Sales for End of an Era were poor, and I knew I was in trouble again. See, it’s easier to sell your first novel than it is your sixth. With a first novel, the publisher doesn’t know if you’re going to be the next Isaac Asimov, and so they’re willing to take a chance. By the time your fifth novel is out, they do know—and I wasn’t. A publisher would be better off buying a new novel, for less money, from a first-timer, than another book from me. I decided it was time for drastic action.
I’d always felt I was writing about important issues. Golden Fleece, for instance, was about the inherent bugginess of computer systems, an issue that was very much of concern in 1989, when U.S. president Ronald Reagan was proposing “Star Wars,” a computer-controlled missile-defense system that would have to work flawlessly the first time it was used, something many computer scientists felt was impossible. Golden Fleece, with its buggy computer main character, very much was meant to illuminate that. (Ironically, one of the very few requests my editor at Warner made was for me to remove the specific reference to Reagan’s Star Wars—this should have prepared me for what was going to come, but it didn’t…)
Likewise, Far-Seer had been issue-based, looking at the Catholic Church’s stance on birth control. Of course, because that novel was set on an alien world, no reference to the Roman church was made in the text, but I felt sure most readers would understand what I was really talking about.
So, I decided I’d write my next book without a contract, take as long as necessary, and produce a blockbuster, doing the most complex, sophisticated story I could manage, with the most subtle and realistic human characters possible. More than that: I wanted to tackle a controversial issue, and not disguise it, but rather deal with it head on.
And so I wrote The Terminal Experiment. The issue was abortion, which fundamentally centers around differing beliefs about when life actually begins—at conception, at birth, or at some point in between. To put it in metaphysical terms, the question is when does the soul enter the body?
Well, The Terminal Experiment deals with a biomedical engineer who discovers when the soul leaves the body—tracking its movements on an enhanced electroencephalograph as people die. He sets about to find out when it enters the body, as well.
I wrote the book, pouring everything I had into it. I sent it to my agent, who thought it was tremendous—everything we’d both hoped it would be. He sent it to my new editor, who had replaced Peter Heck at Ace, when he left to write his own mystery novels—and she rejected it.
I was absolutely stunned. In her rejection letter, my editor said she’d only consider buying the book if I dropped all references to the soul and to the abortion issue.
I could not bring myself to do that, and I told Richard so. He arranged another auction, sending the manuscript to five publishers. HarperCollins USA was then in the midst of starting a new paperback science-fiction line, to be called HarperPrism, and they bought the book. Richard also sold serialization rights to Analog, the number-one best-selling English-language SF magazine; Analog would run the full text of the novel in four massive chunks prior to its book publication.
The book, verbatim as I’d submitted it to my old editor, went on to win the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America’s Nebula Award for Best Novel of 1995. If I’d eviscerated the book, as my old editor had wanted, it would be a forgotten work today. (The year it came out was the first year Amazon.com was in operation; The Terminal Experiment came in fifty-third in total sales for all books in all categories available on Amazon.com that year.)
I was definitely being pulled in two directions at this point. On the one hand, I had grown up reading far-future off-Earth spaceships-and-aliens SF. On the other hand, The Terminal Experiment had succeeded precisely because it was none of those things. I had two more novel ideas at that time, and they were at the opposite ends of the SF continuum. One, Starplex, would be my attempt to deal with every outstanding conundrum in modern astrophysics, in a plot that covered billions of years of time and millions of light-years of space. The other, Frameshift, was a novel about the impact genetic testing has on people’s lives, and was very much in the vein of The Terminal Experiment. In fact, Frameshift would be set in the present day (not even sixteen years in the future, as The Terminal Experiment was). Starplex was very much event-driven; Frameshift was very much character-driven.
I ended up writing both these books, for two different publishers. Analog serialized Starplex, just as it had The Terminal Experiment, and that book went on to be a finalist for both the Hugo and Nebula Awards. Ace—who had published the Quintaglio trilogy and End of an Era, but had rejected The Terminal Experiment—bought Starplex from the briefest outline I’d ever written.
