My agent at the time was very big on series, and he felt I should develop another, so I came up with Starplex -- a sort of Star Trek done right -- and actually sold it to Ace as the first two books of a series. As I set out to write the first book, though, I realized I was deliberately holding things back for future books. And I thought that was wrong; that was cheating the readers. So I said to heck with it, and threw everything I had into one volume, setting myself the task of solving all the outstanding problems in astrophysics and cosmology in a single book. I know I made the right decision: Starplex was the only book from its year to be nominated for both the Hugo and the Nebula, and it won Canada's Aurora Award and the CompuServe SF Forum's HOMer Award. But, ironically, of all the books I've done, it's the one that generates the most requests for a sequel. Certainly the universe I created is complex enough that it could support further books, and so I might indeed go back and do that at some point.

But now I am indeed doing a trilogy conceived as such from the outset. There are two reasons for this. First, British publishers really want series rather than standalone books these days; standalones just don't seem to sell well in the U.K.  And, second, for every writing project I undertake, I try to challenge myself in some new way. For Frameshift [1998 Hugo Award finalist], for instance, it was, by setting, a legitimate SF novel entirely in the present day. For Factoring Humanity [1999 Hugo Award finalist] it was doing a female protagonist, something notoriously difficult for a male author to pull off. Well, this time out, I'm trying a bigger canvas. My earlier novels have ranged from about 70,000 to 100,000 words; this project will weigh in at 300,000 words and although each volume will have its own definite beginning, middle, and end, I'm actually quite pleasantly surprised at how much I'm enjoying conceptualizing on such a large scale.

But then, with that book outselling all my previous novels, I realized I was in danger of being pigeon-holed again, as a sort of Crichton who actually liked science. And so for my next novel, I very deliberately did something completely different. That book was Starplex. I'm now at the point were I really think publishers and my readers understand that a Rob Sawyer novel isn't defined by its setting but rather by an interest in social commentary, in a belief in rationalism, and in a combination of the intimately human and the grandly cosmic. There's no particular pigeon-hole to put such books in, though, and I'm just delighted about that.

On reviews, I think that field is maturing online. There are some credible review sites starting to appear, with SF Weekly and SF Site probably being the most notable; indeed, you're starting to see them being quoted on book covers. Also the official, signed editorial reviews on Amazon.com and BN.com -- I'm talking about the ones they commission from professional reviewers, not the comments left by readers -- have become quite in-depth and insightful in the last year or two.

But for fiction, I've not yet been impressed by much of what I've seen online. Most writers I know consider online publishing to be an oxymoron; we want the permanence of a book or magazine. Also, most of us are sympathetic to the low pay rates of print publications -- I've co-edited three small-press anthologies and am painfully aware of the economics of such undertakings -- but we have a harder time understanding why a web-based publication feels justified in paying just two or three cents a word; editorial is their only real cost, and as a business person, I find myself reluctant to sanction the notion that all the cost savings related to online publishing should accrue to the publisher, with none of it being passed on to the writers in the form of higher word rates.

Actually, though, I have a lot of my previously published short stories posted on my own web site at www.sfwriter.com. This has proven enormously useful on two counts. First, people who are reluctant to shell out money for a book by an author they haven't read before can try me before buying. I've also got sample chapters of all my books, but those only tell you about the premises and the use of language -- they really don't tell you if a writer can plot, because the elegance of a plot is only apparent in a finished work. Well, the free short stories let readers see how I am at all aspects of story telling before they spend money for one of my novels.

Second, to my delight, having the stories online has actually substantially boosted my resale rights. Every month, I get an inquiry about paper reprint rights or translation rights for one or another of the stories on my web site. It's turned into a nice little source of subsidiary revenue.

One of the healthiest things I've seen recently in the SF magazines was the issues of Analog and Asimov's launched at this year's Worldcon in Chicago: the Analog contained a Michael Bishop story, a writer normally associated with Asimov's, and the Asimov's had a Larry Niven kzin story -- the kind of fare one usually expects in Analog. I really think SF readers are just as tired of pigeon-holing as are SF writers; I read the far-future SF of James White and the near-future SF of Stephen Dedman with equal pleasure, and a versatile writer like Robert Charles Wilson can show a great range -- contrast his Bios with his Darwinia, both of which are excellent -- without ever producing something that his fans don't recognize as being absolutely Wilsonian.

I have nothing but good feelings about this. Yes, changes are being made in my original story -- the action has been moved from Los Angeles to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida; poor Frank Nobilio has had a sex change and is now Fran Nobilio; and so on -- but my basic story is remarkably intact. Obviously, a writer can't beat the exposure that having a film made gives to his or her work; millions of people will see the Illegal Alien film, versus only hundreds of thousands who will read it in the various English and foreign-language editions.

Also, of course, there's the money. I'm making quite a comfortable living right now, but the money that I would get if just one of my books was made into a movie would handily take care of my retirement. As the sole income earner in my household, and as someone who is completely self-employed, that's something I do worry about.