By: Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 13/5/2011 (4064 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
THE world's most decorated science-fiction author thinks the BBC could learn from Canada's national broadcaster.
The CBC "has always been wonderfully supportive of science fiction," says Ontario-based Robert J. Sawyer, who reads from the new, concluding chapter to his WWW trilogy, Wonder, on Thursday at McNally Robinson.
By contrast, Sawyer recently signed a letter to the BBC -- co-signed by some of the world's best-known sci-fi and fantasy writers -- criticizing the "sneering coverage" of genre fiction during World Book Night in March.
"The BBC should have been ashamed of itself for ignoring the terrific work being done today in a field that Britain invented," Sawyer says, adding that The Time Machine author H.G. Wells' is science fiction's "father."
In total, Sawyer has won 44 national and international awards for his science fiction -- more, according to the Locus Index to Science Fiction Awards, than anyone else.
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Will Calgary-based Freehand Books once again score a literary awards coup, this time with a first-time Winnipeg novelist?
Good to a Fault, by then-unknown Edmonton author Marina Endicott, won a 2009 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for best book, and was a 2008 Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist. It was published by Freehand, established in 2007.
In October Freehand will publish the "dystopic" first novel of Winnipeg-based Esme Claire Keith, Not Being on a Boat, a satire of luxury and all-inclusive vacations.
Born in Toronto in 1964, Keith has lived in Winnipeg the last 20 years. Not Being on a Boat is her first book.
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Monty Python alumnus John Cleese, 71, is penning his memoirs to help fund his $19.9-million divorce settlement, reports the Toronto Star's entertainment site Toronto.com.
The book, to be titled The Maintenance Memoirs," is something Cleese says he'd been putting off, in part "because it was too difficult trying to remember things."
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In other quirky memoir news, Winnipeg-born Michael Stern, audience supervisor for the last six seasons of the Dr. Phil Show, has written his first book, the autobiographical I Had A Ball: My Friendship with Lucille Ball.
With the approval of Ball's children, Lucie and Desi Arnaz Jr., the 50-year-old Stern self-published the book through the Internet company iUniverse to coincide with the 60th anniversary of iconic '50s sitcom I Love Lucy. (This past April, Ball herself would have turned 100.)
Stern moved to Los Angeles from Winnipeg as a boy.
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Brooklyn writer Andrew Kessler opened a New York bookstore that sells one title -- his.
The 32-year-old has stocked the store, called Ed's Martian Book, with 3,000 copies of Martian Summer: Robot Arms, Cowboy Spacemen, and My 90 Days with the Phoenix Mars Mission.
The book details his privileged behind-the-scenes experiences with NASA scientists during the 2008 Phoenix Mars Lander Mission.
The shop, which opened April 15, will close tomorrow.
ksmithpaperchase@gmail.com
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Kenton Smith
Tuxedo community correspondent
Kenton Smith was a community correspondent for Tuxedo.
