Robert Sawyer
Robert J. Sawyer is a science-fiction writer and futurist living in Toronto. He has been called “a writer of boundless confidence and bold scientific extrapolation” by The New York Times and “just about the best science-fiction writer out there” by The Denver Rocky Mountain News. New Scientist calls his work “scientifically plausible, fictionally intriguing, and ethically important,” The Montreal Gazette says he’s “Canada’s answer to Michael Crichton,” and Maclean’s declares, “By any reckoning, Sawyer is one of the most-successful Canadian authors ever.” According to the US trade journal Locus, he has won more awards for his novels than anyone else in the history of the science-fiction and fantasy fields.
The ABC television series FlashForward, starring Joseph Fiennes and John Cho, was based on his novel of the same name. His twenty-two bestselling novels have been translated into twenty languages. Rob is one of only eight authors in history to win the world’s three top science-fiction awards for best novel of the year:
• the World Science Fiction Society’s Hugo Award (which he won in 2003 for Hominids)
• the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America’s Nebula Award (which he won in 1996 for The Terminal Experiment)
• and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award (which he won in 2006 for Mindscan).
Rob was the only writer invited to sit on the Canadian Federal Department of Justice’s advisory panel for genetics laws, and he recently was invited by DARPA—the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—to consult on its “100 Year Starship” project. His other consulting clients have included Kodak, Lockheed Martin, Motorola, NASA, Computer Associates, and Gartner.
Rob has made over 300 TV appearances (including MSNBC’s Rivera Live with Geraldo Rivera and CTV’s Canada A.M.) and given over 300 radio interviews (including NPR’s Talk of the Nation “Science Friday” and CBC’s Sounds Like Canada). He is a frequent commentator on science stories for the CBC and BBC Radio, and often appears as a futurist on Discovery Channel Canada. His nonfiction has appeared in Archaeology, Sky & Telescope, Canadian Business, The Globe and Mail, Maclean’s, Report on Business Magazine, The Ottawa Citizen, and The Toronto Star. He wrote the guest editorial for the robotics issue of the world’s top scientific journal, Science, and one of his stories was published in Nature.
Rob has previously spoken at such venues as the Library of Congress, the National Library of Canada, the Canadian Embassy in Tokyo, TEDxManitoba, and Darwin College, Cambridge, and he has given keynotes and talks for such organizations as Google, Sanofi-Aventis, CLEAR (the Council on Licensure, Enforcement, and Regulation), Professional Engineers Ontario, the Alberta Land Surveyors’ Association, the New America Foundation, the Federation of State Medical Boards, Turkey’s Garanti Bank; and Ceridian.
Rob Sawyer lives in Toronto. For more information, visit his website at sfwriter.com.