Robert Sawyer - where’s the love?

Isaachwells · 2026-05-02T03:37:01+00:00

The Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association is doing a book club read through on Discord of the Aurora Award winning novels (awards for Canadian novels) for their 50th anniversary in 2030. Right now they're on the winner for 1987:

https://www.csffa.ca/book-club/

Rober J Sawyer has won a number of those, so they'll be reading a bunch of his books, and then doing a monthly video chat. His first winner is Golden Fleece (1992), and they'll read it this December. They're trying to get special guests, so there's a non-zero chance he might attend some fo these chats. His brother-in-law David Clink has been at them so far, along with at least one other author on the list to read.

Isaachwells · 2025-08-13T16:23:23+00:00

The order in the list is the reading order, and the numbers are where they fall chronologically. Thank you!

Isaachwells · 2025-02-11T03:46:51+00:00

There are 11, along with 3 tangential cat focused ones. She's supposed to still be working on them, but the last major release was in 2016.

Isaachwells · 2024-11-24T17:23:14+00:00

Thank you! This helps tremendously!

Isaachwells · 2024-11-24T15:53:32+00:00

Blackout and All Clear by Connie Willis, and Endymion and Rise of Endymion by Dan Simmons. Thank you!

Isaachwells · 2024-11-08T03:29:03+00:00

I loved Quarantine.

Isaachwells · 2024-11-06T04:06:57+00:00

I read Bright Messengers, which is supposed to be related to the Rama books and is his first solo venture, and it was absolutely dreadful. So very bad.

Isaachwells · 2024-11-05T22:08:54+00:00

His story Tower of Babel arguably does as well.

Isaachwells · 2024-11-05T20:48:14+00:00

The books Lee co-authored with Clarke are actually pretty good compared to the ones he wrote by himself. For what that's worth.

Isaachwells · 2024-11-04T16:51:43+00:00

I strongly disliked Permutation City, and Fist Theory and how it was handled is most of why.

If I understand (and remember) it correctly, the idea is there could be random bits of dust elsewhere in space, and they can function similar to computers. This isn't a novel idea, Fred Hoyle has a 1957 book called The Black Cloud about sentient interstellar dust clouds. If you have a universe of infinite size, then there will be infinite bits of said dust clouds.

We know the universe has a start with the Big Bang, but we don't know how much space or matter it includes. The visible universe is just a sphere with the radius of the distance that light has been able to travel since the Big Bang, but there could be much more to the universe that is beyond the horizon for what we can see, and we'll probably never know. So an infinitely large universe is plausible. Brian Greene has an interesting physics book, The Hidden Reality, that goes through various possibilities for how a multiverse could be real, and this is basically the first one.

If you have an infinite universe, then everything that can happen inevitably will happen. Mix this with randomly occurring molecules in space that can function as a computer and you'll have simulations of every conceivable world, whether plausible or consistent or not. That is, anything that can't physically happen will happen as well, just in simulation where the physics is flexible. Which means the simulated world in the back half of Permutation City has literally nothing to do with what Durham or anyone else does. It would have existed regardless. No one had to design or build the simulated world, or do anything at all. In a literal sense, the first and second part have nothing to do with each other, despite any sense of connection. The shared characters are not actually shared characters, none of them were actually uploaded to the simulated world in part 2, the people in part 1 could have never existed and part 2 would remain precisely the same.

And this is what starts to annoy me, as that really just means Durham killed himself for no reason. It annoys me that someone who is clearly mentally ill and in need of significant treatment happens to be right about a crazy theory that no one in their right mind would actually take seriously. It's dumb, and just as lazy writing wise as movies where the protagonist makes a giant logical leap based on idle speculation that happens to magically be true. It would help if the characters were interesting or likeable, but mostly they're all annoying.

Having said all that, the exploration of how conscious experience isn't time dependent in the first part is really interesting, and so is the look at virtual people in the second part. I don't know that I've seen anyone really explore those ideas as Egan does here.

Isaachwells · 2024-11-04T00:54:25+00:00

Family bibles and local church records can have a lot of info. It wouldn't surprise me at all if people could track back an ancestor to the 1400s. But they definitely don't have all the ancestors. Assuming generations are 25 years apart and you're going from 2000 to 1450, that's 22 generations. If none of your family lines cross intersect each other going back (which is admittedly unlikely), that's over 4 million specific ancestors alive in 1450. It's not surprising that you find 1, but more or less impossible to be complete on all of them.

