by Lake, Jay
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”?
Q: There’s a certain type of American (who probably vote Republican; which I do not) who might say that the reason Canadians have this more utopian view is that someone else has always looked out for them. They’ve spent their entire history either under the protection of the British Empire or the Americans. Is there any validity in that, or are Canadians just as good at staring Hitler, Stalin, or Osama bin Laden in the face as anyone? Or does Canadian SF look at things through rose-tinted glasses?
Sawyer: I would invite this hypothetical “certain type of American” to actually read some history, old boy. First, Canada has been an independent country since 1867; we’ve hardly been relying on the Brits since then. As for the United States protecting us—when and from whom, one might ask? The wars the United States has fought during my lifetime—Vietnam and Afghanistan and Iraq—were not particular threats to Canada, and Canadian peacekeepers are still in Afghanistan, mopping up the mess made there. NORAD, the North American Air Defense Command, is a joint US-Canada effort. In fact, a Canadian officer, Canadian Forces Major General Rick Findley, was in charge of the battle staff at NORAD’s Cheyenne Mountain complex on September 11, 2001.
As for staring down Hitler and Stalin, Canada joined the Allied Powers and sent our boys off to die in Europe starting September 10, 1939—just nine days after the invasion of Poland. The US, on the other hand, sat on the sidelines until after the attack on its own facility at Pearl Harbour on December 7, 1941, over two years later.
Parenthetically, my favorite film is Casablanca, and I recently had someone refer to it in my presence as “wonderful escapism.” It’s not: it’s a pointed commentary on the United States’s failure to join in the fight against Hitler. The American Rick Blaine says, “I stick my neck out for no one,” and the European Ferrari has to say to him, “My dear Rick, when will you realize that in this world today, isolationism is no longer a practical policy?”
And as for Osama bin Laden, well, politely, he hasn’t attacked Canada, although we share in the outrage over what he’s done. But I think its regrettable that all that can be said is that perhaps he is being stared down, rather than apprehended, and it’s not been particularly effective leadership going after Saddam Hussein instead of the real threat. But Canada faced its own home-soil terrorism crisis in October 1970, and then Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau so effectively and swiftly dealt with that event that it is no coincidence that there’s been no act of terrorism on Canadian soil in the thirty-seven intervening years.
Canada’s foreign-policy record (including our Prime Minister, Lester Pearson, winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1957), its foreign-aid record, its record of vigorously joining battles in just wars, and its peacekeeping record speaks for themselves. Canada doesn’t have rose-colored glasses on—but, if I may be so bold, your hypothetical American of a certain type has on blinkers.
Q: I wonder why the publisher even worried about how Calculating God or any of your novels would sell in the Bible Belt. Do they really think that Fundamentalists buy anything more SFish than the Left Behind books?
Sawyer: I never claimed to understand my publisher’s decision; I merely report it—but the book in question was The Terminal Experiment, not Calculating God; Tor, who published the latter book, has been nothing but 100% supportive in letting me tell my stories my way.
But, in fact, having been guest of honor at many SF conventions in the South—Albuquerque, Houston, Memphis, Chattanooga, Knoxville, Orlando, and Richmond, to name some—it’s clear that there are lots of SF readers down there, and, yes, some of them do have a sensibility that varies from that in the north.
A fellow from Bethlehem, Georgia, wrote this of my Hybrids on Amazon.com: “I mentioned in an earlier review that with respect to Sawyer’s Liberalism, he let the nose of the camel come peeking under the tent. Well, in Hybrids the camel is all the way inside the tent and it has taken a dump in the middle. I’m going to have to hold my nose if I read any more of his stories. Points include the old Military Industrial Complex as the boogieman, and universal homosexuality being apparently espoused.”
Well, first, of course, neither of those things actually happen in Hybrids: the villain is a sole terrorist acting alone, but I am very proud of the fact that the book was nominated for the Spectrum Award, which celebrates positive portrayals of gay, lesbian, or bi characters in SF. More to the point, though, it stuns me that the quality of my book, or any book, is being judged not on its execution but rather on its politics—an astonishing way to review a book, in my view. In fairness to the reviewer, though, he did give my book four stars—but I’ve seen other examples of people sorting SF into “good” and “bad” based simply on the underlying politics not on the effectiveness of the storytelling.
Q: We’ve had a lot of people in our field bemoan the apparent retreat of science fiction itself, Gregory Benford most notably. Just as the “future” has arrived, we have space travel, exo-planets are being discovered by the dozen, we have robots, the internet, etc.—now so many writers and readers are no longer interested in the future, and alternate histories and fantasy seem to outsell anything that resembles real SF. What do you make of this?
Sawyer: Oh, yes, I’ve been decrying this for years. In 1999, I gave a talk at the Library of Congress entitled: “The Future is Already Here: Is There a Place for Science Fiction in the 21st Century?” And I’m just reading William Gibson’s latest, Spook Country, and he’s given up totally on writing about the future, finding, as many others do, wonder enough in the present.
