Unless, that is, there’s more than one universe. If there are, in fact, trillions of universes—either currently existing alongside our own, or having previously existed prior to ours being formed—and if those universes have varying combinations of physical parameters, then there’s nothing at all remarkable about a universe like this one existing. In all of that variety, this particular combination of parameters was bound to crop up just by random chance.
Right now, we don’t know whether there are, or have been, other universes. But I didn’t want to wait to find out; that’s why I wrote Calculating God. In this novel, we get the answer today because aliens, about a century more advanced than we are, show up on Earth with definitive scientific evidence that no parallel universes currently exist, and that only eight previous universes existed prior to the big bang that created ours. The intervention of an intelligent designer is, to them, an established scientific fact. The novel explores the impact that knowledge has on humanity.
Now, I don’t know if aliens will show up with such proof—or, indeed, whether they will arrive with the opposite finding, namely that there are countless other universes, and therefore no need to invoke God in discussing ultimate origins. But even without aliens arriving, we’ll have the answer soon: doubtless, by the middle of the twenty-first century, work in cosmology and quantum theory will determine whether or not our universe is the only one.
And then we’ll know whether or not God ever existed.
Thanks, quite appropriately, to that most powerful tool of all.
Thanks to science.
Committing Trilogy
My website at www.sfwriter.com is often called the best author’s site on the web; it contains over one million words of material, and has been online longer than Amazon.com. I try to provide lots of interesting content there, including this article about how my “Neanderthal Parallax” trilogy came to be.
For me, the most daunting question is “What’s next?”
That’s not necessarily the case for all authors. After all, if you ask Sue Grafton “What’s next?,” her answer is predetermined by the letters of the alphabet. Me, I’d consider it purgatory to write 26 novels about the same character, but I suppose you can’t argue with success.
See, I like to try something new each time out. For instance, The Terminal Experiment (1995) was my first attempt to do a realistic domestic situation; Starplex (1996) was my first attempt to juxtapose realistic humans with truly alien aliens; Frameshift (1997) was my first attempt to do a legitimate SF novel set entirely in the present day; Factoring Humanity (1998) was my first attempt to write a book from a female point of view; and Calculating God (2000) was my first attempt to write a thriller that consisted of nothing but talking heads.
All five of those books were Hugo Award finalists, so I suppose I succeeded to some degree in what I was attempting. Still, after a dozen novels, it becomes hard to come up with new challenges.
But one that I hadn’t undertaken yet was conceiving a trilogy. I know, I know: my novels Far-Seer (1992), Fossil Hunter (1993), and Foreigner (1994) compose “The Quintaglio Ascension” trilogy—but they weren’t conceptualized in advance as a trilogy. Far-Seer was intended to be a stand-alone; Fossil Hunter was a one-off sequel to the successful first volume; and Foreigner was commissioned later, as another sequel.
It was a worthy challenge: to write a trilogy that had been planned in advance as such. I’d gotten the hang of the 100,000-word form, but could I do a 300,000-word project?
I freely admit that there were also some commercial considerations: starting with my seventh novel, I’d always had two-book contracts with my publishers, which is nice, because you get a pile of money up front…but I wanted to try for a three-book deal, and a trilogy was the natural way to do that. Also, my British publisher, HarperCollins UK, had made it clear that the only SF selling briskly in England was in the form of trilogies and series; standalones just didn’t do well in that market.
Now, I’m well known as a critic of the proliferation of trilogies and (even worse) open-ended series in SF, so I knew I’d have to make peace with my personal misgivings about this form. At the outset, I set some ground rules: I would try to write a work that would succeed artistically both as three standalone volumes, each with its own legitimate beginning, middle, and end, and would also have an overarching structure that started at the beginning of the first, book and reached a real conclusion at the end of the third.
Both criteria were important to me: I remember vividly Baen Books publishing Lion’s Heart, by fellow Toronto writer Karen Wehrstein, a dozen years ago…with nothing in the packaging to indicate it wasn’t a complete novel, and the book stopping with a cliffhanger and a note from the publisher that said, “So ends part one…” I would feel like I was cheating my readers if I did that. But I also needed a big, three-book-worthy idea—otherwise, what was the point of committing trilogy?
Most of my novels percolate in my head for years before they get written; Hominids—the first volume of what ultimately became my Neanderthal Parallax trilogy—was no exception. I’d come up with the seed of the idea on December 30, 1995, over dinner at The Olive Garden with my wife Carolyn: Earth is threatened by some menace so great that many multiple versions of Earth—one where dinosaurs evolved intelligence; another where Neanderthals became the dominant form of humanity; others where different Cambrian explosion body-plans rose to intelligence—must band together to defeat it.
Three and half years later, on June 20, 1999, I finished the second draft of my twelfth novel, Calculating God. That evening, Carolyn and I went for a walk—something we often do in the summer—and talked through a more focused version of that idea: a novel about parallel modern-day worlds, one peopled by the descendants of Cro-Magnons, the other by the descendants of Neanderthals.
