This week, Sci-Fi Today has the privilege of interviewing one of the top talents in science fiction today, Robert J. Sawyer. He has been called “the dean of Canadian science fiction” by The Ottawa Citizen newspaper and “among the most successful Canadian authors ever” by Maclean’s: Canada’s Weekly Newsmagazine. Rob was born in Ottawa in 1960, and now lives just west of Toronto with his wife, poet Carolyn Clink. His award-winning web site has been called “the best author’s page on the Internet”, containing over 900,000 words of short stories, sample chapters, articles, interviews and reviews. He is the former president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA), the world’s oldest and largest association of science-fiction professionals, and was the first non-American ever to hold that post.

Rob has won twenty-two national and international writing awards, including the 1995 Nebula Award for The Terminal Experiment. He has been been a finalist for the Hugo Award (science fiction’s international readers’ choice award) six times with the novels The Terminal Experiment, Starplex, Frameshift, Factoring Humanity and Calculating God and for the short story The Hand You’re Dealt. His last novel Hominids is the first book in the Neanderthal Parallax trilogy and is on the Preliminary Nebula Award Ballot. The second volume, Humans, has just now become available in stores.

Once again, YOU ask the questions. If you don’t already have a free account, sign up now and post your questions all week long as replies to this story. You are strongly encouraged to also rate each other’s questions during the week. At the end of Friday, the 10 top-rated questions will be sent to Robert Sawyer and his responses will be posted here when ready.

Update [2003-2-3 19:2:23 by Drog]: Rob has graciously volunteered to dispense with the usual routine of answering only the top-10 questions at the end of the week, and will instead answer questions as they come in during the week. This should make for a much more interactive and evolving interview, so let’s take advantage of his generosity!