Ficlets

1. Quick! Tell us a little about yourself and Rollback.

I’m a full-time science-fiction writer, with 17 novels under my belt. I’m lucky enough to have won all three of the major science-fiction awards for best novel of the year: the Hugo (which I won in 2003 for Hominids), the Nebula (which I won in 1996 for The Terminal Experiment), and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award – the field’s major juried award, and the only significant award left that’s just for science fiction and not also for fantasy; I won that last year for Mindscan.

Although I’m usually classified as a hard-SF writer, I like to think of the particular kind of science fiction I do as “phi-fi” – philosophical fiction, the literature of ideas. That said, I think believable characterization is hugely important to good SF; I really think SF should combine the intimately human with the grandly cosmic, and have something to say not just to the mind but to the heart, as well.

I live just outside Toronto with my wife, Carolyn Clink, who, besides working full-time as my assistant, is also a very fine poet.

Rollback tells the story of SETI researcher Sarah Halifax, and her husband Don. The novel opens in 2047 when they’re both 87 years old. Almost forty years earlier, Sarah had decoded the first ever radio transmission received from aliens, and now, as Sarah and Don are celebrating their 60th wedding anniversary, word comes in that another message has been received from the aliens. A wealthy industrialist who is funding SETI at this point calls Sarah, telling her she’s the key to decoding the new message. Sarah says no, she’s too old, and, besides, they need someone who can stick around for the next reply, decades later, and her life is almost over.

Not necessarily, says the industrialist. He offers Sarah a “rollback” – an experimental, and hugely expensive, new procedure that can rejuvenate a person; it could make Sarah physically 25 again. Sarah says she won’t do it without her husband. The industrialist agrees – and the process works for Don, who ends up physically in his twenties again, but it fails for Sarah, leaving her in her eighties. The novel deals with the impact of this on their marriage while Sarah races to try to decode the alien message in the small amount of time she has left.

2. Science fiction is often portrayed as being a genre about gadgets, but one of the very nice things about Rollback is that it’s not about the technology, but the moral and ethical quandaries that humans deal with when technology offers new opportunities and dangers. This will come as no surprise to long-time readers of SF, but why is there this disconnect in the minds of non-SF readers between what they think written SF is, and what it is in your book and others?

Yeah, you’re exactly right; it’s a real problem. During the book tour for Rollback, I was lucky enough to get to give a talk at the Library of Congress, and the title of that talk was ”’A Galaxy Far, Far Away” My Ass!” I really think a large part of the problem is Star Wars, which has become indelibly etched in people’s minds as the standard example of science fiction. But it’s not – it’s science fantasy, or some other category – and it has almost no extrapolation, and no real moral or emotional dimension, and that’s what most people think SF is.

I don’t think SF book covers help in a lot of cases. Fortunately, I’ve been getting good covers of late, but it’s an uphill climb to get people who don’t already read science fiction to try the genre; you can see in many cases the look of disgust on their faces when you hand them an SF book. And, of course, there’s Sturgeon’s Law, which says that 90% of SF is crap, so it’s not true, despite what some SF evangelists say, that if you get them to read one they’ll be hooked for life. A lot of SF is pretty unreadable, even by hardcore fans, but the best stuff has new and important things to say to everyone about what it means to be human.

A few years ago, the Region of Waterloo, which is close to a million people in Ontario, Canada, did my Hominids for their community-wide reading program. And at one of the public events I did, an old woman came up to me, and she said she’d made it to ninety without ever reading science fiction, but had loved my book and regretted now that she’d never even tried the genre earlier; mine had been the first SF novel she’d ever read, and, she said, it was also, because she had so little time left, going to be the last.

3. Along this same line, a question for you: Does all new and innovative technology come with moral and ethical implications? In fiction it usually does, because one is trying to tell a story. But what about in the real world? Is my iPod a moral crucible? What about my cell phone?

