I have two brothers, Peter Douglas Sawyer, who is six years older than me, and Alan Bruce Sawyer, who is sixteen months younger. My parents had hoped to space their children more evenly, but there were medical complications after my older brother was born. It’s too bad: I’ve never been as close to Peter as I would have liked, but of course no sixteen-year-old wants a ten-year-old tagging along. And my relationship with Alan was strained during much of our childhood; we were so close in age that a rivalry was inevitable. Still, I was very much the traditional middle child, always trying to make peace and build bridges.
My mother had been a bona fide gifted child, graduating from the University of California at Berkeley when she was 17, and my older brother had been accelerated (put ahead a grade) twice at school. The teachers and my parents meant well in doing this, but Peter had a bunch of troubles in his early years, in large measure because he was pushed ahead.
I was a bright kid, too, but, because of what happened to Peter, my parents resolutely kept me at the grade appropriate for my age. It was probably for the best, but I remember being bored most of the time in the classroom, and that led to me being somewhat disruptive there. But at the end of every week, my father took me down to the Royal Ontario Museum’s Saturday Morning Club, where bright kids got to go behind the scenes in the museum’s various departments and learn all sorts of fascinating things; that was the intellectual highlight of my childhood.
I was a chubby kid, and lousy at sports. I’m sure this disappointed my dad, who was a big baseball fan. I also had a coordination problem—and still do, to some degree—and couldn’t throw a ball well or get my body to do the things that my friends could do with ease. (Ultimately, I think this problem had something to do with me becoming a writer. An athlete has to get it right on the first try: if you’re taking a shot at the goal, you don’t get a second chance to score a point. But a writer revises, and keeps going back until he or she is satisfied.) So, instead of playing sports, I watched a lot of TV. There’s never been much domestic Canadian dramatic television. Instead, Canadian channels fill their prime-time schedules with American programs. But, since 90 percent of all Canadians live within a hundred miles of the U.S. border, we also receive American TV stations. Today, with almost all Canadians getting their TV via cable, the cable operators simply delete the US signal and simultaneously substitute the Canadian one—meaning we see the same episode of the same series, but with Canadian, instead of American, commercials.
But in the 1960s and 1970s, things were different. Canadian stations had to entice us to watch their broadcasts of the program (with the ads they’d sold), rather than the American ones. To do that, they showed the American-made programs earlier in Canada.
When I was 12, in 1972, my favorite new series was called Search, starring Hugh O’Brien and Burgess Meredith. It was an intricately plotted caper series, with high-tech agents, linked by miniature cameras and radios to a mission-control center, working to recover missing objects. In Toronto, we got the Canadian broadcast of the latest episode on Tuesdays at 8:00 p.m. on local channel 9, and then, the next night, at 10:00 p.m., we got the American broadcast, spilling over from the NBC station in Buffalo, New York.
I never missed an episode on Tuesday nights, but I wanted more. Every Wednesday night I had a fight with my mom, because I wanted to stay up to watch Search again—the exact same episode I’d seen the day before. It was an hour-long series, meaning it wasn’t over until 11:00 p.m.—way too late, my mom felt, for a 12-year-old on a school night. But I whined and wheedled, and she would usually give in.
Back then, I couldn’t articulate why it was so important to me to watch the same episode a second time—but I understand it perfectly now. I was learning how to write. On Tuesday nights, I’d be surprised by the twists and turns the plots took—and on Wednesday nights, knowing how the story turned out, I was able to see how the writer had developed the plot.
Now, television drama may not be the greatest form of literature—but the structure it uses is wonderful for learning plotting. There was always something else on and, at every commercial break, there was an opportunity for you to switch to another program, so TV writers had to end every act—indeed, just about every scene except the last—with a little cliffhanger, to keep you in suspense, to keep you from turning away.
(Today, of course, there are videocassette recorders and DVD players; no one has to go through the difficulties I did to see the same program twice in rapid succession. Still, I think watching a program twice—or reading a book twice—is a great way to see exactly how the writer accomplished what he or she had set out to do.)
Search wasn’t the only TV program that had an impact on me. The original Star Trek—the one with Kirk, Spock, and McCoy—was also a huge influence. I only saw one episode in first ran: “The Devil in the Dark,” the one with the Horta. That had been a special treat; my parents didn’t approve of me watching violent TV shows (the spy program The Man from UNCLE was banned in our house); nor did they ever buy us toy guns (although we did receive a few as presents from neighborhood kids over the years, over my parents’ objections). Those bans certainly had an effect on me; I consider myself a pacifist today, and most of the characters I write about go out of their way to avoid a fight—not out of cowardice, but out of principle.
Anyway, there was a book published in 1968, while Star Trek was still in first run, called The Making of Star Trek. It was the first book of its kind, and I found it absolutely fascinating. The edition I have has “The book on how to write for TV!” emblazoned above the title. The authors were Stephen E. Whitfield and Gene Roddenberry (the latter the creator of Star Trek), and it contained all sorts of materials: blueprints of the starship Enterprise, close-up photos of props, character sketches of the ship’s crew, and dozens of memos sent between various people involved in the production arguing about every little background detail, from what powered the starship to what sorts of family names Vulcans might have.
