Robert J. Sawyer has won 46 national and international fiction awards including a Hugo, a Nebula and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. He’s been called the Dean of Canadian science fiction and Canada’s premier science fiction author and lives in Ontario with his wife, a poet. His novel, Flashforward, was the basis of the ABC TV series in the U.S. His other novels include Terminal Experiment, Illegal Alien,The WWW Series, The Neanderthal Parallax and The Quintaglio Ascension trilogies, Calculating God, Mindscan and his latest Triggers from Tor Books.
His short fiction has appeared in anthologies like Dinosaur Fantastic, Sherlock Holmes in Orbit, and Far Frontiers, and three short story collections. He can be found on Twitter as @robertjsawyer and Facebook and via his website.
Bryan Thomas Schmidt had an extensive conversation with Rob about his craft and work for us.
SFFWRTCHT: Let’s start with the basics: Where’d your interest in science fiction and fantasy come from? And who/what were some of your favorite authors and books?
Robert J. Sawyer: Growing up in the 1960s with Star Trek and Apollo, plus seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey in first run. Clarke Childhood’s End, Pohl Gateway, Niven Ringworld , Asimov Caves of Steel.
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Into the Black: Reclaiming Dystopian Fiction
There’s not doubt about it: Dystopian fiction is a hot literary commodity. In fact, dystopian literature seems to have supplanted paranormal romance as the new “It” genre—bookshelves, both virtual and brick-and-mortar, are awash with sexy heroines who, despite total societal collapse, still managed to apply makeup. Yet, in this rush to realize Hunger Games levels of fame and fortune, publishers and their media brethren have sanitized the genre, stripping away the grit and existential horror that defines classic dystopia.
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In episode 125 of the Hugo Nominated SF Signal Podcast, Patrick Hester asks our irregulars to weigh in on: eBook Pricing!
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O’Reilly’s TOC Conference is the place where leading practitioners from the publishing and tech industries converge to explore ideas, share what they’re learned from their successes (and their failures), and navigate the profound changes affecting our industry. Each year, TOC provides a deft mix of the practical and the visionary to give attendees the tools and guidance they need to succeed—and the inspiration to lead change. In 2012, TOC goes “4-D” with a particularly sharp focus on Data, Design, Development, and Deployment. This “4-D” approach provides a wide range of practical, in-depth sessions that cover the innovations rocking every aspect of the art, craft, and business of publishing in the 21st century–from designing and implementing profitable business models to the advanced technical aspects of creating digital books, agile publishing, and fostering collaborative environments that help ideas (and careers) to thrive.
Here’s LeVar Burton’s Keynote…
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Check out this clever video from the folks at Penguin [via Poe TV]
Here’s an interesting experiment in self-publishing…
Fergus Bannon (whose writings have appeared in Interzone, Territories, West Coast Magazine and Shipbuilding) has written a novel called Judgement, a book author Gary Gibson describes as reading “like an episode of CSI, if CSI had been written by Timothy Leary and filmed by James Cameron”. Judgement is a psychedelic science fiction thriller described thusly:
It started with a few isolated incidents. A mob shootout in Las Vegas, a firefight in the Central American jungles – one apparently unconnected event after the other, hinting at a worldwide conspiracy of unprecedented proportions. But before long CIA computer expert Bob Leith realises it’s something much more than mere globalised terrorism, something literally not of this world …
Rather than just sell the eBook outright, Bannon is trying something interesting.
You can either buy the novel in various eBook formats at Smashwords for the more-than-reasonable price of $2…or, you can read it online for free.
This flies in the face of conventional wisdom that says people will not pay for what they can get for free. Will it work? The thinking is that people will pay for what they like, especially if it’s cheap enough. I’d be interested in hearing a few months from now how well this works…
Robert J. Sawyer, known as “the dean of Canadian science fiction” by The Ottawa Citizen, is one of only seven writers in history to win all three of the science-fiction field’s top honors for best novel of the year: the Hugo Award (for his novel Hominids), the Nebula Award (The Terminal Experiment), and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award (Mindscan). Rob’s novels are top-ten national mainstream bestsellers in Canada. His novels include Frameshift, Factoring Humanity, Flashforward, Calculating God, the Neanderthal Parallax trilogy (Hominids, Humans, and Hybrids), Mindscan, and Rollback. His short fiction collections include Iterations, Relativity, and Identity Theft and Other Stories. Rob is also Editor of Robert J. Sawyer Books, the science-fiction imprint of Calgary’s Red Deer Press and blogs at http://sfwriter.com/blog.htm.
SF Signal had the opportunity to talk with Rob about his latest novel WWW: Wake, his writing, publishing, and the upcoming ABC television series, Flash Forward, which is based on his book…
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