Robert J. Sawyer
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Robert J. Sawyer (born April 29, 1960) is a Canadian science fiction writer, dubbed "the dean of Canadian science fiction" by the Ottawa Citizen in 1999. He describes himself as a "hard science-fiction writer", but he is more concerned with characterization and human psychology than many other practitioners of that subgenre. His work often delves into metaphysics, à la Arthur C. Clarke, and philosophy; he very much comes from the school that says science fiction is the literature of ideas.
In 1995, Henry Mietkiewicz of The Toronto Star dubbed him "Canada's only native-born full-time science fiction writer," but with the explosion of Canadian SF later in that decade that ceased to be true; Julie E. Czerneda and Karl Schroeder are among the handful of full-time SF writers born in and still living in Canada. Sawyer remains, however, Canada's most prolific and most honored writer in the genre.
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[edit] Biography
Robert James Sawyer was born in Ottawa, grew up in Toronto, and now lives in Mississauga, Ontario. He attended Ryerson University in Toronto, where he received a Bachelor of Applied Arts degree in Radio and Television Arts (RTA) in 1982. Entirely coincidentally, he was in the same graduating RTA class as Tanya Huff who would later become a noted author in the field of contemporary fantasy; Sawyer and Huff also both used to work at Bakka, Toronto's science-fiction specialty store, although not concurrently. Twenty years later, Sawyer was given Ryerson University's Alumni Award of Distinction in honor of his international success as a science fiction writer.
Sawyer has won thirty-eight national and international awards for his fiction, most prominently the 1995 Nebula Award for his novel The Terminal Experiment; the 2003 Hugo Award for his novel Hominids, first volume of his Neanderthal Parallax trilogy; and the 2006 John W. Campbell Memorial Award for his novel Mindscan. He has two additional Nebula nomination, nine additional Hugo nominations, and two additional Campbell Memorial Award nominations under his belt. His fiction has received starred reviews (denoting books of exceptional merit) in Publishers Weekly, Booklist, Quill & Quire, and Kliatt. His books have appeared on the top-ten national mainstream bestsellers' lists in Canada, as published by The Globe and Mail and Maclean's magazine, and they've hit number one on the bestsellers' list published by Locus, the trade-journal of the SF field. Translated editions have appeared in Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, and Spanish, and he has won SF awards in Canada, France, Japan, Spain, and the United States.
Sawyer's short fiction has appeared in Analog Science Fiction, Amazing Stories, On Spec, Nature, and numerous anthologies. In addition to his own writing, he edits the Robert J. Sawyer Books science-fiction imprint for Red Deer Press, part of Canadian publisher Fitzhenry & Whiteside' contributes to The New York Review of Science Fiction; is The Canadian Encyclopedia's authority on science fiction; and is a judge for L. Ron Hubbard's Writers of the Future contest. He is profiled in Canadian Who's Who, The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature, Contemporary Authors volume 212, Something About the Author volume 81, St. James Guide to Science Fiction Writers, and The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. The hour-long documentary In the Mind of Robert J. Sawyer debuted on Canadian television on January 8, 2003, and has been shown numerous times since on various channels, including Space: The Imagination Station, for which Sawyer is a frequent commentator.
Stylistically, Sawyer is known for simple, clear prose, in the mode of Isaac Asimov; this perhaps comes from Sawyer's original career in the 1980s as a writer of nonfiction for magazines (his specialties were personal computing, personal finance, and the broadcasting industry). He also has a tendency to include pop-culture references in his novels (his fondness for the original Star Trek and Planet of the Apes is impossible to miss), and he is unusual even among Canadian SF writers for the blatantly Canadian settings and concerns addressed in his novels, all of which are issued by New York houses.
Sawyer's politics are often described as liberal, even by Canadian standards (although he contributed a Hugo Award-nominated story called "The Hand You're Dealt" to the Libertarian SF anthology Free Space, and another called "The Right's Tough" to the Prometheus Award-winnig Libertarian SF anthology Visions of Liberty). He holds citizenship in both Canada and the United States, and has been known to criticize the politics of both countries. He often has American characters visiting Canada (such as Karen Bessarian in Mindscan) or Canadian characters visiting the U.S. (such as Pierre Tardivel in Frameshift and Mary Vaughan in Humans and Hybrids) as a way of comparing and contrasting the perceived values of the two countries.
