Talk:Robert J. Sawyer

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	The following comments have been left for this page: [edit] Assessment Start-class - almost no sources (I found his bio), little discussion of his work, too much biographical detail. Lots of room for improvement. Avt tor 08:59, 1 February 2007 (UTC) (edit)

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Further information might be found on the talk page or at requests for expansion. (January 2007)

Relevant for inclusion?

I'm just reading Flashforward, and found it amusing/spooky that he mentions Pope Benedict XVI in the 2009 setting.

[edit] Edit Request

I really don't like this sentence. While I think all of the ideas presented have value, the particular combination seems highly POV and political to me: Although he is a dual US/Canadian citizen, he is sometimes seen as being critical of the United States (however a close reading of his work often reveals similar criticisms of Canada; see in particular the denouncing of former Ontario Progressive Conservative premier Mike Harris in Calculating God). In particular, it suggests to me that either his American citizenship should preclude him being critical of the United States, or that being critical of the United States needs the defense that he's a citizen of it, and he's a citizen of Canada and critical of them, too. Or perhaps I'm reading too much into it. But at any rate, can someone change it to an alternative? --Steven Fisher 15:16, 8 May 2005 (UTC)

Edited. I tried to make it as general and NPOV as possible. --SimonCrowley 3 July 2005 08:43 (UTC)

Why was "Webmind" removed from the bibliography? --IP 209...

Webmind was the working title of the project that Sawyer was originally contracted to do. With the permission of his editor, he went to work on Mindscan to fulfil that agreement. --Drakkenfyre

It would be helpful to expand the article with info about Weiss v. Sawyer, the libel case that started several years ago and apparently (?) ended in 2002. Even a cursory mention is not here. It involved Weiss -- a bibliographer and reviewer -- suing Sawyer for libel. Weiss had published a negative review of one of Sawyer's novels, and Sawyer contacted the newspaper in question, Realms, regarding a previous difference of opinion between the two writers. His letter may have appeared on the Realms website, as well as in the paper, and formed the basis for the libel claim. All I've been able to find so far on the web is discussion of the Canadian legal precedent that was set; the judge in the case found that publishing online is considered to be the same as publishing a newspaper, in terms of expectations for filing a libel suit. http://puggy.symonds.net/pipermail/goajourno/2002-September/000202.html has a summary of that court action. I met the editors of Realms magazine at one time and was startled to see a Toronto Star article regarding the case and their need for a legal defense fund. I have not been in Canada for some years and am not sure if anything happened after 2002. Still, it bears mentioning, for the precedent it set at the very least. Noirdame 18:28, 10 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Further cleanup

While some excellent work has been done here, we've lost the lede in a gigantic swamp of undifferentiated material. The new version needs some subject headings, and a bit of standard formatting (personal vs. professional life, etc.) to become useful. --Orange Mike | Talk 01:21, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

Got to agree. This article reads like a laundry list of accomplishments, and is (sorry to say) a bit of a tough slog to get through. And while his list of accomplishments is impressive, a lot of what's here seems like puffery. Is someone familiar with Sawyer willing to do some pruning? 172.134.44.120 (talk) 00:39, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

While there may be a "laundry list" of accomplishments, I worry that removing note of these will cause the article to be less factually complete and therefore less informative. Frankly, if I were a student writing a book report, for instance, there isn't a piece of information on that page that I would feel comfortable being without. Drakkenfyre (talk) 07:12, 29 December 2007 (UTC)