These days, many DVD releases come with commentary by the screenwriter or director, but back then this sort of insight into the creative process was completely unprecedented. I’m sure I would have loved Star Trek regardless, but I learned an enormous amount watching the 79 original episodes re-ran over and over again, once the show was in syndication, because of the background in that book. One of the key skills for an SF writer is “world building”—creating a convincing alternate reality, and giving the audience insights into it through well-chosen background details. There’s no doubt I learned this skill through Star Trek.
Of course, my very first stories didn’t have much in the way of world building—but I do think it’s interesting that from day one, I was writing from non-human perspectives. The very first story I ever wrote, when I was six or seven, was called “Bobby Bug.” Ironically, at that time, I had no idea that “Bobby” was a form of my own name, Robert.
(Actually, I was called “Robin” as a child. That was what my mother wanted to give me as my legal name, but my father thought it would be better to have a more masculine name; also, he had a great fondness for his Scottish heritage, and so my given names, Robert James, are after historic kings of Scotland. But I was registered at school as Robin Sawyer, and the local Parks and Recreation Department, guessing my gender by my name, kept sending me invitations to join girl’s ice-skating teams and similar things. When I was ten, I rebelled against the name Robin, and have used Robert (or Rob) ever since. I actually regret it now; Robin is a great name for a writer.)
In 1968, when I was eight years old, my father took me to see the then-new movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. It was my introduction to the work of Arthur C. Clarke, then and now my favorite science-fiction writer, and I ultimately saw 2001 a total of 25 times on the big screen. Part of the appeal was the fact that the movie had that year in its title. One of the nice things about being born in a year that ends in zero is that it makes math simple. Even as a kid, I knew I would be 41 in 2001, and my father, sitting next to me in T
oronto’s Glendale Theatre, was then 43—meaning I’d be younger than my dad was then when the wonders of giant space stations and cities on the moon and thinking computers would supposedly be a reality.
Also an important part of my childhood was the Apollo program, which really did put human beings on the moon. I was absolutely fascinated by it, and my parents used to let me stay home from school to watch important mission events on TV.
Still, I mostly enjoyed school—except for a few bullies. I hadn’t really shown a profound interest in writing by the time I was in grade four, but my teacher, Peter Moroz, let me indulge my interest in space.
By the time I got into grade five, though, I was very much intrigued by writing. My teacher, Patricia Matthews, greatly encouraged me in that. This was back in the days before photocopies were common, and there was no such thing as a word processor. She used to ask me for copies of my stories, so she could keep them for herself—my first fan—and I dutifully wrote out duplicates of them by hand for her.
Multiculturalism has always been part of my life. Toronto, where I live, has been recognized by the UN as the most multicultural city in the world. The original Star Trek, with its multiracial crew, certainly underscored that, and even as a kid, I never allowed other kids to get away with racist, or anti-Semitic, remarks in my presence.
Indeed, I remember one of the few times I was ashamed to be a Canadian was while watching the opening ceremonies on TV for Expo 70 in Osaka, Japan. Canada’s participation was a series of female dancers—and every one of them was white with brunette hair. Even as a ten-year-old, I knew that was wrong. There should have been people of all races represented. I’ve always tried to do just that in my writing.
Now that I’m older, I realize the enormous racism that was going on in the southern U.S. during my childhood. When I’m asked who my heroes are, people expect me to name scientists or writers. No; indeed, one of the great shocks of my life was discovering that one of my childhood heroes, the American paleontologist Roy Chapman Andrews, who died the year I was born, had been a racist. My heroes today are Martin Luther King and Mahatma Ghandi—people who struggled nonviolently to change the world. I’m an idealist at heart, and the two most moving experiences I’ve had as a tourist were visiting the United Nations Headquarters in New York City, and the Civil Rights Museum in Tennessee.
In public school (Kindergarten through Grade 6), I didn’t really have many friends who were as bright as me, and that was emotionally quite hard. In Junior High (Grades 7 through 9), I had one close friend who was quite bright, and we spent a lot of time together talking about space and science fiction. It wasn’t until high school, though, that I really found a group of friends who were as intelligent as I was, and my high-school years were some of the best of my life.
In October 1975, when I was beginning Grade 10, I made friends with a guy named Rick Gotlib, who was in my Latin class (yes, Latin was an oddball choice—but I thought it would help me to understand scientific terms; I was planning on becoming a scientist). We both had an interest in science fiction, and spent one lunch period trying to stump each other with trivia questions. Rick and I figured there had to be other science-fiction fans in the school, and so decided to start a science-fiction club: the Northview Association for Science Fiction Addicts, or NASFA (Afsan, the main character in my novels Far-Seer, Fossil Hunter, and Foreigner, is NASFA spelled backwards).
The first meeting was a great success, and, to our surprise and delight, a large number of pretty girls joined the club—an unexpected bonus. I’d never really had female friends prior to this—the street I’d grown up on was filled with boys—but suddenly I did. Most of the people who joined the club were older than Rick and I were (back then, Ontario High School went to Grade 13, meaning some of our members were eighteen at the beginning of the year, and nineteen by the time it ended).
