IGMS Issue 6

by IGMS

  "That's seven words. And it's only scary if you're expecting to go to hell." Kyle lay quietly for a moment, staring up at the ceiling. I guess he was giving me a second chance.

  "Well?" I asked, unable to dredge up any other quotes. "What are the six scariest words in the Bible."

  He looked back at me and said, "Have you considered my servant Job?"

  Okay. I knew the plot of that one. "That's where Satan drops in on God, right? And they make some kind of bet."

  "Right. Do you remember the details?"

  I shook my head. "No way."

  "God says Job is faithful. Satan tells him it's because Job has a cushy life and everything is going swell for him. So God lets Satan test Job. Kapow. Job loses his family, his property, and his shiny clean complexion. Remember now?"

  "Yeah." Once my mind was jogged, I could dredge up snippets from the lesson. "It's almost like a bizarre version of a disaster movie, or a Fox sitcom. Every five minutes, someone comes running up to Job with bad news. Hey, Job, your sheep just got killed. Check it out, Job, someone stole your camels. Bad news, Job, a house fell on your children. On top of all that, Job gets covered with sores."

  "And it all starts out with those six words."

  "I see what you mean," I told Kyle. He'd had a rather bad run of luck over the last couple of months. First, his car had rolled down the hill from where it was parked, and gone right through a guard rail above the Monocacy Creek. It was totaled. The same week, his girlfriend had ditched him. Now, on top of all that, he'd lost the battle of bicycle meets sports utility vehicle. Talk about a David and Goliath encounter.

  "You're lucky to be alive," I told him.

  "Or unlucky," he said.

  "So what's your point?"

  Kyle shrugged. Or tried to shrug. From the flash of pain that shot across his face, I figured the gesture was a mistake. "What if I've been picked? What if this is all some sort of test?" he asked.

  "You're whacked," I told him. "You must have landed on your head. I don't think God cares about the details of your life. There are five or six billion people on the planet. Even if only a couple million are more important than you, that's still a pretty long line."

  "But the very hairs of your head are numbered," Kyle said.

  I stared at him.

  "Matthew," he told me. "Chapter ten, verse eleven."

  "Oh."

  "God knows every blade of grass," he said. "He knows every sparrow that falls from the sky. I mean, he made everything."

  "So God let you get hit by a truck? And he convinced Judith Messinger to ditch you for that idiot with the Corvette? And he smashed your car?"

  "I think so. I mean, I think he allowed it to happen."

  This tasted like a weird version of self-pity. Kyle was saying he'd been rewarded for his faith by having his life totally trashed. "I'll have to think about that," I said. I stood up and tossed the magazine on his bed. "It's getting late. I'd better be heading home."

  "Okay. Thanks for coming by."

  "Sure." I squeezed past the end of the bed, careful not to bump any of the traction ropes that had turned Kyle into a human marionette.

  "See you tomorrow?" Kyle asked.

  "I'll try to come. You know how it is." I waved and left the room.

  Have you considered my servant Job? I couldn't believe Kyle could even consider such a crazy view of his situation. Maybe they'd put him on something for the pain and it had mushed his mind.

  I hurried down the hall, feeling relieved I was just a visitor. Man, if people wanted to question the way things worked, there wasn't a better place to start. On either side of me, I caught glimpses of all sorts of sorrow. Broken lives, fading lives, interrupted lives. And none of it happened for any reason I could tell.

  Well, maybe some of it did. I guess if I'd remembered to pick up Kyle on the way to school that day, like I'd promised, he wouldn't have been in the accident.

  I went out the exit and walked to the curb. Yeah, nobody forced him to ride his bike, but I suppose I could accept some of the blame. And I guess, if I'd remembered to set the parking brake on his car after I'd borrowed it, he might not have needed a ride from me.

  I mean, who knew how one thing would lead to another? I'm not psychic. Maybe I shouldn't have introduced his girlfriend to that other guy. I'd only done it for a joke. I hadn't figured she'd dump Kyle.