Well, remember the iPod and the cell phone aren’t categorically new technology: the iPod is the current iteration of the transistor radio (the original portable music device), and the cell phone is, well, a phone. But things like rejuvenation – or the underlying technologies of DNA manipulation, stem-cell research, and so on – are new things, and they do come freighted with moral issues.

And that’s always been the case. The United States still wrestles with the abortion issue, for instance, and that’s a technological issue. It didn’t take any particular thought to be anti-abortion seventy years ago, since the chances of performing an abortion without actually physically harming the woman were slim; it was a dangerous procedure. Now, thanks to advances in medical technology, it’s not. And that forces us to wrestle with real moral issues: When does life begin? When does personhood begin? Is “potential life” a meaningful concept?

The transition from “anti-abortion” (it’s a very risky procedure, and so should be avoided)—to “pro-life” or “pro-choice” (it’s a straightforward, routine procedure – but what are its ethical ramifications?) is a nice example of a moral quandary new technology has given us. The birth-control pill, prenatal screening for genetic diseases, Uzis and automatic weapons (something the people who wrote the Second Amendment had no idea about), and, yes, the moral implications of the ease of copying intellectual property – to bring your iPod back into it – are real and significant.

Right now, I’m reading The Assault on Reason by Al Gore, which, to my astonishment and delight, turns out to contain a great deal about neurophysiology and cognitive science. He certainly makes a very interesting case for the specific moral and ethical dimensions of various media technologies, including print, TV, and the World Wide Web. I don’t know if Gore reads SF, but he thinks like someone who does – and, of course, I mean that as a compliment.

4. Share a piece of advice you’ve been given about writing.

This was the most important of all, and I was lucky enough to get it early on. My friend Terence M. Green – who went on to be a two-time World Fantasy Award finalist, although he himself was just starting out when he told me this in 1986 – said, after reading one of my manuscripts, “Rob, you’ve got to stop worrying about what your mother will think if she reads your work.”

Like a lot of writers, I’d been pulling my punches: my characters were saying “darn” instead of – and, look, here I am pulling back again – the F-word. And people who should have been having sex in a detailed scene that was crucial to the story (as, for instance, the first Neanderthal/Homo sapiens coupling in my Humans is, or the sex between the rejuvenated now-physically 25-year-old man and his still physically 87-year-old wife in Rollback is) were instead getting it on off-screen in my early works. You have to be willing to lay yourself bare, lay your characters bare, and tell the truth. If you start worrying about what people who know you will say – or worry that people who don’t know you will think that you’re writing autobiography – you’re cheating your readers.

5. You have been referred to as “the dean of Canadian science fiction.” So, tell us: What is going on in Canadian science fiction that is unique and notable? I would imagine that the default position of most US folks would be that Canadian science fiction is like US science fiction, but with extra “u”s added in. Disabuse us of this notion. Provide examples.

At the Library of Congress, I was asked why there are so many significant Canadian SF writers, and I’ll repeat the answer I gave there. Canadian socialized medicine means that many of us were able to become full-timers at younger ages; I’ve been a full-time freelance writer since 1983, the year I turned 23. So, one perhaps sees Canadians doing better, more important work earlier in their careers, and being more prolific, as well, because they can devote full-time efforts to it, rather than having to be shackled to a a nine-to-five just so they and their kids will get to see a doctor routinely.

My country does a lot to support the arts but the health-insurance system is single greatest advantage Canadian artists have. And, yes, a lot of people have read Rollback as being about the inherent wrongness of unequal access to advanced health care, and there’s no doubt that theme is in there.

I’m fond of quipping that American SF has happy endings, Canadian SF has sad endings, and British SF has no endings at all. If I can be so bold, John, Old Man’s War and Rollback are, respectively, American and Canadian takes on rejuvenation – one, a jubilant, triumphant we-are-the-champions novel; the other, a novel that says that it’s all bigger than we are, and despite everyone’s best intentions, things just aren’t going to work out as planned.