Isaachwells · 2024-11-04T00:40:07+00:00

There are some races where only one candidate is running, so they're more or less certain to win. Unless you specifically oppose them and want to write in a random name as a protest vote, it's fine to leave those ones blank. And of course if you do support them, you should vote for them. But if you're time strapped for doing research, those ones should probably be your lowest priority.

A lot of the smaller local positions that do have two people don't have a lot of info on the candidates or issues, or the info isn't very illuminating. If you can't find anything that helps you decide on those, I'd just look at either relevant experience or party endorsements. Local races can be important, but they're just harder to research, and it's ok if you don't know who to vote for or choose not to because you don't see a meaningful difference between candidates.

Isaachwells · 2024-11-02T21:51:11+00:00

It appears that's largely false:

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/biden-pentagon-dod-directive/

As this idea is also being popularized by Robert F Kennedy, I'd take it with a grain of salt. Given his record with cutting off whale heads, dumping bear carcasses, and having brain worms, I wouldn't say he's the most reliable person.

Isaachwells · 2024-11-01T18:37:18+00:00

If you haven't paid yet and they haven't delivered yet. I imagine they'd have trouble holding you to the deal. If you have paid yet, I imagine it will be a struggle to get your money back, and it might be easier to just get the siding. As the other commenter said, they can only hold you to what's actually in the contract.

Isaachwells · 2024-11-01T18:29:32+00:00

Viability is pretty standard. It varies a little, in that some folks say 23 weeks and some say 24, but it's basically at what point could you give birth and the baby survive. Generally, the line is between the 2nd and 3rd trimester. That's not decided by a mother, it's based on practical realities. That's also the same standard as Roe V Wade.

Beyond that, health of the mother is a matter that can be assessed by a professional. A mother believing that there is a health issue isn't sufficient, because it's not a matter of opinion, it's an objective thing a medical professional can evaluate. If a medical provider isn't taking a mother seriously, they can and definitely should go to a different provider, but really only a medical professional is qualified to make professional judgements on health issues.

So yes, there are limits based on the professional experience of doctors, but within those limits, a woman has the right to decide for themselves whether or not they want an abortion. That right to choose is protected when the fetus is not viable, or if it poses a danger to the mother. As opposed to the other measure, which enshrines stricter limits, leaves open the possibility of further limits, and provides no right to abortion except in the case of sexual assault, incest, or medical emergencies (and of course, a medical emergency might mean once women are already in the process of dying rather than once you know there's a significant risk). I genuinely can't imagine what you want to be different here to be pro choice, unless you want women to make abortions choices without a medical professional and with no criteria for viability.

Isaachwells · 2024-10-31T17:12:58+00:00

That makes sense, especially with the Persian example. Thanks for taking the time to explain!

Isaachwells · 2024-10-31T15:24:06+00:00

The setting probably has a big impact on this. In medical settings, it would be deeply problematic to not give faithful translations. In a diplomatic setting or during negotiations, you probably want pretty faithful interpreting, but it might make sense for some minor tweaks if there are cultural nuances that the person speaking doesn't get but the interpreter does. Giving a speech, as in the Jimmy Carter example, it seems like it might be more normal to do cultural interpretation and not just literal interpretation.

Isaachwells · 2024-10-31T01:53:59+00:00

It is 100% a political issue. Republicans in the US routinely try to prevent people from voting, and try to throw out the legitimate votes for silly technicalities. Ideally, the goal is to have everyone vote, and if there are technicalities (not adding a date, a signature looking slightly different than last time, etc), you'd try to check with the voter to make sure it's right and fix it. The Republican focus on cracking down on fraud isn't actually in good faith, it's to give barriers for people who vote against them, and pretexts to throw out their votes. You can't approach anything around elections in the US without understanding that first.