Sawyer's work frequently explores the intersection between science and religion, with rationalism always winning out over mysticism (see especially Far Seer, The Terminal Experiment, Calculating God, and the three volumes of the Neanderthal Parallax [Hominids, Humans, and Hybrids], plus the short story "The Abdication of Pope Mary III," originally published in Nature, July 6, 2000). He also has a great fondness for paleontology, as evidenced in his Quintaglio Ascension trilogy (Far-Seer, Fossil Hunter, and Foreigner), about an alien world to which dinosaurs from Earth were transplanted, and his time-travel novel End of an Era. In addition, the main character of Calculating God is a paleontologist, and the Neanderthal Parallax novels deal with an alternate version of Earth where Neanderthals did not go extinct.
He often explores the notion of copied or uploaded human consciousness, most fully in his novel Mindscan, but also in Golden Fleece and The Terminal Experiment, plus the Hugo-, Nebula-, and Aurora-award-nominated novella "Identity Theft" and its sequel short story "Biding Time," and the Hugo- and Aurora-award-nominated short story "Shed Skin." His interest in quantum physics, and especially quantum computing, inform the short stories "You See But You Do Not Observe" (a Sherlock Holmes pastiche) and "Iterations," and the novels Factoring Humanity and Hominids. SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, plays a role in the plots of Golden Fleece, Factoring Humanity, Mindscan, Rollback, the novelette "Ineluctable," and the short stories "You See But You Do Not Observe" and "Flashes."
Sawyer gives cosmology a thorough workout in his far-future Starplex. Real-life science institutions are often used as settings by Sawyer, including TRIUMF in End of an Era, CERN in Flashforward, the Royal Ontario Museum in Calculating God, the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory in Hominids and its sequels, and the Arecibo Observatory in Rollback.
Sawyer's work often crosses over from science fiction to mystery; indeed, he won both Canada's top SF award (the Aurora Award) and its top mystery-fiction award (the Arthur Ellis Award) for his 1993 short story "Just Like Old Times." Illegal Alien is a courtroom drama with an extraterrestrial defendant; Hominids puts one Neanderthal on trial by his peers for the apparent murder of another Neanderthal; Mindscan has the rights of uploaded consciousnesses explored in a Michigan probate court; and Golden Fleece, Fossil Hunter, The Terminal Experiment, Frameshift, and Flashforward are all, in part, murder mysteries. It's perhaps no surprise, then, that Sawyer has served as a consultant to Canada's Federal Department of Justice on the shape future genetics laws should take.
Another Sawyer hallmark is the mortally ill main character. Pierre Tardivel in Frameshift suffers from Huntington's disease, Sal-Afsan in Far Seer is blinded, Thomas Jericho in Calculating God has lung cancer, and Jacob Sullivan in Mindscan has an arteriovenous malformation in his brain; one of the main characters in Rollback vividly suffers from that most fatal illness of all, old age. Perhaps ironically, Sawyer nonetheless is known for tales that end on an upbeat, and even transcendent, note.
Sawyer wrote the original series bible for Charlie Jade, an hour-long science-fiction TV series that first aired in 2005-2006, and he did conceptual work in 2003 for reviving Robotech. He has also written and narrated documentaries about science fiction for CBC Radio's Ideas series. He provided analysis of the British science fiction series Doctor Who for the CBC's online documentary The Planet of the Doctor, frequently comments on science fiction movies for TVOntario's Saturday Night at the Movies, and co-edited an essay collection in honor of the fortieth anniversary of Star Trek with David Gerrold, entitled Boarding the Enterprise.
Sawyer has taught science-fiction writing at the University of Toronto, Ryerson University, Humber College, and the Banff Centre. In 2000, he served as Writer-in-Residence at the Richmond Hill, Ontario Public Library. In 2003 he was Writer-in-Residence at the Toronto Public Library's Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation and Fantasy (the first person to hold this post since Judith Merril herself in 1987). In 2006, he was Writer-in-Residence at Odyssey: The Fantasy Writer Workshop. Also in 2006, he was the Edna Staebler Writer-in-Residence at the Kitchener Public Library in the Region of Waterloo, Ontario, following on the Region of Waterloo's choice of Sawyer's Hominids as the "One Book, One Community" title that all 490,000 residents were encouraged to read in 2005.