One might argue that the difference comes from our countries’ vastly different stature on the world stage. The US is a superpower – for the moment, at least, the superpower – and its presidents can and do (let me reach back for a positive example here!) say things like, “We choose to go to the Moon.” Canada is a middle power – we know there are things we just can’t do; if a Canadian prime minister said “We choose to go to the Moon,” we’d think he’d lost his mind.

Those difference do percolate into the texts we write. I’ve talked to other Canadian authors about this, and we’ve all had the same experience: US editors who have asked us to find what seem to us to be unnaturally upbeat endings for our works. It rankles, and I’ve dug in my heels more than once to keep what I’ve felt was the appropriately honest – and for that, often, read “melancholy” – conclusion to one of my books.

Years ago, I read in manuscript a book by Terence M. Green, the fellow I mentioned earlier; he’s a Canadian, like me. And his final line in that book literally made me gasp; my wife called out from the next room to ask what was wrong. But nothing was wrong; it was perfect.

But when his book came out, I was astonished to see another little scene tacked on the end – and learned it was there precisely because the American editor felt the story needed a more positive ending, an ending that literally had the characters climbing up into the sunshine. I don’t say that was the wrong decision for the US market – which is where Terry and I and almost all Canadian SF authors make most of our money, of course – but it vividly underscored the difference between the two nations’ approaches to the genre.

6. You are well known for science fiction, but you’ve also won awards in mystery and crime fiction. Talk a little bit about that side of your writing. Is it something separate from your science fiction, or is it all part of a continuum – and if so, what does that say about genre boundaries?

Almost all of my fiction writing is science fiction (although I’ve done some fantasy and horror at short lengths), and 100% of my mystery fiction has also been science fiction. That’s the beauty of writing science fiction: it’s not a narrow category at all, and several of my novels have also been, quite legitimately, mystery or crime novels, including Golden Fleece, Fossil Hunter, The Terminal Experiment, Illegal Alien, Hominids, and Mindscan.

Science fiction and mystery are not an unnatural pairing – indeed, I’ve always thought that science fiction has way more in common with mystery than it does with fantasy. SF and mystery, after all, both prize rational thinking and both require the reader to pick up clues artfully salted about what is really going on – although in SF that’s mostly because of the narrative conceit we use.

SF is, as I like to say, the mainstream literature of an alternate reality – it’s written as if for an audience of people already familiar with the milieu of the story. Of course, you can’t really do that – a tour de force like A Clockwork Orange requires a glossary, because the book is gibberish without it, since no one really is familiar with its milieu, and so the dropping of clues and hints is crucial, and, just as in a mystery, they have to be inserted so transparently, without drawing attention to themselves, that the reader doesn’t even consciously notice them.

I won Canada’s top mystery award – the Arthur Ellis Award from the Crime Writers of Canada – for best short story of the year for what was absolutely a science-fiction story (“Just Like Old Times,” a time-travel tale first published in Mike Resnick’s DAW SF anthology Dinosaur Fantastic in 1993) – but that story also won Canada’s top SF award, the Aurora.

And the mystery-fiction reviewer for The Globe and Mail, Canada’s national newspaper, said my novel Illegal Alien – which is a courtroom drama with an extraterrestrial defendant – was “the best Canadian mystery novel of 1997.” And when Penguin Canada recently put together its Penguin Book of Crime Stories, edited by Canada’s leading mystery author Peter Robinson, they included my “Biding Time,” a short story about uploaded consciousnesses on Mars – you can’t get more SFnal than that! – and The Globe singled it out as one of the best in the book.

Why does mystery draw me? Well, I’ve got a degree in broadcasting, and I’ve done some scriptwriting – but the current standard model of scriptwriting is to avoid dialog that is “on the nose.” That is, it assumes that people don’t say, “I hate you – you ruined my life,” but instead say, “That shirt is a bit old-fashioned, don’t you think?,” and we’re supposed to read into the latter the sentiment of the former.

But in mystery fiction – through courtroom cross-examination, through interrogation by the cops, through a brow-beating by a private eye – you actually do get at the heart of the matter very directly, and I love that: I love getting the issues right out there on the page, so we can really engage with them; the mystery voice lets you do that in a very dramatic, very direct way.