For me, plots always come from research. For many years, my favorite online resource was Magazine Database Plus, a full-text article database available through CompuServe; on June 22, 1999, I downloaded 50,000 words of magazine and journal articles about Neanderthals. Magazine Database Plus was expensive—a buck an article—but I had a freebie account on CompuServe, left over from when I’d been an associate system operator of the WordStar Forum there, so I used it with abandon. Those articles were only the tip of the iceberg of my research, of course, but they gave me the major plot points to write an outline.
That same day, I looked on Amazon.com at other novels with ancient hominids encountering modern humans, including Frank M. Robinson’s Waiting, Petru Popescu’s Almost Adam, Philip Kerr’s Esau, and John Darnton’s Neanderthal, to make sure that none of them had premises similar to what I had in mind; they didn’t.
Also that day, I wrote up a series of goals for this book:
To write an ambitious novel for publication in 2002, to be a real contender for the Hugo Award to be presented in Toronto in 2003;
To be a tour de force of world-building, rewriting the last 40,000 years of human history;
To be a big book, 150,000 words [at this point, I wasn’t yet ready to commit to a trilogy—I was simply going to try a bigger book than anything I’d ever written before],
To have out-of-genre appeal.
On Friday, July 9, 1999, I arrived at Readercon, a literary SF convention held outside of Boston. There I hand-delivered the manuscript for Calculating God to Jim Minz, the assistant to my editor David G. Hartwell. Jim asked me what I was going to do next, so I pitched the Neanderthal concept—still quite vague in my mind—to him: two versions of Earth that have to work together to stem a catastrophe facing both worlds. Jim was very intrigued. I asked him whether I should do it as a standalone or a trilogy; Jim said Tor would be happy either way.
(This was a red-letter day for me for another reason: Harlan Ellison was guest of honor at Readercon that year, and in his speech that night he called for a standing ovation for my accomplishments as SFWA president; my time in office had been very difficult, so this pleased me enormously.)
A month later, Carolyn and I rented a cottage on Otter Lake in Northern Ontario; one of my goals while there was to outline my next novel. On Thursday, July 29, I wrote this in my journal:
Finished, by mid-afternoon, I thought, the outline for Neandertal World [then the working title]—but in the evening I skimmed Waiting by Frank M. Robinson (which had been edited by my editor, David G. Hartwell); Jim Minz had sent me a copy because I told him I was working on a book about Neandertals. Robinson uses his conflict between us and the modern descendants of archaic humans to preach about ecology; despite previously having checked this book out on Amazon.com, my take was too close to that. Aided by the Encyclopedia Britannica and Grolier’s Encyclopedia, I came up with the idea of the threat to the two worlds being a magnetic reversal (I suspect this might have been in my mind because earlier in the week, I had used Britannica to look up the Geologic Time Scale, and the chart it presented listed magnetic reversals). I like the magnetic-field collapse better than the ecological threat, anyway. (Ah, the joys of computers! It’s wonderful to be sitting on the side of a lake with several complete encyclopedias installed on your hard drive.)
The next day, I finished a revised outline, and faxed it to my agent, Ralph Vicinanza. At this stage, I was still pitching only a single novel, and I had absolutely no idea who the characters would be. (I was also using the -tal spelling of Neanderthal back then; I’ve since reverted to the older -thal spelling for reasons I outline at length in a forward to Hominids.)
Here’s the outline, in its entirety; don’t worry too much about spoilers—the final project deviated significantly from this document:
Neandertal Parallax
a novel proposal
by Robert J. Sawyer
Ne•an•der•tal: now the preferred spelling by most English-language paleoanthropologists of the word formerly rendered as Neanderthal, recognizing the official revision of the spelling of the original German place name by the German government.
par•al•lax: the apparent shifting of an object’s position when seen from a different point of view.
Forty thousand years ago, two distinct species of humanity existed on Earth: Archaic Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis. Both looked out on their world with dull gazes, unable to comprehend it, barely aware of their own existence.
And then an event that would change everything occurred: in the quantum structures of the complex neural tissue packed into the brains of Homo sapiens, consciousness emerged. And with consciousness came art and sophisticated language and science and religion and subtle emotions and planning for the future. Until this time, no truly self-aware lifeform had existed on Earth, no creature lived, primate or otherwise, that was driven by anything other than instinct.
Of course, this newfound awareness enabled Homo sapiens to out-compete the Neandertals; in less than ten thousand years, the Neandertals were extinct.
Or, at least, they were extinct here—in this universe.
But, under quantum physics, the phenomenon of consciousness is intimately tied in with the nature of reality. Indeed, quantum theory predicts that every time an event observed by an intelligent being could have two outcomes, both outcomes do come to pass—but in separate universes. Until the rise of consciousness, there were no branching universes, no parallel realities. But, starting on that crucial day 40,000 years ago when consciousness emerged for the first time, the universe did begin to split into multiple versions.
