
Starplex
Terminal Experiment
End of an Era
Golden Fleece

Series: Neanderthals: Hominids, Humans, Hybrids
Quintaglios: Far-seer, Fossil Hunter, Foreigner

Website: www.sfwriter.com

> Pitch your latest novel.

WAKE is about the World Wide Web gaining consciousness. It's the story of a 15-year-old blind girl in Waterloo, Ontario, who gets a post-retinal implant that's supposed to give her vision but instead lets her see the structure of the Web -- and she discovers an entity hidden in the Web's background. She tries to connect with it, bringing it into contact with the outside world.

> What are your favourite three books (not by you, either in the field or out of it)?

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD by Harper Lee
GATEWAY by Frederik Pohl
THE FOUNTAINS OF PARADISE by Arthur C. Clarke

>In the books you've written, who is you favourite character and why?

I think Caitlin, the blind girl in WAKE, is my favourite -- which is surprising, because she's so unlike me in many ways. But she's so smart, so feisty, so committed to her principles, and so curious about the world, that she's enormous fun to write; I particularly enjoyed writing her blog postings that appear in the novel.

> If you could, would you change places with any of your characters?

The truth is, authors tend to make life pretty miserable for their characters: we put them through hell, even though we may like them a great deal. I think I prefer living in the random real world, rather than in a fictional world in which an author is always thinking of new ways to mess things up for me!

> If you could live in your fantasy/sf world, would you?

The world of WAKE is subtly different from our own. It's the very near future, but it is a future of basically good people. It's that future we're hoping we're all going to get as we come out of the current economic crisis, as the United States renews itself, and as Canada becomes a happier place. I'm not writing about a far-future utopia, but the kind of world we could have if we all tried a little harder to work together -- and yes, I'd very much like to live in that world.

> What was the first novel (published or unpublished) that you wrote and how long did it take to write it?

The first novel I wrote was END OF AN ERA. I outlined it in 1980, when I was 20, but didn't really dive into working on it until about seven years later. It took me a couple of years of part-time work -- and it did eventually sell: it came out as my fifth novel, in 1994 -- and is still in print.

> What was the hardest scene for you to write?

I've written lots of gut-wrenching scenes over the years, and some of those have been very difficult to write emotionally, but the hardest scenes I've ever had to write creatively are in WAKE: much of the novel is told from a first person point of view by the consciousness that is waking up in the background of the World Wide Web. Making those scenes plausible and captivating was very difficult to do. I ended up using a lot of interesting linguistic tricks to pull it off, and I was delighted when my brother-in-law, David Livingstone Clink, who is a very accomplished poet, said that they read like poetry.

> What was the most fun book signing, convention, etc., you've attended and why?

No doubt whatsoever: the World Science Fiction Convention when it was here in Toronto in 2003 -- I won the Hugo Award there for Best Science Fiction Novel of the Year for my novel HOMINIDS; it was the most amazing thing that has ever happened to me. The World Science Fiction Convention is back in Canada this year, by the way -- it'll be in Montreal in August, and I urge people to go; it'll be a blast!

> If you still have one, what's your day job? If you don't, how long did it take before you could support yourself only on your writing?

I've been a full-time freelance writer for 26 years now, since 1983, and a full-time science-fiction writer for 17 years or so (my early career was mostly writing about business and high technology). It took about three years before I was making a decent living doing the nonfiction work in the 1980s, and, when I switched to mostly fiction writing, it took about five years for that to really take off. In 1996, I won the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America's Nebula Award for Best Novel of the Year, and that was the turning point: shortly after that, my wife quit her job and came to work full-time for me as my salaried assistant.

> What is your university degree in?

Radio and Television Arts from Ryerson, class of 1982 -- I was in the same class as DAW fantasy author Tanya Huff, and we've been great friends ever since; in fact, we collaborated on our final big TV project together.

> Do you think it is easier to write fantasy or science fiction?

It's easier to write fantasy, because you can make up the rules for your universe, and you can have magical things happen, or not, at your authorial whim. In science fiction, you've got to adhere to the rules of our universe -- and, since our universe is governed by quantum mechanics and relativity and all sorts of other complex things, it really does require a lot of work to do it properly.


