Non WFTL Blogs

The Aurora Award-winning webiste MADE IN CANADA -- Don Bassie's elaborate and detailed repository of information about Canadian science fiction and fantasy -- is no more. It had been hosted on Yahoo's Geocities service, and, in a spectacular act of online genocide, Yahoo wiped out all free Geocities sites on 26 October 2009.

Don's site had been an enormous asset to us all, and it's terrible that it's gone. For the record, the URL for it was www.geocities.com/canadian_SF.

Don had stopped updating the site -- which won Auroras in 2000, 2003, and 2004 -- some time ago, but it was still an enormously valuable historical resource.

Thank God for the Internet Archives. The most recent version from there, dated August 2004, can be accessed here. Sadly, it only contains bits and pieces of the now-gone full site, though.
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... reading this discussion thread will eat hours of your time. It's a fascinating, hyper-detailed look at every prop that ever appeared more than once in classic Star Trek. Tons of great pictures and screen captures.
Visit The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
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Coming December 1, 2009, from Penguin Group Canada: new premium mass-market editions of two of my novels: The Terminal Experiment, which won the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America's Nebula Award for Best Novel of Year for 1995, and Illegal Alien, which the Globe and Mail's mystery-fiction reviewer Margaret Cannon said was "the best Canadian mystery of 1997."

Premium mass-market is the format used for most bestselling fiction paperbacks these days; it's about an inch taller than regular mass-market (and has bigger type); Penguin Canada's paperback edition of my latest hardcover, Wake, coming in March 2010, will also be done in premium mass-market.

Ace Science Fiction in the United States has separately acquired US rights to these titles, and will be producing their own editions, with their own covers, later.
SF Site on The Terminal Experiment: "Robert J. Sawyer won the Nebula Award with this novel, and I would have voted for it. There is so much of interest in this book -- artificial intelligence, a good murder mystery, a nicely realized near-future, and, as I've come to expect from Sawyer's novels, thought-provoking philosophy."

The Washington Post on Illegal Alien: "Innovative, imaginative, and pioneering — not just excellent sf but also excellent popular literature. A fast-paced, exciting book that shows the imaginative heights to which science fiction writers can climb when they combine sf with something else."
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A nice video interview with Jessika Borsiczky, executive producer of FlashForward, the TV series based on my novel. (Jessika's last name is pronounced Bor-shees-key.)

Tune in tonight for episode 5, "Gimme Some Truth." I was on the set for much of the filming of this one, and enjoyed having lunch with guest star Glynn Turman. (I'll be watching it in a hotel room in Winnipeg.)
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Answer: because they don't sell memberships at the door, and they cap sales for pre-registration.

This weekend, I have to be in Vancouver, British Columbia, as a presenter at the Surrey International Writers Conference. Sometime shortly after that -- but the date is yet to be precisely nailed down, but it might be Friday, October 30, and it might be Monday, November 2 -- I have to go to Los Angeles, to do some work on FlashForward, the TV series based on my novel of the same name.

So, what's in between Vancouver and Los Angeles, and is taking place between the dates I have to be in those two places? Why, San Jose, and this year's World Fantasy Convention, which is being held there.

But I can't buy a ticket now, unless I hunt around to find someone who isn't going and is willing to sell theirs, and I can't buy one at the door at any price. I understand that World Fantasy wants to keep out last-minute local goths and vampire-junkies who might get wind of the convention through the media as it's happening, but the effect of their membership-cap and no-at-the-door-sales policies is to keep me away.

Surely the same effect of keeping outsiders out could be accomplished by limiting at-the-door sales to publishing professionals (employees of publishing companies, active members of SFWA, etc.)? And surely a handful of at-the-door sales to people who obviously belong couldn't really overrun the convention's capacity?

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In honor of the release of the new tie-in editions of my 1999 novel FlashForward, which is the basis for the hit ABC TV series, I wrote a little essay about the book for Tor.com. Here it is.
Visit The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
and WakeWatchWonder.com