I also wrote Frameshift, but without a contract, since my editor at HarperPrism had left the company for health reasons. Unfortunately, my old agent was unable to sell the book, and I acquired new representation, in the person of Ralph Vicinanza, who is the top agent in science fiction, fantasy, and horror (his other clients include Stephen King and the estate of Isaac Asimov). Ralph found the perfect editor for the book, David G. Hartwell, at Tor, the largest SF publisher in the world. Frameshift was my first book published in hardcover, and it sold well, was nominated for the Hugo Award, and won Japan’s Seiun Award (as had my earlier End of an Era) for best foreign novel of the year.
From then on, it’s been nothing but near-future or present-day SF novels for me, and I suspect it will stay that way. That doesn’t mean I soft-pedal the science; not at all. I try to have large-scale transcendent sense-of-wonder notions at the heart of all my novels, in the best classic SF pulp-magazine tradition. Indeed, after writing Frameshift, I formulated a mission statement for my writing: “to combine the intimately human with the grandly cosmic.” Focusing on that led me to do my next novel for Tor, Factoring Humanity, which I think is the best thing I’ve written to date.
Factoring Humanity tells the story of the discovery of an alien technology that allows people to surf the human collective unconscious the way we currently surf cyberspace. The woman who discovers this technology uses it to resolve the crisis that is tearing her family apart: her daughter has accused her husband of having abused her as a child, a charge the husband flatly denies.
I often get asked why the people in my books have such unhappy lives. Peter Hobson’s wife is cheating on him in The Terminal Experiment; Pierre Tardivel has Huntington’s Disease in Frameshift; Michiko Komura’s daughter is killed in the opening of Flashforward; and Tom Jericho has terminal lung cancer in Calculating God. It’s not that I live an unhappy life—quite the contrary; I’m more happy and content than most people. But I do like writing about raw emotions, and of course these come out most in extreme circumstances. Indeed, the appeal of mystery fiction for many readers isn’t the intellectual puzzle of figuring out whodunit. Rather, it’s the emotional lives of the characters, which are brought to the surface by the extreme circumstance of having someone close to them die. I’m looking for that same sort of laying bare of inner feelings in my science-fiction writing.
Still, I have had my share of misfortune. In the summer of 1985, I walked through what I thought was an open doorway at a shopping mall—but it wasn’t; it was a plate-glass window. If the window had been made of safety glass, nothing would have happened. But, instead, the window broke into giant pieces. I brought my right hand up to shield my face just as a large, jagged portion fell down out of the top of the frame. It sliced open the back of my hand, severing tendons.
My hand was bandaged for weeks, keeping me from doing any writing (I’m right handed), and to this day it has a horrific scar running diagonally across its back. My handwriting had always been somewhat sloppy, but ever since the accident it’s been all but illegible. If I lived in a different era, that injury would have put an end to my writing career, but it doesn’t impede my use of a computer. The irony isn’t lost on me: I’m a science-fiction writer who needs high-tech tools to do his job.
And that job ha
s really become all-consuming, I must admit. I don’t have any children; neither my wife nor I ever felt the urge to have any, and, indeed, when I turned 40, I had a vasectomy. (Prior to that, we jokingly decided if we ever had a kid to name him Peabo Clamhead Clink-Sawyer…and the horrific prospect of forcing someone to go through life with that name was enough to keep us from becoming parents.)
My father was an only child, and neither of my brothers have any kids, either—so the Sawyer line will be extinct once we die. I find myself wondering about this from time to time, since I’ve had a life-long interest in evolution, and the definition of success in evolution is the passing on of your genes to the next generation, something I’ve totally failed to do. And yet I do feel I have some small degree of immortality: the words I’ve written will survive after I’m gone. I’m not fool enough to think I’ll be widely read in the future, but it does please me to know that every once in a while, someone will pick up—or download—a book by me in the centuries to come. I guess that means I’m more interested in the survival of my memes than my genes—“meme” being evolutionist Richard Dawkins’s term for a persistent idea.