I often get asked if I’ll ever write a straight mystery novel; the answer is almost certainly no. I can do everything I want artistically, emotionally, creatively, and intellectually within the science-fiction field – which, after all, covers all of time and space – and, unless I myself get a rollback, I’ve only got a few decades left, and far too many SF stories I want to tell in that time!

But the question of genre boundaries is an interesting one, and it ties in with the question about American vs. Canada SF. Although it’s physically bigger than the United States, Canada has about one-tenth the population of the US. Still, we do have a vigorous domestic publishing industry here – including the largest genre-publisher in the world, Harlequin, which is owned by Torstar, the parent company of The Toronto Star newspaper.

But setting aside Harlequin, our major publishers don’t do genre imprints. That’s one of the reasons Margaret Atwood can cross in and out of genres at will. Her publisher here never even has to ask whether her book should be labeled “science fiction,” or “mystery,” or whatever, because none of our books bear genre labels – they’re just books. A lot of people say Margaret actively denies that she’s writing SF, but that’s mostly not the case; in reality, the question just rarely comes up.

Now, that said, I did nonetheless tweak her a bit about this earlier this year. I was lucky enough to win a major award from the Toronto Public Library – which is the largest public-library system in North America, and the second largest in the world. They give a $2,500 prize and a trophy at a black-tie dinner each year to the author they think has given their patrons the most pleasure, and enhanced the joy of reading the most. Last year’s winner was Margaret Atwood, and this year I won it (pretty good supporting evidence for what I’ve said about the Canadian public being very accepting of science fiction).

Part of the ceremony had Margaret passing the baton to me, and she said, “I’m so glad to see this going to a science-fiction writer.” To which I replied, “And I’m so glad to be receiving it from a science-fiction writer.” It got a big laugh, and, to her credit, Margaret was wonderfully gracious about it.

This fluidity of genres is hugely liberating. I sell well in the US – I’ve hit number one on the Locus bestsellers’ list. But I sell almost as many copies in Canada as I do in the US, which makes me a mainstream bestseller up here. And that’s possible because, the 90-year-old woman I mentioned a moment ago notwithstanding, Canadian readers are much less influence by genre labels; I have large number of readers here who read me but don’t think of themselves as science-fiction readers (try to find a community-wide reading program in the U.S. that has done a science-fiction novel that was labeled as science fiction on the spine).

In fact, that science-fiction label – which Hominids had, because Tor did the hardcover and mass-market editions for the full North American market – really seems a bit out of place in Canada. In part to more directly deal with these real national differences, I’ve just signed a nice contract for my next three books with two divisions of Penguin. In the States, my next three books will be published by Penguin USA’s Ace Science Fiction imprint – as pure-quill an SF imprint as you can find, and, indeed, I’d argue the leading hard-SF house these days; it’s worth noting that the last two best-novel Nebulas have gone to SF books from them.

But in Canada, my books will be separately published by Penguin Canada, with different covers, and labeled simply as “Fiction.” Now, I am proudly a science-fiction writer – my website is sfwriter.com, my license plate says SFWRITER; I make no bones about what I write. But when genre labels become fences keeping people who would enjoy the books out, that is a problem. As I said at the outset, good science fiction has things of value to say to everyone.

I expect to see more Canadian SF writers being published as mainstream, at least here in Canada, in the years to come, and maybe, just maybe, some of us will break out into the mainstream in the US. Right now, there are lots of bestselling SF books – but they’re by people such as Michael Crichton, Nora Roberts (writing as J.D. Robb), Walter Mosley, and Audrey Niffenegger; the worst credential you can have, it seems, for breaking out into a wider market with science fiction is coming from science fiction, and that’s tragic.

Well, I’d wanted to end this interview on an upbeat note, but the Canadian in me is coming out, I guess. It always does.

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Catch more of Robert J. Sawyer and get all his latest news at his blog.