  As I approached the corner, I heard an ambulance racing toward the emergency entrance. The wail of the siren grew louder as I though about those six scary words . . .

  Have you considered my servant Job?

  I sure hoped Kyle wasn't God's servant. Because, if he was, whose servant did that make me? As that thought sunk in, I clench my teeth. Or maybe I gnashed them.

  InterGalactic Interview With Robert J. Sawyer

  by Darrell Schweitzer

  * * *

  All you have to do to introduce Rob Sawyer and show why he's an important science fiction writer is to cite his awards. His credits give new meaning to the phrase "a list as long as your arm." He is one of only seven writers in history to have won the Hugo, Nebula, and John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Novel, and he is the only Canadian to have done so. He won a Hugo for Best Novel for Hominids (2002) after having had six previous nominations for Best Novel, one for Best Novella, and two for Best Short Story. He won the Nebula for The Terminal Experiment (1995) and has had additional nominations for Novel and Novella. He won the Campbell for Mindscan (2006) and has had two previous nominations for that award. He is honored in Canada with nine Aurora Award wins and a record-breaking 28 further nominations.

  He has also won top national honors in Japan, China, Spain, and France. He has even won mystery awards (Best Canadian Mystery novel) for his science fiction (Illegal Alien, 1997). There's a lot more, a Science Fiction Chronicle Award, an Mississauga City Arts Council Award for Established Literary Artist of 2002 and another City of Mississauga Civic Award in 2004 in recognition of his accomplishments in science fiction. There's also a an honorary doctorate for "international success in science fiction" from Laurentian University, a Ryerson University Alumnus of Distinction Award, and so on and so on. It is clear that the Canadians regard Robert J. Sawyer as a national treasure, as well they should.

  Does this guy ever stop? In a word, no. He is a tireless and prolific practitioner of "hard" science fiction, which might be otherwise called Big Thought SF, the story of science fiction that is genuinely about something, that extrapolates off valid science-fiction ideas and tries to actually show us where the world is headed, or might be headed.

  Besides that, he also writes well. His novels are gripping, fun to read, and leave something behind for your brain to chew on.

  He lives in Mississauga, a suburb of Toronto, with his wife, Carolyn Clink, a noted poet.

  His novels are Golden Fleece, Far-Seer, Fossil Hunter, Foreigner, End of an Era, The Terminal Experiment, Starplex, Frameshift, Flashforward, Illegal Alien, Factoring Humanity, Calculating God, Hominids, Hybrids, Humans, Relativity, Mindscan, and, most recently Rollback.

  SCHWEITZER: So, what's your background? What brought you to the SF field?

  SAWYER: Well, skipping over all that boring stuff between the Big Bang and April 1960, I was born in Ottawa, Canada's Capital city. My father was an economist, and shortly after I was born he was offered a teaching appointment at the University of Toronto, so we moved there, and Toronto, or environs, has been my home ever since.

  I was first introduced to science fiction through kid's TV shows, most notably Gerry Anderson's Fireball XL5, which started airing in Canada in 1963, when I was three; I still consider the music played over the closing credits of that series -- "I Wish I Was a Spaceman" -- to be my personal theme song.

  When I was 12, my older brother and my dad noted what I was watching on TV, and they got me some science-fiction books: Trouble on Titan, a YA novel by Alan E. Nourse; The Rest of the Robots, Asimov's second robot collection; and David Gerrold's first novel, Space
Skimmer. I'm still enormously fond of all three, and am thrilled to now be friends with David. In fact, we collaborated on editing an essay collection entitled Boarding the Enterprise last year in honor of the 40th anniversary of classic Star Trek, which, as anyone who has read my books knows, was also a big influence on me.

  Indeed, with all due respect to those book authors, I've got to say that it was media science fiction -- the original Star Trek, the original Planet of the Apes, and, to a lesser degree, the original Twilight Zone -- that really opened my eyes to SF as a vehicle for social comment, for looking at the here and now.

