Tag: Robert J. Sawyer

CBC Radio will broadcast and podcast Robert J. Sawyer’s Rollback

Jesse Willis

SFFaudio News

CBC Radio One - Between The Covers podcastRobert J. Sawyer has a contract in hand from CBC Radio One’s Between The Covers program. BTC will broadcasting Robert J. Sawyer’s novel ROLLBACK! I asked Heather Brown, a producer at Between The Covers for more details on the distribution method and she had this to say:

“Yes, we will be podcasting as well as broadcasting Robert J. Sawyer’s novel ROLLBACK. At the moment there is no firm date for the broadcast/podcast although it won’t be presented until much later this year and perhaps not til early next year. The book will be abridged somewhat but Mr. Sawyer will be a full participant in those choices.”

That’s very cool! I’ve long enjoyed Between The Covers, but it was their broadcast of Connie Willis’ Bellwether that cemented my love of this long running CBC Radio show. We’ll keep you updated on the broadcast and podcasting dates for this.

Posted by Jesse Willis

Review of Calculating God by Robert J. Sawyer

Scott D.

SFFaudio Review

Audiobook - Calculating God by Robert J. SawyerCalculating God
By Robert J. Sawyer; Read by Jonathan Davis
Audible Download – 12 hours – [Unabridged]
Publisher: Audible Frontiers
Published: 2008
ISBN: None
Themes: / Science Fiction / Aliens / Paleontology / Religion / Philosophy / Space Travel /

One of the things I enjoy most about reviewing audiobooks is that I get to revisit novels that I’ve read and loved in the past. When these beloved novels are given great readers (not always the case), I can’t wait to get at them. Calculating God is one of those novels, and Jonathan Davis is an excellent narrator, so this audiobook leapt to the top of my TBR list the moment I realized it existed.

Jonathan Davis burst onto the science fiction scene with his stellar narration of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (SFFaudio review here). Since then, in the science fiction genre, he’s been almost exclusively reading Random House’s Star Wars abridgments. He reads them well, but I was thrilled to see him step away from that and narrate another of science fiction’s great novels. He is one of our very best narrators and this is a fine performance. I was rapt the entire time, and even near tears at one moment in the book.

When I read this novel for the first time, I was a bit taken aback. I am a Catholic and I’ve been reading science fiction all of my life. I have never had a problem reconciling science and religion and have been both perplexed and dismayed that Christianity is portrayed so often as being incompatible with science. It’s certainly true that for many Christian churches this conflict is real, but those churches are not Catholic churches, despite the most famous illustration of the conflict being the Catholic treatment of Galileo. I tell everyone who cares that Galileo was an aberration in the history of the Church (not the norm), but still, it was a colossal (though admitted) mistake. But for myself, science and religion are NOT in conflict. I’ve included a link at the bottom of this review to an interview of Brother Guy Consolmagno, a Vatican astronomer that aired on CBC Radio as an illustration of a Catholic’s relationship with science. Robert J. Sawyer is mentioned in the interview as well.

Back to the novel at hand: The reason I was taken aback when I first read this book was that it’s the first novel I’ve ever read in which the aliens believe in God. That in itself makes this book interesting enough to pick up. Imagine – an alien lands on your front doorstep and starts to question your doubts about the existence of God. Most science fiction portrays religion as something that is grown through or evolved past. By the time an alien species is mature enough for stellar travel, surely they have jettisoned religion? There’s no place for such a thing in a rational, scientific universe. Right?

Well, not according to this novel. Sawyer presents, in a very entertaining and interesting way, arguments for and against God’s existence. The main character (Tom Jericho) is a paleontologist who is dying of cancer. An alien (named Hollus) lands near the Royal Ontario Museum and strolls right in, asking to see the fossils. And off the novel goes. Jericho and Hollus spend much of the novel together looking at fossils and discussing various topics that range from the wide, including mass extinctions and evolution, to the intimately personal, like the approaching death of Jericho. I can think of no better way to present these topics than this lively novel, and I’ll recommend it to anyone interested in thinking about these things, no matter which side of the fence they are on.

Sawyer uses science fiction to create circumstances that make us readers think about important ideas in different ways and from different perspectives. That’s exactly the kind of science fiction I love to read, and why I’ll keep coming back to Robert J. Sawyer for more. I’m very happy to have had a chance to revisit this novel, and even happier to be able to award it our SFFaudio Essential designation.

Audible.com has published a few more of Robert J. Sawyer’s novels: The Neanderthal Trilogy is there (Hominids, Humans, and Hybrids). They also have his Nebula winning novel The Terminal Experiment, published by Recorded Books. We reviewed it back in 2003.

Robert J. Sawyer’s Calculating God page: LINK

A link to a CBC interview of Brother Guy Consolmagno, Vatican Astronomer: LINK

Posted by Scott D. Danielson

Audible.com and Blackstone Audio Royalties

Jesse Willis

SFFaudio News

Audible.comBlackstone AudiobooksRobert J. Sawyer, in answer to a question about the royalties he gets on the sale of his audiobooks, writes:

“…on royalties, Audible pays –% (either of the flat-out purchase price, or the purchase cost of the applicable “Audible Listener Credit” applied). Audible doesn’t do any physical product. Blackstone Audio does, though, and they pay:

Rental and Retail 10% of net receipts
Direct internet download 15% of net receipts
Download via (sublicensed) 3rd party 40% of net receipts (that is 40% of whatever they get from Audible or other online retailers).