Metaphysical thoughts? I suppose. Indeed, religion seems to figure a lot in my novels—and that causes people to ask frequently about my own religious background. I can’t really say that I have one. My father was a lapsed Anglican (what Americans call Episcopalian), and my mother was a Unitarian. I’d attended a Unitarian Sunday School for a few years, but never really understood whatever point they were trying to make. We seemed to spend most of our time going for hikes along a river bank—I vividly remember a succession of soakers, and my little brother falling in and almost floating away. But God was never mentioned, and we never opened a bible or other holy book.
My best friend in public school was quite religious, and his mother kept trying to convert me. As a kid, I couldn’t see how any intelligent person could believe in God. I vividly remember my friend telling me one day when we were playing in my backyard that God could count every blade of grass in the yard. Rather than be impressed by this supposed feat of divine numeracy, I thought my friend dim for believing such a silly story.
Indeed, it wasn’t until after I finished university that my perspective began to change a bit. My first major contract as a freelance writer came in October 1983 with a little consulting firm called The Rosewell Group, headed by the Honorable David MacDonald, formerly Canada’s Secretary of State.
Rosewell was trying to launch an interfaith television cable channel, bringing various denominations of Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and more together. They needed someone to produce promotional materials and to edit their license application to the Canadian federal broadcasting regulator, the CRTC. One of my professors at Ryerson recommended me for the job, and I took it, spending the next nine months working with The Rosewell Group. This brought me into contact with high-level people in Canada’s various faith groups, and I was astonished to find that most of them were intelligent, well-read, thoughtful, and fun people.
They didn’t make me believe in God—but they did show me that such belief wasn’t necessarily a sign of intellectual weakness or irrationality. I came to realize, indeed, that atheism is an act of faith. Science, after all, doesn’t deal in negative results—it doesn’t disprove things; therefore, it can’t disprove the existence of God. And, of course, a wily creator could choose to conceal from us the fact that we live in a created universe. To say “I believe there is no God,” I realized, is philosophically exactly the same as saying “I believe there is a God”—both are statements based on faith.
It seems to me that the only non-faith position is agnosticism, either in the popular sense of the word (“I don’t know if God exists” or the technical sense (“The nature of God, if one exists, is by definition unknowable by its creations”). These days, my own belief tends toward the popular definition; I don’t think that if a god exists it is necessarily true that it will always elude our comprehension.
Still, I strongly disagree with those who say that science is just another religion. Belief in science doesn’t require faith; science can demonstrate its truth quite effectively. To use Richard Dawkins’s example, science makes airplanes that really work. The wooden airplanes made by cargo cults and the wax wings of Icarus didn’t work, no matter how fervently their owners believed that they should. Indeed, the beauty of science is that it can even make an airplane that will carry someone aloft who believes flight is impossible. Science invites skepticism, welcomes verification, and is open to revision when evidence warrants; faith has not one of those properties, and I consider myself devoid of faith.
When people want to ask less-personal questions than about my religious beliefs, they usually inquire what my hobbies are. The sad truth is that I don’t have any. Oh, I like to read—but that’s part of a writer’s job. And I have a nice collection of science-fiction toys, especially those based on TV shows from the 1960s (in my office, there’s a 34-inch wooden model of Fireball XL5, four toy versions of the robot from Lost in Space, a 12-inch Gorn and a 12-inch Andorian from Star Trek, and models of various vehicles from Thunderbirds). I also collect plastic dinosaurs—my only criterion is that they must have been scientifically accurate depictions at the time they were made. But these collections take up almost none of my time. Being a writer is, as I said before, an all-consuming life for me, occupying, in one way or another, most of my waking hours. I sometimes think I’d like to do fossil hunting or get into building intricate science-fiction model kits, and I do buy books about both these topics, but I just don’t have the time for either pursuit.