  Fast-forwarding: I knew from very early on that I wanted to write science fiction, and I'd been captivated by Gene Roddenberry and Stephen E. Whitfield's book The Making of Star Trek. So after high school I did a degree in Radio and Television Arts at Toronto's Ryerson University. Ironically, in doing courses in English literature there, I discovered that print, not film or TV, was were I really wanted to be.

  I made a living after I graduated in 1982 for the next decade mostly doing nonfiction writing, plus the odd SF story on the side. I somewhat precipitously became a full-time SF writer in 1990, when my first novel, Golden Fleece, came out.

  For the record, anyone who says major awards have no financial value is full of beans -- I made more money off of science fiction in the six months following winning the Best Novel Nebula Award in 1996 for The Terminal Experiment than I'd made in the six years preceding that. John Douglas, one of my editors on that book, put it just right the day after I won the Nebula, I think: "Overnight, you've gone from being a promising beginner to an established, bankable name." I've made a comfortable living ever since, and now have 17 novels under my belt.

  SCHWEITZER: What difference does it make, in terms of writing SF, that you are a Canadian? Sure, it probably means you get more local media coverage, but I note that all those books and TV shows you cite (except for Fireball XL5) were American. Do you think that a Canadian perspective produces a different kind of SF? Did you find it necessary to learn to "fake American" in order to sell to American markets? Did anybody try to pressure you to do this?

  SAWYER: Honestly, the difference it makes is principally financial. I make about double what I'd be making if I lived in the States. First, science fiction actually is quite popular in Canada, and people aren't such genre snobs here -- plus they like to buy Canadian. That means, even though the population is only one-tenth as big, I sell as many copies in Canada as I do in the States, and that makes me a national mainstream bestseller here, and that directly translates into money in my pocket.

  Being a big fish in a small pond has other advantages: I've got a lucrative sideline going as a keynote speaker at conferences up here, doing about one major gig a month. And there's a long list of paid library residencies and so forth; as we do this interview, I'm sitting rent-free in Canada's north, being paid a stipend of $2,000 a month to write a book that I'm already being paid by the publisher to write. And although the really big bucks are doubtless in Hollywood movies, the Canadian film industry is significant, and options tons of properties. Right now, I've got film rights to ten of my novels under option, nine of which are to Canadian producers.

  As it happens, I'm a dual US-Canadian citizen -- my mother is an American who was temporarily in Canada when I was born -- and someone asked me recently if I'd ever thought of moving to the States. The implication was that, like actors leaving Toronto to try their luck in L.A., that that should be my next move. But he had it backwards, and I had to say to him, "Sorry, I couldn't afford the cut in pay."

  Now, what about the impact on the words I write? Well, being a Canadian resident hugely affects my perspective. Canada is a middle power, a nation of peacekeepers, and a country that looks for compromise. There's no doubt that my politics are liberal by American standards, and that my heroes are much more pacifistic than most Americans would write. The most often quoted remark from all my books is something an alien said in Calculating God: "Honor does not have to be defended." To a Canadian that seems right: honor is something you have, it can't be taken away by anyone; to a lot of Americans, though, that line seems nonsensical.

  Anyone familiar with both Canada and the United States is aware that I criticize both countries -- hell, the Government of Ontario gets ripped a new one in Calculating God. But some of the commentary on Canada goes unnoticed by some American readers, because they don't get the references, and so they think I'm only taking swipes at the US government, and they get testy about that.

  But I make no apologies. When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1980, and Jimmy Carter reactivated Selective Service, I could have said screw that, I'm in Canada, but I went and registered for the draft, and to this day I file a tax return with the IRS. I'm an American citizen and criticizing both the countries I love is not just my birthright, it is, I honestly believe, my patriotic duty -- God love the Dixie Chicks! And, yes, just like them, I do love the United States: I don't think anyone who has read the speech by the American president that appears in segments at the beginning of each chapter in my Hybrids could think otherwise. Right after 9/11, we put an American flag on our car in solidarity; it's still there and it's the only flag on our car.