> When and where do you write?

I have a La-Z-Boy recliner in my living room, opposite the fire place, with two monitors hooked up to my computer, and I spend four or five hours every day sitting there, tip-tapping away on a cordless keyboard.

> What's the best/worst thing about writing?

The best thing is when somebody tells you that you changed their life. I just autographed a book today for someone who is now studying neuroscience at U of T because he was inspired by my book MINDSCAN. The worst thing is the uncertainty: there is no job security for writers, and you're only as good as your last book. It's a risky profession.

> What is something you didn't know about the publishing industry before you had your fist book published?

That editors really do very little editing. Most of their job is meeting with the art department, the sales force, and so on; the romantic ideal of an editor spending months helping you craft a manuscript just isn't the way it works -- you've got to get it 95% of the way on your own; editors just don't have time to deal with authors who can't do most of the work themselves.

> Do you have any advice for hopeful authors?

Write. Write. And write some more. Don't talk about it. Don't daydream about it. Don't wait for the muse to strike. Do it now -- right now -- and do it often. The only way to become a good writer is by producing a lot of material.

> How many rejection letters did you get for your first novel?

END OF AN ERA was rejected three times before it found a publisher. Rejection slips are a fact of life; every writer I know has them. But they're badges of honor -- they mean you went to war, and lived to tell the tale. Be proud of them.

Writers of the Future Event

Asked to introduce our guests only a few hours before the event, I went into a flurry of reading their websites and blogs. I learned some interesting things.

I already knew that Robert J. Sawyer had won a Nebula Award (Terminal Experiment) and a Hugo Award (Hominids). But I didn't know he'd won a John W. Campbell Award (Mindscan) or that this year he was given an Honourary Doctorate from Laurentian University. Also this year, he won an Aurora Award for his short story 'Biding Time', which appeared in the anthology Slipstreams. And of course, he was a judge for this year's L. Ron Hubbard's Writers of the Future Contest. Robert J. Sawyer is truly one of Canada's most prominent science fiction authors.

He is also an excellent public speaker, waxing eloquent on the merits of the Writers of the Future Contest, both literary and monetary. The four quarterly winners received cash prizes of $1000 USD, while the Grand Prize winner received $6000 (though, as Mr. Sawyer pointed out, "...it's only American dollars, so it's not what it once was."). In addition to money the winners got to spend one week at a writer's workshop for free. They also got to make contacts in the writing industry and join the ranks of those who won the contest in the past. Here's a clip of Robert J. Sawyer pointing out some of those past winners.


(Sorry about the quality of the video. I took it with my digital camera. I'm not sure why it's on it's side...)

As for the winners themselves, Stephen Kotowych, was this year's Grand Prize winner for his short story 'Saturn in G Minor'. This is only the second time in its 23 year history that a Canadian has won the grand prize (the first winner was James Alan Gardner). Stephen's work can also be found in the anthologies Under Cover of Darkness ('Borrowed Time') and Tesseracts 11 ('Citius, Altius, Forius').



And Tony Pi, second place winner for his short story 'The Stone Cipher' has been busy as well. He has stories in Tales of the Unanticipated #28 ('Pinocchio Cantatas') and Abyss and Apex ('Metamorphoses in Amber').

The two award winners read excerpts from their stories and then signed copies of the Writers of the Future anthology for audience members.

For anyone wishing to learn more about the international Writers of the Future Contest, check out their website.

Writers of the Future Signing at the World's Biggest Bookstore

For those of you who would like more information about the signing next month, the event will take place on Tuesday November 6th at 6pm and feature this year's L. Ron Hubbard Writer's of the Future Contest's Grand Prize winner, Stephen Kotowych, for his short story 'Saturn in G Minor' and the 2nd Place winner, Tony Pi, for his novella 'The Stone Cipher'. Robert J. Sawyer, a judge of this year's contest and a prominent Canadian Science Fiction author will also be in attendance.