clock … watching time, the only true currency

From Vin, he of Sportscolumn and Favorite10 fame, I received Rollback, the best Robert J. Sawyer novel I’ve read to date. Per usual, simple premise opens rich exposition of some eternal questions. The narrator’s wife Sarah decoded an alien message (a la Carl Sagan’s Contact) long ago. Now, another message has arrived. But Sarah is [...]

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Hybrids by Robert J. Sawyer is the third and final book in The Neanderthal Parallax, exploring the imagined interaction between Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens via parallel universes. Hybrids completes what began in Hominids and continued in Humans. Once again, Sawyer delves into where science and religion mix, this time “finding” the God organ in the [...]

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Humans by Robert J. Sawyer is the second book in The Neanderthal Parallax, a set of three novels exploring interaction between Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens via parallel universes. Humans picks up from its beginnings in Hominids. The story is a bit dialog-heavy. The conversations between the Neanderthal male named Ponter and a human woman named [...]

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Hominids by Robert J. Sawyer opens The Neanderthal Parallax, a set of three novels exploring interaction between Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens via parallel universes, where the big lugs didn’t die out…and weren’t such lugs. As always, Sawyer makes science human. Jumping off from a quantum physics experiment gone slightly askew, Sawyer blends in jealous ex-spouses, [...]

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A month ago, Vin sent me a box full of books, including several Robert Sawyer novels. I’ve enjoyed earlier reads, and Flashforward was a quick romp. Courtesy of a supercollider experiment, the world gets a glimpse of its future 21 years out. Sawyer takes a swing at the mundane (patent office is overwhelmed with applications [...]

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I travelled this weekend, which meant I got to start and finish Robert Sawyer’s The Terminal Experiment. In a fun combination of two technology sectors, the story follows the impact of EEGs taken at a nanoscale level and software constructs of human brains/personalities. Call it a mashup, even…with an evil genius AI committing real-world murder [...]

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I finished Robert Sawyer’s Factoring Humanity several days ago. I enjoyed it, as I did the other Sawyer novel I read last summer. Also set in Toronto, Factoring Humanity blends human interaction — a marriage between university professors that family crisis has damaged — with three of the most challenging scientific problems in the world. [...]

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Flying back to San Francisco alone a week ago gave me plenty of reading time, so I finished off Calculating God, by Robert J. Sawyer. Thanks, Mom… I’ll definitely have to pick up some more Sawyer, since it’s clearly intelligent, approachable science fiction. And I appreciate an author forward thinking enough to use sfwriter.com as [...]

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