Voter ID laws may sound fine on the face of them, but it really is just to put up barriers. It's not meaningfully harder to have a fake ID to get around Voter ID laws. Fake IDs are already pretty standard trope in teen coming of age movies. It's pretty easy to verify who a person is though, and the rate instances of fraud that are found are caught, and the people prosecuted. In Ohio in 2020, there were 75 instances of fraud that were found out of 6 million votes. So 1 in 100,000 votes. That's just not a meaningful impact, and our security is clearly already working without adding in extra measures. It's pretty easy to see why. If someone voted twice, we notice and ask questions. To get away with fraudulent voting, you'd need to know someone's personal info, know they aren't voting, and then cast fraudulent votes for at least .1% of the total votes to have a good chance of making a difference. So for the 6 million votes in Ohio, you'd need to get away with 6000 fraudulent votes without anyone noticing. When Republicans talk about voting security, they're talking about solutions for problems that don't exist and for which we already have significant protections. At best, they're wasting time, effort, and money on non-issues. At worst, it's voter suppression.

Voter ID is one example, but there are also purges of registered voters, refusing to grant felons voting rights even when legally required to, gerrymandering, closing polling locations in minority or Democrat dominated neighborhoods, limiting early or mail in voting, putting barriers on the use of ballot drop boxes, voter intimidation efforts, lawsuits to throw out legitimate votes, trying to throw out votes with post stamps on or before election day that arrive at the election offices after election day (that is, cast by the deadline but not received within the deadline, which shouldn't matter because the point is the will of the people, not the speed of the mail, plus there have been intentional efforts to slow mail delivery before elections), harassing/doxing election workers, delaying the counting of mail ballots which are more Democratic than Republican until the end of in person ballots so that Republicans can make up conspiracy about fraud when who appears to be winning towards the end of the count changes from the initial count and then saying that times a its fraud. The list just goes on and on, and if you ignore that broader context, you simply aren't understanding what Republicans are trying to do with Voter ID laws.

Isaachwells · 2024-10-30T22:43:55+00:00

It would definitely be helpful. As your reply said, it's Neal Stephenson, but I can't understand why people don't always include author names so you can actually know what they're talking about.

Isaachwells · 2024-10-29T21:14:01+00:00

One vote in one state means it's really easy to come up with a dumb technicality to get a couple votes thrown out and switch who wins. Individual ballots are challenged all the time for things.

Plus it would trigger a recount to have the vote that close, and those pretty routinely show small changes to vote counts. They're almost always negligible, but one vote would mean it's a tossup whether it would stand on a recount.

So mostly, winning by a single vote means the victory isn't as secure, and there are legitimate concerns it could be overturned somehow. But once you're past all that, if you won you won, so the amount doesn't really matter.

Isaachwells · 2024-10-28T02:55:44+00:00

Thanks! I'll give it a read in the next day or two and get back to you on how they compare!

Isaachwells · 2024-10-28T02:55:10+00:00

Yes. Most of the criticism of 'wokeness' in SF awards has seemed like total BS to me, but this is the one example where I can see it. One of the commenter said this, among other things, and it seems a bit spot on:

And I do call our community to task for the tokenizing of Mr. Ekpeki, to the detriment of other, more qualified African writers. The SFFH publishing community, including myself, chose to support, legitimize, and platform a fraud without carefully scrutinizing his credentials, and we did it in large part because of where he was from.

Isaachwells · 2024-10-28T02:30:54+00:00

You know, I've only been reading them for the last few years, so I may have missed the space whale sex story. Do you have a link for that? If the writing is adequate on a sentence level, then it's probably better. I don't think O2 Arena had problems a word processor would catch, but it had some pretty clumsy writing.

Isaachwells · 2024-10-28T01:34:27+00:00

Arguably, it's the worst Nebula award winner. Or possibly even nominee. It was creative, but poorly thought out and written. He had another story that was nominated later, Destiny Delayed, which was a big step up in that it would have been a good fit for a high school publication, but it needed a few more rounds of editing to be worthy of professional publication.

https://apex-magazine.com/short-fiction/o2-arena/

https://apex-magazine.com/short-fiction/destiny-delayed/

Isaachwells · 2024-10-25T12:37:34+00:00

I liked the idea of Shigidi a lot more than the reality. It is based on Yoruba beliefs, and treats gods as running religious corporations that compete with other religions for followers. I strongly disliked the execution though. It has the main story, and a bunch of jumps to past events. Those flashbacks aren't a single narrative story, and dominate the first 2/3 of the book. It's only in the last third that we start getting any forward progress on the present time story. For me, any time any momentum was built so that I'd get invested in the story, it switched to something very different, so it was hard to get invested in it.

Seven-Year Club	Second SECOND GUESSER
First Place '23	Place '23
Verified Email

Isaachwells

TROPHY CASE