Jawbone.tv: Speaking of big ideas, your work is being adapted for television, the series FlashForward, which is getting the coveted Thursday night, 8:00 PM time slot on ABC, right after the hit show Lost.

"It’s interesting because we are a prime time show, but most people who were predicting thought we would be a nine or ten o’clock because we do have an awful lot of serious adult content and serious philosophical exploration. But we got 8:00 PM, which means we’ll have an even bigger viewing audience. So ABC is pinning an awful lot of hopes on this series and we are doing everything we can to deliver on the promise."

Jawbone.tv: And you’re operating as a story consultant on that and then possibly drafting an episode yourself?

"I have a contractual commitment that I will write one of the first season episodes, and yes, I’m consultant on all of the episodes, and certainly before we even consummated the deal, I sat down with David S. Goyer (Batman Begins , Blade) and Brannon Braga (Enterprise, Threshold), who were setting out to write the pilot script, to discuss the philosophical underpinnings and what FlashForward is as a kind of intellectual exercise, and we were all very much on the same page, and I’m delighted to be working with them on this."

Jawbone.tv: So there are no horror stories as far as adaptations are concerned?

"No, not at all ... My whole life I’ve understood the process of adaptation. I wasn’t looking for, and never expected to find, somebody to make a slavish, scene-by-scene, beat-by-beat adaptation of anything I’d written, because what I wrote was written for the printed page, for the strengths of fiction as presented as printed text. It wasn’t written to be an elaborate pitch towards Hollywood. When something gets made into a separate medium, the only sensible way to approach it is to tear it down and rebuild it from the ground up. That’s happened here, in a very inventive and very, to me, in a still emotionally true to the underlying material sort of way."

Jawbone.tv: The first printing of FlashForward would have come out in 1999?

"First published in 1999, which of course means I wrote it in ’97 and ’98."

Jawbone.tv: Is that something that, at that point in your career, there would have been an option on that book at that stage? Or has it been sitting on someone’s bookshelf, and then in the last two or three years it’s picked up and ultimately ends up on TV?

"David Goyer and his wife Jessica Goyer were introduced to the book almost immediately after it came out, by my agent who had a good sense of who might appreciate this property. And in the interim, of course, David’s career took off, he wrote Batman Begins among other things. So that it was kind of back burner. During that process, we had approaches from other people who wanted to option the property, who were offering really substantial sums of money on the table. And we actually chose not to option it, but almost on a handshake and a general ‘everybody liking the project’ and thinking we had the right people involved, we let it lie fallow until David found time in his schedule to give his full attentions to it. That turned out, of course, in the long run, to be the right strategy for this particular book."

Jawbone.tv: As you said, you’ve been involved in making sure your work is in the right hands … assuming FlashForward lives up to expectations, is there anticipation of a downpour… that people will be snapping up anything written by you because there might be some name recognition next to it?

"It’s not even anticipation. We’re already getting an enormous amount of interest in my other properties, which is great. We just … it ‘looks like’, I’m not announcing it now, so I won’t tell you which one, but it looks like we just green-lit a motion picture adaptation of another one of my properties that certainly had been languishing for a number of years, and I don’t think that it’s any coincidence at all that suddenly it’s moving to the front burner. My agent in New York was remarking that the number of times my name is mentioned in the overwhelming amount of press coverage there’s been about FlashForward, is staggering ... the publicity value of that alone ... has been gigantic and it’s already had a demonstrable effect on the marketability of my other properties for film and television."

Jawbone.tv: What’s next for you? What are you working on now?

"Well, I recently had published the first volume of a new trilogy about the World Wide Web gaining consciousness. That was called Wake. I’ve completed the second volume, it’s called Watch. The final volume, Wonder, is what I’m writing right now, and it will take me through probably to the beginning of next year, as well as writing my episode for FlashForward. After that, I’m in the very enviable position right now of pretty much having the confidence of my various publishers. I have a separate Canadian, American and British publisher, and I’m looking forward to figuring out what I’m going to write after this trilogy."

"I have two or three projects that are each calling to me in a different way, and I’m also therefore in the process of sorting out what I want to do next. But at this level of my career, being confident that pretty much whatever I want to do, my publishers are going to say yes, let’s get behind that. And that’s a very satisfying place to be. The books that I’m going to be next pitching to my publishers will be my 21st and subsequent novels. After you’ve been at it this long, you have some momentum and everybody wants to keep you going."

(For a complete transcript of this interview, see Author Robert J. Sawyer Interview - Unabridged.)