The very first split—the very first time an alternative universe was spun off from this one—happened because the original emergence of consciousness, a product of quantum fluctuations, could have gone a different way: instead of consciousness first arising in a Homo sapiens mind, it might instead have arisen originally in a Homo neanderthalensis mind, leading to the Neandertals deposing our ancestors, instead of vice versa.
And 40,000 years later, in what in this universe is referred to as the dawn of the 21st century, an artificial portal opens, bridging between our universe and one in which the descendants of Neandertals are the dominant form, allowing small numbers of individuals to pass in either direction.
Many things are the same on both Earths: the sky shows the same patterns of stars, the year is still 365 days long, and is divided into months based on the cycling of the moon’s phases. The gross geography of both worlds—the shapes of the continents, the location of lakes and mountains—is the same. And the flora and fauna is essentially the same (although Neandertals never hunted mammoths or other animals into extinction, and so they still flourish).
But all the details of culture are different. Gender roles, family structures, economic models, morals, ethics, religion, art, vices, and more are unique to each species. In what I hope will be a tour de force of world building, the Neandertal world will be as rich and as human as our own, but different in almost every particular. Although there is much diversity in modern human cultures, many themes recur in almost all of them, themes that can be traced back to our archaic Homo sapiens ancestors of 40,000 years ago: pair-bonding, belief in an afterlife, territorial defense, xenophobia, accumulation of wealth. The modern Neandertal society will have entirely different approaches to these and other issues, based on their different evolutionary history.
For instance, humans are able to effectively communicate with words alone: language spoken in darkness, printed text, radio, telephone conversations, E-mail—all are possible because we can easily transcribe or transmit spoken sounds, and convey virtually our entire intended meaning with just these sounds. But there is much evidence that Neandertals would have had a substantially reduced vocal range compared to that of archaic humans—possibly meaning they, and their descendants, would have to supplement verbal communication with facial expressions and gestures. If their descendants developed books or telephones at all, they might only be useful for conveying limited kinds of information.
Meanwhile, some fossil sites suggest that only female Neandertals homesteaded, and males lived nomadic existences, interacting with females only to breed. Projected into the present day, such lifestyles might define radically different social arrangements, with most individuals having long-term same-sex partnerships (of two, or possibly more, individuals), and secondary other-sex relationships. Absentee fathers wouldn’t necessarily be bad fathers, though: modern Neandertal society might be built around multiday holidays during which all work stops and rural males come into the cities to be with their offspring.
And, of course, all the background of daily life—here, in our universe, typified by such things as single-family dwellings, nine-to-five jobs, private automobiles, television, contract law, national allegiances, and war—would be completely different in the Neandertal world, a world equally advanced scientifically but in which individuals are much more physically robust, have larger brains (ancient Neandertal brains averaged 10% larger than those of Homo sapiens), are much less interested in colonizing and proselytizing, and are much better suited to living in cold, northern climates: the harsh lands that we know as Alaska, northern Canada, Siberia, Scandinavia, and Iceland—sparsely populated in this universe—might be developed centers in the Neandertal world.
Neandertals and humans differ genetically by only 0.5% (whereas humans and chimpanzees differ by 1.4%); incorporating the latest anthropological research to develop a modern, technological Neandertal culture, the book will illuminate what it means to be human.
The portal between the two universes has been opened accidentally, by the creation not in this world but rather in the Neandertal one of a giant quantum-computing facility (quantum computers—currently in development—access alternate universes to almost instantly solve otherwise intractable mathematical problems).
The contact could not have come at a more propitious time. In both universes, Earth’s magnetic field is collapsing—a prelude to a polarity reversal. Such reversals have happened many times during our planet’s geologic history. They occur without any discernible periodicity, and can last as little
as two thousand years or as long as 35 million years (the current normal-polarity period began 780,000 years ago; the preceding period of reversed polarity lasted from 980,000 to 780,000 years ago). The difference between reversed and normal polarity is trivial: compass needles point south during the former and north during the latter. But the transitional period is of great concern: during it, the magnetic field shuts down, and dangerous cosmic-ray particles that are normally deflected are free to bombard the Earth’s surface.
Neither the Neandertals nor the Homo sapiens alone have the technology to prevent the collapse of the magnetic field, or, failing that, to protect their worlds during the transitional period—but, perhaps by pooling their differing scientific expertises, they will jointly be able to save both worlds.
The exchange of science and culture starts off promisingly enough, but then the Neandertals discover that we have depleted our ozone layer (which provides additional protection from cosmic rays) through our use of chlorofluorocarbons and petrochemical exhaust from automobiles. It becomes clear that the magnetic-field collapse actually presents a much greater threat to us than it does to them. On their world, the onslaught of cosmic rays will surely cause many cancers and mutations, but on ours, out-and-out mass extinctions—including, likely, that of Homo sapiens—will additionally occur.
The Neandertals have learned of our history of expansionism and warfare (something they don’t share). Many of them fear if no solution to the magnetic-field collapse is found that we will try to forcibly invade their world with its intact ozone shield—it is, after all, the only other habitable planet that we could possibly escape to.