  And, sure, lots of Canadians told me to Americanize my books if I wanted to sell them to publishers in the Big Apple; they kept saying that Americans wouldn't get what I was saying. But I refused to believe that Americans were that provincial, if you'll forgive the pun. I've had books published by Warner, HarperCollins USA, Ace, and Tor, and never once have any of them ever asked me to tone down the Canadian content on my books. And why should they? Americans love Canada, and Canadians, honest to God, love Americans.

  SCHWEITZER: So, do you get your ideas from the secret P.O. Box in Schenectady that American writers use, or another one somewhere in Canada?

  But, more seriously, I should think that an important difference between Canadian and American SF (and writing in general) is that may topics which are controversial in the USA are not in Canada. I doubt Evolution is a big deal in Canada, whereas in the US school system it's almost a taboo. I can see two ways this could affect things. First, it could mean that you have more freedom writing in Canada. Or it could mean that in order to make satirical or controversial points in the US, you might seem to the Canadians to be belaboring the obvious. Any sense of this? I imagine we have more flat-earthers in the US too. Or do I have a greener-pastures view of Canada?

  SAWYER: No, no, there's no doubt that intellectually, these days, the pastures are greener in Canada. Our prime minister is only a moron; your president is an idiot ... [laughs]. Seriously, of course there's a reactionary right wing here in Canada, and religious fundamentalists, too, but they don't hold much political sway, to which I'll say, advisedly, thank God.

  But one very valid reading of my Neanderthal trilogy is that the Neanderthal culture I portray is emblematic of Canadian ideals: full acceptance of alternative lifestyles including the whole GLBT gamut and polygamy, plus secularism, pacifism, and environmentalism, topped off with the willingness to give up personal liberty for the common good (for the actual common good, not trumped-up threats). It's significant that many American critics have termed the portrayed world utopian. It isn't -- it's not no-place; it's that big honking land you get to if you just keep driving north.

  But, you know, I have had troubles with the US market, now that I think about it. Back in 1994, I submitted The Terminal Experiment, as a finished manuscript, to my then publisher, who had an option on the book -- and the publisher rejected it, despite the fact that my previous books for them had been doing well (and, indeed, they eventually bought five more books from me).

  Now, there's no doubt that The Terminal Experiment -- which is about a biomedical engineer who finds proof for the existence of the human soul -- is in part about the abortion issue; it's not even subtextual; I say it directly in the book. And the editor in question said they feared their ability to sell this material in the Bible
Belt. Yes, changes and cuts were suggested, but I refused to make them, and my agent at the time, the redoubtable Richard Curtis, supported me in that.

  So, we moved on to another publisher with a new imprint that I think really was trying to draw attention to itself, the HarperPrism line, and they published the book verbatim as the previous house had rejected it ... and, of course, The Terminal Experiment went on to win the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America's Nebula Award for Best Novel of the Year. So, I guess it paid to stick to my guns ... which, of course, is something we Canadians only do metaphorically!

  My great friend Robert Charles Wilson has recently come up with a definition of what science fiction is (my own, incidentally, is "the mainstream literature of an alternate reality"). He says that SF is "the literature of contingency" -- and he very much is intending a Gouldian evolutionary reading of that. And, yes, damn it, from The Time Machine on, SF has been, at its core, about evolution: how things could have been different; how things might turn out. That America is turning its back on the single greatest scientific truth we know -- natural selection resulting in speciation -- is painful to me. It's no coincidence, I think, that the major SF novels about evolution of the last several years -- my own Fossil Hunter and Calculating God, and Stephen Baxter's aptly titled Evolution -- are by non-Americans.

  As for getting the ideas, actually, the fount -- and I think this is true for many of us hard-SF writers, regardless of nationality -- is really in Britain: the weekly magazine New Scientist. How can you not love a magazine whose subtitle is "The Week's Best Ideas"?