And then a miracle occurred: the teachers went on strike. For months, Northview Heights Secondary School—and all the other high schools in Ontario—were closed. But we decided to keep holding NASFA meetings anyway during that period, once a week at different people’s houses.
It was an unusual situation: a couple of Grade 10 boys hanging out with boys and girls in Grades 11, 12, and even 13. But since there were no classes to worry about during the strike, we were treated as equals; all that mattered was how clever or funny we could be. Indeed, to my astonishment, I soon found myself dating a gorgeous girl named Lorian Fraser who was two grades ahead of me—quite a heady experience for a guy who, in junior high, had been very awkward around girls.
I’d hung around with some bad kids in junior high, but had avoided getting entangled in the smoking, drinking, and drugs they were experimenting with. There’s always been something in me that was averse to peer-group pressure: when bell-bottomed pants came into style in the late 1960s, I refused to wear them, making my mother drive me all over town looking for stores that still had straight legs. And, until I was in my 20s, I never wore blue jeans, despite the fact—or more precisely, because of the fact—that everybody else was wearing them.
But the science-fiction crowd in high school never got into trouble. Not one of us smoked, no one was using drugs, and only a few occasionally drank. (Robert Charles Wilson, another SF writer and one of my closest friends, noted recently that I’ve never developed adult vices: to this day, I don’t drive and I don’t drink, but I’ve got a real fondness for chocolate milk, potato chips, and pizza.)
Still, we members of NASFA had incredible amounts of fun, and I felt intellectually stimulated all the time. Several members of the club talked about wanting to write science fiction, but it seemed clear that I was the only one who was really serious about it, and in the summer after grade ten, I made my first-ever submission to a science-fiction magazine. The story, quite rightly, was rejected, but I wasn’t discouraged. On the contrary, I was rather impressed by the simplicity of the process: anyone, anywhere, could send in a story, and it would be seriously considered for publication.
Incredible as it seems today, with the fifth Star Trek TV series currently in first-run, back in 1977, when I was 17, it had been eight years since the original Star Trek went off the air, and it looked like there would never be any more. So some friends and I set about shaping a series of audio dramas—there was no way we could afford to do TV!—that would be the new Star Trek.
I was the driving creative force, and the first proposal I came up with as the basis of our series was something I called Creator Quest: in the 21st century (which seemed a long way off then!), scientific evidence points to a guiding intelligence for our universe, and a starship sets off to find this God. Aided by my brother Alan, we produced a mock opening credits sequence for the show, with music and ominous narration. I don’t remember much of it, except the last words were “…the astral quest for our creator!”
Anyway, my friends looked at me like I was nuts after I played the Creator Quest demo tape, and so I decided to start over. I proposed a format very similar to Star Trek. Instead of a United Federation of Planets, it had a Commonwealth of Planets (Canada, of course, is part of the Commonwealth of Nations, the alliance of countries formerly under British control). But my parents’ pacifism had had an effect on me. I completely rejected the military background of Star Trek, and came up with a democratic, socialist structure based on that of a university (the university-like setting was also, I’m sure, my parents’ influence; remember, they both taught at the University of Toronto).
Our series ended up being named Star Station Terra (because our little SF club that had spun off from NASFA, pulling in a few people who had never gone to Northview and others who had already graduated, was called the Society for Speculative Thinking, and we wanted it to have the same initials). Contributing in major ways to fleshing out the series were my friends Tom Nadas, Carolyn Clink, Ariel Reich, and Do-Ming Lum, but still the core concept was mine—including the presence of dolphins aboard our starship. At that time, American biologist John C. Lilly
was talking a lot about his theory that dolphins might be as intelligent as humans. That notion fascinated me, so I threw in a dolphin named Bobo.
We wrote a bunch of scripts, and put them through many drafts, but never got around to producing the audio dramas. That was fine by me—it was really the writing, not the production, that I was interested in. All in all, it was a great experience.
In 1974, my parents bought a vacation home on Canandaigua Lake, one of Upstate New York’s Finger Lakes, and we made frequent trips there. The nearest city was Rochester, New York, and my parents became members of the Rochester Museum and Science Center. In the summer of 1979, the Strasenburgh Planetarium, which was part of the RMSC, announced a contest to be judged by science-fiction great Isaac Asimov: write a short story that could be made into a dramatic planetarium star show.
I decided to dust off one of my old Star Station Terra ideas, and wrote it up in prose. I stripped out any parts of the background that I myself had not made up, added new stuff to cover what was missing, and submitted the story. I thought there might be a prejudice against a Canadian entering an American contest, so I put the address of my family’s US vacation home on the submission.
In January of 1980, Isaac Asimov’s pick was announced—and it wasn’t me. Still, the planetarium was having a reception for everyone who had entered the contest, and my mother agreed to drive me down, along with Carolyn Clink, two years older than me, a member of the Society for Speculative Thinking, and now, after four years of friendship, my new girlfriend.