Sawyer has long been an advocate of Canadian science fiction. He lobbied hard for the creation of the Canadian Region of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. The Canadian Region was established in 1992, and Sawyer served for three years on SFWA's Board of Directors as the first Canadian Regional Director (1992-1995). He also edited the newsletter of the Canadian Region, called Alouette in honor of Canada's first satellite; the newsletter was nominated for an Aurora Award for best fanzine.
In 1998, Sawyer was elected president of SFWA on a platform that promised a referendum on various contentious issues, including periodic membership requalification and the creation of a Nebula Award for best script; he won, defeating the next-closest candidate, past-SFWA-president Norman Spinrad, by a 3:2 margin. However, Sawyer's actual time in office was marked by considerable opposition to membership requalification and negative reaction to his dismissing, with the majority support of the Board of Directors, one paid SFWA worker and one volunteer. He resigned after completing half of his one-year term, and was automatically succeeded by then-incumbent vice-president Paul Levinson. Prior to resigning, Sawyer's promised referendum was held, resulting in significant changes to SFWA's bylaws and procedures, most notably allowing appropriate non-North American sales to count as membership credentials, allowing appropriate electronic sales to count as membership credentials, and creating a Nebula Award for best script.
Sawyer is active in other writers' organizations, including the Crime Writers of Canada and The Writers' Union of Canada (for which he has served on the membership committee), and he is a member of the Writers Guild of Canada and the Horror Writers Association.
Sawyer has been married since 1984 to poet Carolyn Clink; his father is the noted Canadian economist John A. Sawyer, professor emeritus at the University of Toronto.
Since 1996, Sawyer's literary agent has been Ralph M. Vicinanza; from 1989 to 1996, he was represented by Richard Curtis. Sawyer's film and TV agent is Vince Gerardis of Created By.
[edit] Bibliography
- Golden Fleece (Warner, 1990)
- The Quintaglio Ascension Trilogy:
- End of an Era (Ace, 1994)
- The Terminal Experiment - Serialized as Hobson's Choice in Analog Science Fiction (HarperPrism, 1995)
- Starplex - Serialized in Analog Science Fiction (Ace, 1996)
- Frameshift (Tor, 1997)
- Illegal Alien (Ace, 1997)
- Factoring Humanity (Tor, 1998)
- Flashforward (Tor, 1999)
- Calculating God (Tor, 2000)
- Iterations - Short stories (Quarry Press, 2002)
- The Neanderthal Parallax:
- Hominids - Serialized in Analog Science Fiction (Tor, 2003)
- Humans (Tor, 2003)
- Hybrids (Tor, 2003)
- Relativity (ISFiC Press, 2004)
- Mindscan (Tor, 2005)
- Rollback - Serialized in Analog Science Fiction (Tor, 2007)
[edit] Selected Awards
- 1991 Aurora Award for Best Long Work in English, for Golden Fleece
- 1992 Homer Award for Best Novel, for Far-Seer
- 1993 Arthur Ellis Award for Best Short Story, for Just Like Old Times
- 1993 Homer Award for Best Novel, for Fossil Hunter
- 1995 Le Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire for Best Foreign Short Story, "You See But You Do Not Observe"
- 1995 Nebula Award for Best Novel, for The Terminal Experiment
- 1995 Aurora Award for Best Long Work in English, for The Terminal Experiment
- 1996 Seiun Award for Best Foreign Novel, for End of an Era
- 1996 Aurora Award for Best Long Work in English, for Starplex
- 1997 Science Fiction Chronicle Reader Award for Best Short Story, for "The Hand You're Dealt"
- 1999 Aurora Award for Best Long Work in English, for Flashforward
- 2000 Seiun Award for Best Foreign Novel, for Frameshift
- 2002 Seiun Award for Best Foreign Novel, for Illegal Alien
- 2003 Hugo Award for Best Novel, for Hominids
- 2005 Analog Analytical Laboratory Award for Best Short Story, for "Shed Skin"
- 2005 Aurora Award for Best Work in English (Other) for Relativity
- 2006 John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, for Mindscan
[edit] Interviews
- Interview on wotmania.com
- Listen to an interview with Robert J Sawyer
