Thursday, December 29, 2005

John Demjanjuk ordered deported

My 1997 novel Frameshift (a Hugo finalist, and winner of Japan’s Seiun Award), which has just been reissued by Tor in a handsome trade-paperback edition, deals in part with the story of John Demjanjuk, the Cleveland autoworker falsely accused of being Ivan the Terrible, the notorious guard at the Treblinka death camp. The real Ivan the Terrible was actually a man named Ivan Marchenko, who bore a passing physical resemblance to Demjanjuk; Marchenko was never apprehended.

A U.S. immigration judge has just ordered Demjanjuk, now 85, deported to his native Ukraine. The Globe and Mail has the AP story, and there’s also coverage on the CNN web site.

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4 Comments:

At December 29, 2005 1:50 PM , Blogger Joel Kelly said...

Should that be considered some sort of spoiler? I'm concerned because I just picked up Frameshift yesterday... probably should have stopped reading that post when I hit the title, though.

Since it was published so long ago I probably can't complain; there's gotta a some sort of statute of limitations on spoiling.

 
At December 29, 2005 3:53 PM , Blogger RobertJSawyer said...

Oh, no, not at all. Chapter 2 is set in Treblinka, and deals with Ivan the Terrible, and the trial of Demjanjuk appears early on as well (Chapter 5). Don't worry about reading my blog -- I'm very careful about spoilers!

In fact, a story about spoilers: over twenty-five years ago, a friend of mine thought it was funny when we were on a car trip to pick up the book I'd just started and read the last page aloud (he was in the back seat; I was in the front -- so I didn't know what he was doing until it was too late). I've only just, finally, gone back to that book (Arthur C. Clarke's The Sands of Mars, which I will finally finish tonight), and I still remember how it ends from all those years ago.

(The same friend is the guy who, upon greeting me in December 1979 said, "So what did you think of that whole Voyager 6 thing in Star Trek: The Motion Picture," which I hadn't yet seen. Ugh.)

 
At December 30, 2005 9:59 PM , Blogger Scott said...

Love the new look to the blog!

Had the opportunity to chat with you and Edo Van Belkom years and years ago at WORD ON THE STREET in Toronto. A distinct pleasure to see writers treating fans with such warmth and friendliness.

Looking forward to checking out MINDSCAN in paperback.

Oh, and about spoilers -- when I was nine years old I read the comic book adaptation of STAR TREK III before seeing the flick, and it distinctly ruined the viewing experience. (I wanted to scream out loud to the entire theatre: "Spock's alive! He's okay!") Ever since I've been paranoid about them. (Excluding, of course, the time I read the copy of the PULP FICTION script before seeing the film. A fascinating experience, true, to see how a clever script was transformed into a fantastic film, but a lot of the fun was lost...)

Keep up the great work!

 
At December 30, 2005 10:03 PM , Blogger RobertJSawyer said...

Many thanks, Scott! Word on the Street (Toronto's open-air book festival) is always great fun, although I'm not sure I'll make it in 2006 (I'm teaching SF writing at the Banff Centre in Alberta for a week in September, and my class ends the evening before Word on the Street).

Edo van Belkom is indeed a great guy, and one of my very best friends. He and Robert Charles Wilson just delivered the manuscript for the anthology Tesseracts 10, which they're editing (my wife and I edited Tesseracts 6).

 

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