The Big Idea: Robert J. Sawyer



















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10 Comments on “The Big Idea: Robert J. Sawyer”

  1. Being a work of fiction, I can easily accept the central conceit of the story and enjoy the story. But as a scientist, I really have little time for the conceit of Penrose in his pronouncements about biological matters.

  2. That’s a great illustration of the premise “Writers must read.” I’m definitely looking forward to getting this one under my eyes.

  3. Thanks to the Amazon and it’s Kindle app, this book was the first thing I looked at this morning. I could hardly stop reading long enough to deal with my morning routine. This is a great book, and I strongly recommend it to everyone. As Sawyer says, the book is ultimately optimistic, but he does run you through some scary stuff before you get there. Not scary in the way a horror story is, but in way good SF always has. This is a future that we surely don’t want, and yet, if a discovery like this were to happen, there would be nothing we could do to stop it.

    Of course there are some things in it that would explain American politics if they were true.

  4. I’ve been looking forward to this book for quite a while. I was hoping to snag a signed copy when Sawyer visits Winnipeg but sadly I can’t make the signing. Maybe McNally Robinson will have some signed copies hanging around after. I have enjoyed everything I have read by Sawyer and this Big Idea assures me I won’t go wrong this time.

  5. Timely given that such a shining example of p-zombies currently exists (and are happily shambling towards the GOP front-runner). For that matter, that the second state, psychopath, is well represented by the object of their attraction.

  6. How is it that Robert J. Sawyer is able to put voice to the random things that I happen to be thinking about, and do it in a completely well-thought-out and interesting manner? It blows my mind that he’s so able to blow my mind.

  7. John killed this guy a few years ago in a blog post (justifiably, he was complaining about something silly). Good they made up. Another great book by Sawyer is Flash Forward. There was a TV series based on it, the book is very different and better than the TV series. It was not about conspiracy theories or action. It was about how people dealt with this bizarre event.

    Sawyer is interesting because he writes successful books about lots of different near future topics. Most of them are pretty different from each other. Most authors tend to revolve closer to a core style in the genre. I like Sawyer because his books are often very different fom each other. So Im less likely to fall into author fatigue of same stuff different book.

    His books are also relatively short and there isn’t and bloat in them.

  8. This one looks pretty interesting. I have it on my Amazon UK list to get when it’s in paperback.

  9. I reviewed the book for SFRevu ( I liked the ideas, but the first third is very slow and talky. I understand the need to impart a lot of information and the author did try to use different techniques so it wasn’t all one infodump, but it did make the initial pacing slow. I think the payoff was worth it but other readers might not.