Net receipts is a tricky phrase: it’s NOT that I get 10% of the price you, the consumer, pays on the cassettes/CDs, but 10% of the portion of that price the bookseller passes on to the publisher — making the effective royalty about 6% of cover price.

So, the royalties are pretty darn small, but, then again, they’re small on books, too (8% on mass-market paperbacks is typical; 7.5% on large format trade-paperbacks; 10% on hardcovers – although at least those amounts are percentages of cover price).

All that said, I’m into five figures on audio-book income actually received so far this year, so I’m not complaining too much (although all of that is advances against royalties, or other licensing fees).”

$??,??? just in audiobook revenues in less than 5 months!

[via the Robert J. Sawyer Yahoo! Group]

Posted by Jesse Willis

UPDATE ON JUNE 4th 2008 Rob Sawyer asked me to remove the Audible.com figures from this post (due to a non-disclosure agreement he has with Audible.com). I’ve done so because I’m nice and he asked me nicely. I like Rob and don’t want to screw up something he was kindly, but mistakenly, telling his readers about.

Hypaspace Podcast interviews: Shatner, Sawyer, Takei, Hopkinson, Wilson + MORE

Jesse Willis

SFFaudio Online Audio

Space The Imagination Station - Hypaspace PodcastThe HypaSpace podcast, which is put out by Space: The Imagination Station, talks about the Aurora Awards, and talks to Nalo Hopkinson, Robert J. Sawyer, William Shatner, George Takei, Alessandro Julianni, and Robert Charles Wilson in the latest podcast. Have a listen |MP3| or subscribe to the feed via THIS LINK.

Posted by Jesse Willis

Orthopedic Horseshoes: Robert J. Sawyer, Dave Degraff, James Alan Gardner, and Edo van Belkom

Jesse Willis

SFFaudio Online Audio

I’ve had the same email account since 1999 so I get a lot of spam. Thankfully I’m also got pretty good at spotting it. But one item caught my eye right before I was about to blast it into electronic nothingness. The subject line was:

“Orthopedic Horseshoes”

Orthopedic Horseshoes? Is this yet another Nigerian Prince scam – but gone horribly wrong? Or are they just really working hard to find euphemisms for “penis enlarger” (how many does one man need anyway)? So, I clicked on it.

It turns out it wasn’t a scam at all! That’s the name of a show! Details follow:

Orthopedic HorseshoesDan Gurzynski and some of his friends work on a monthly podcast called Orthopedic Horseshoes, it’s a “show where cranky old men discourse on American society and media.” It seems the OH crew recently visited Erie Con in Niagara Falls, NY. And so, starting May 9, 2008 they’ll feature interviews with the likes of Robert J. Sawyer, Dave Degraff, James Alan Gardner, and Edo van Belkom.
I’ve listened to the first few shows in the podcast feed and they’re funny and full of literary SF references. You can listen to the “Audio Stream” version HERE, or subscribe to the podcast via this feed:

itpc://orthohorseshoes.mypodcast.com/rss.xml

Posted by Jesse Willis

Recent Arrivals – Joe Haldeman and Robert J. Sawyer

Jesse Willis

SFFaudio Recent Arrivals

Hot out of the microphones and into SFFaudio’s Audible Accounts, two Science Fiction titles from Audible Frontiers…

First up, a Joe Haldeman story that I first heard about on Prisoners Of Gravity, which is always a source for good Science Fiction!

The Hemingway Hoax by Joe HaldemanThe Hemingway Hoax
By Joe Haldeman; Read by Eric Michael Summerer
Audible Download – 4 Hours 31 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Audible Frontiers
Published: April 2008
The hoax proposed to John Baird by a two-bit con man in a seedy Key West bar was shady but potentially profitable. With little left to lose, the struggling, middle-aged Hemingway scholar agreed to forge a manuscript and pass it off as Papa’s lost masterpiece. But Baird never realized his actions would shatter the history of his own Earth – and others. And now the unsuspecting academic is trapped out of time – propelled through a series of grim parallel worlds and pursued by an interdimensional hitman with a literary license to kill.

Intelligent design and creationism versus the fossil record, it should be a slam-dunk, until the alien arrives…

Calculating God by Robert J. SawyerCalculating God
By Robert J. Sawyer; Read by Jonathan Davis
Audible Download – 12 Hours and 4 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Audible Frontiers
Published: 2008
An alien walks into a museum and asks if he can see a paleontologist. But the arachnid ET hasn’t come aboard a rowboat with the Pope and Stephen Hawking (although His Holiness does request an audience later). Landing at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, the spacefarer, Hollus, asks to compare notes on mass extinctions with resident dino-scientist Thomas Jericho. A shocked Jericho finds that not only does life exist on other planets, but that every civilization in the galaxy has experienced extinction events at precisely the same time. Armed with that disconcerting information (and a little help from a grand unifying theory), the alien informs Jericho, almost dismissively, that the primary goal of modern science is to discover why God has behaved as he has and to determine his methods. BONUS AUDIO: Author Robert J. Sawyer explains how the creationism vs. evolution debate informed the writing of Calculating God.

Posted by Jesse Willis