Even my vacations almost always have something to do with work. Just about every year, my wife and I travel to wherever the World Science Fiction Convention is being held. It was in Melbourne, Australia, in 1999, and we took five weeks of extra time so we could explore Australia and New Zealand, but those five weeks were the last real vacation I’ve had. There is a treadmill quality to being a writer: if you don’t keep producing new books at a good clip, your readers will go off and find someone else to read.
Maybe that sounds insecure—but, despite winning over two dozen awards and having a substantial degree of financial success, I am insecure about my writing. Most of the writers I know are. Indeed, it’s become almost a running gag with my friend Edo van Belkom, a great horror writer, that whenever he’s about halfway through writing a book he’ll phone me up and tell me that his book stinks, that he’s throwing in the towel, that the manuscript should go in the garbage, that he doesn’t understand why he ever thought he could write books. Of course, I talk Edo through this difficult time, and he continues on. But then, a few weeks later, the roles are reversed, and I phone Edo expressing all the same concerns about my latest project. I think a certain degree of doubt is important: it keeps me from getting complacent or lazy about my writing.
Still, I wouldn’t change my current conditions for anything. I love my work, I love my wife, I love my life, I love my home. What more can anyone ask?
Robert J. Sawyer’s Place in Science Fiction
by Valerie Broege
The writings of Robert J. Sawyer not only embody much of the rich and diverse historical tradition of science fiction but also are at the cutting edge of the evolution of the field as a “genre-in-the-making.”1 If we consider one of the earliest examples of proto science fiction, Lucian’s True History (written 170-180 A.D.), we note the use of mythology and the fantastic voyage to the moon. In his first novel Golden Fleece, Sawyer draws on the ancient Greek myth of Jason and the Argonauts and the theme of the cosmic voyage but within the framework of highly advanced science and technology.
A much later landmark figure in the history of SF who has directly influenced RJS is Arthur Conan Doyle. When asked to contribute a story for Mike Resnick’s anthology, Sherlock Holmes in Orbit, Sawyer wrote “You See But You Do Not Observe,” which involves the chronotransference of Holmes and Watson to the year 2096 to resolve the Fermi paradox.
Also Doyle’s 1912 novel The Lost World with its focus on dinosaurs contains a subject dear to our author’s heart, as witnessed by his four novels and several short stories dealing with these fascinating creatures. Similarly, Sawyer pays homage to another great SF writer who was a contemporary of Doyle—H.G. Wells. Using Wells’ The Time Machine as a springboard, Sawyer in “On the Surface” creates his own tale of time travel involving the Morlocks and the Eloi.
Sawyer places himself squarely in the American pulp-science fiction magazine tradition of the 1920s-1950s in his attempts to evoke a sense of wonder in his readers. He has succeeded in achieving this objective, according to some of his reviewers.2
Although Sawyer was once commissioned to write a space opera short story, I do not think “Wiping Out” is nearly as simplistic and formulaic as pure space opera tends to be. RJS is not called “Mr. Concept” for nothing!
Golden Age science fiction writers Robert Heinlein, Frederik Pohl, and Isaac Asimov have informed much of Sawyer’s work. Asimov was connected with Sawyer’s writing career right from the start in buying his story “Motive,” which contains many of the seeds of RJS’s future fiction. Even though he lacks Asimov’s graduate degrees in science, Sawyer is regarded both by himself and others as a writer of hard SF in the tradition of Asimov. Sawyer has made himself aware of much cutting-edge research in the fields of astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, genetics, neuroscience, AI, paleontology, and psychology and is rarely faulted by critics for lapses in these areas in his SF. Both Asimov and Sawyer use their knowledge of science and technology to craft convincing world-building stories which always involve the interplay of ideas and are often cast in the form of mysteries. Sawyer has used elements of detective fiction to good effect in such works as Golden Fleece and Illegal Alien, among others.