Robert J. Sawyer's Blog

My Calculating God, the beloved Hugo Award-nominated novel about the conflict between science and religion — perfect for fans of Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow and Carl Sagan’s Contact — has a new 25th-anniversary edition (in hardcover, trade paperback, and ebook!) with spectacular new cover art by Lui Junwei.

An alien walks into Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum and asks to see a paleontologist. Dinosaur expert Tom Jericho is stunned to learn that many worlds experienced the same five gre...

Five years ago today, my novel The Oppenheimer Alternative was officially published. I think it’s my finest book. It’s available in print, as an ebook, and as an audiobook — and you can get autographed copies directly from me.

Buying links for all formats worldwide: https://sfwriter.com/buylinks.htm#oa

Although marketed as an alternate-history science-fiction novel, I prefer to think of The Oppenheimer Alternative as the secret history of the Manhattan Project, filling in the untold st...

Way back in 1997, in my Hugo Award-nominated and Seiun Award-winning novel Frameshift, I warned about US health insurance companies using nefarious means to acquire genetic profiles of potential clients.

Today, Carolyn and I had 23andMe delete our genetic data; the gene-sequencing company is in Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, and there’s a real likelihood that an insurance company, or consortium of them, will acquire 23andMe specifically for its data as a way of screening potential clie...

My 2016 Aurora Award-winning novel Quantum Night tells of a psychopathic US president using a trumped-up (ha!) excuse to invade Canada.

“Uncomfortably close to present-day fears.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review denoting a book of exceptional merit)

“Sawyer’s most blatantly Canadian book, an almost forensic examination of the cultural and political differences between Canada and its neighbor. Another thought-provoking and tense novel from a master science fiction writer.“ —Sci-Fi Bu...

Forty years ago, at the end of 1984, I put together this roundup of the year’s Canadian achievements in science fiction and fantasy. It was published in The Bakka Bookie Sheet, the newsletter of Toronto’s Bakka: A Science Fiction Bookstore. 

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John Robert Colombo‘s Canadian Literary Landmarks (Hounslow, December) contains many references to writers of the fantastic.

Book 2 of Vancouverite Michael Coney‘s “Song of Earth” was issued by Houghton Mifflin in September. It’s called Gods...

Google is dangerous since it’s started serving up AI answers instead of actual links to reliable sources as the first thing you see after a search.

I put in “major Canadian cities,” and it replied:

What are the ten largest cities in Canada? The top ten largest cities in Canada are: Toronto, Montreal, Calgary, Ottawa, Edmonton, Mississauga, North York, Winnipeg, Scarborough, and Vancouver.

That’s flat-out wrong. Neither North York nor Scarborough have been cities since 1998 — twenty-six ...

Every Canadian of my generation knows the line, “I told him, Julie, don’t go!” It was said by Sylvia Lennick, the mother of my dear friend, the great Canadian filmmaker and special-effects expert Michael Lennick. Michael passed away ten years ago today, on November 7, 2014, at just 61 years of age.

He’d been admitted to hospital a month earlier and was diagnosed with a very aggressive brain tumor; he was put into a medically induced coma; he never woke again. His wife and business partner...

I was very sad to hear of the death of former talkshow host Phil Donahue, who left us today at the age of 88. I was a regular viewer of Donahue in the 1980s and 1990s because he so often tackled big issues.

And so, when I was writing my novel The Terminal Experiment — which dealt with the ramifications of a biomedical engineer discovering proof for the existence of the human soul — it seemed appropriate to have that character, Dr. Peter Hobson, appear on Donahue.

I wrote the following ...

I’ve updated my WordStar for DOS 7.0 archive, based on feedback from the thousands of people who downloaded the initial public release (which was version 1.4, dated July 30, 2024).This new version is 1.5, dated August 12, 2024.

The new version has the file size of the PDF manuals reduced (which cuts the archive size from 680MB to 460MB), adds disk images of the original 5.25-inch WordStar 7.0 Rev. D diskettes, and provides additional instructions and clarifications in the various -README ...

As you all know, I continue to use WordStar for DOS 7.0 as my word-processing program. It was last updated in December 1992, and the company that made it has been defunct for decades; the program is abandonware.

There was no proper archive of WordStar for DOS 7.0 available online, so I decided to create one. I’ve put weeks of work into this. Included are not only full installs of the program (as well as images of the installation disks), but also plug-and-play solutions for running WordSt...