Certainly, for my own career, I’ve moved my work much closer to the here-and-now. You can divide my career into two parts: the first phase includ
ed my off-Earth spaceships-and-aliens novels: Golden Fleece, Far-Seer, Fossil Hunter, Foreigner, End of an Era, and Starplex. Now, I’m very proud of all of those, and Starplex was the only 1996 novel to be nominated for both the Hugo and the Nebula, not to mention winning Canada’s Aurora and being nominated for Japan’s Seiun. But, as a group, they are my worst sellers. My best sellers are all the others, starting with The Terminal Experiment: near-future or present day, and exclusively on Earth.
It’s a mode I intend to continue in, because I’ve found that I can still do all the things I want to do artistically and philosophically in that milieu. And I use that term “philosophically” advisedly: if I had my druthers, this field would be called philosophical fiction, not science fiction—phi-fi, not sci-fi.
But I am still very much a hard SF author: actual, real science is the backbone of my work. That it’s a field that draws fewer and fewer readers each year saddens me. I used to say, man, I wished I started selling novels a decade earlier, in the early 1980s, with the wave of writers that included the last bunch to become really rich writing SF: Greg Benford himself, William Gibson, David Brin, Greg Bear, Kim Stanley Robinson.
Now I say I’m so glad I didn’t start a decade later: my first book came out in 1990, and I make a good living, but the guys who are starting out in the first decade of the twenty-first century are facing a much smaller audience, with vastly reduced print runs. The era of any appreciable number of people being full-time SF writers is coming to a close, and that’s bad artistically for the field.
Q: Why not continue to write of a spacefaring far future? If we haven’t given up on those Heinleinian vision of out species expanding outward, isn’t now more than ever the time for someone to write a really compelling, intelligent far-future, outer-space story, if only to capture the audience back from Harry Potter? You may have seen the exchanges I had with Gregory Benford over this. If hard SF is losing its market share, surely the only possible solution is better SF to bring those readers back.
Sawyer: Nope, I disagree. It’s the disconnect between our here-and-now and the far-flung outer-space story that’s driven people out of SF: no human has left Earth orbit for 35 years now, and yet we tell people they should give up their precious reading time to space opera because it’s somehow important, relevant, and true?
The reason I’m prospering is that I have managed to bring in large numbers of readers who don’t habitually read SF, while not alienating the core SF audience. The outsiders care not one whit for magical post-singularitarian or transhumanist worlds, but find the “what does it mean to be human” theme of my work to be of interest.
It’s a tricky balancing act: appealing to the hardcore SF readers and to mainstream readers alike, but I seem to be managing it. Calculating God was a national top-ten mainstream bestseller in Canada, meaning it was being widely read and enjoyed by people who don’t read science fiction, and it hit number one on the bestsellers’ list in Locus, which is based on a survey of science-fiction specialty stores, meaning it was appealing to hardcore SF readers, too. Hominids was used for a major “if everyone read the same book” program in Canada, and was hugely popular there with people who had never read an SF novel in their lives—and it also won the Hugo, voted on by the absolute hardcore of SF fans, those who are members of the World Science Fiction Convention. The future of SF isn’t narrowly focusing on distant tomorrows, but broadening the appeal to bring in readers from outside the shrinking core.
Far-future SF has gotten increasingly esoteric, and increasingly magical rather than grounded in reasoned extrapolation. Remember Homer Simpson, when he became an astronaut, looking lovingly at an inanimate carbon rod, and saying, “Is there anything it can’t do?” Substitute “nanotech” or “post-singularity science” or whatever your favorite synonym for Clarke’s “indistinguishable from magic” is, and you get a lot of so-called science fiction today—and 99.999% of humanity has no interest in it, not because they don’t believe great advances in technology may someday be possible but because they’re being wielded like magic wands in these stories, and, frankly, the actual fantasy writers do a better job of combining magic with rousing plots and compelling characterization. Even if far-future SF writers rose to the challenge of adding those missing elements, they’d still only be producing an oddball variant of fantasy, not something unique and special in its own right.
Q: About your new novel.... Describe a little of what it’s about and how you came to write it.
Sawyer: Rollback, my seventeenth novel, out now from Tor, is a good example of what I’ve been talking about in terms of trying to appeal in and out of genre. Canada’s national newspaper, The Globe and Mail, called it “a novel to be savored by science-fiction and mainstream readers alike,” whereas Publishers Weekly, in its starred reviews, recognized that the core SF reader should like it, too, saying “Sawyer, who has won Hugo and Nebula awards, may well win another major SF award with this superior effort.” And, indeed, it is hardcore, hard SF: heck, it was serialized in Analog prior to book publication: you can’t get any more hard-SF than that!
Rollback started with a pure high concept: a man and a woman, both in their eighties, are offered a chance to be rejuvenated, each becoming physically twenty-five again. They accept—and it works for the man and fails for the woman.
The book just grew organically from exploring the ins and outs of that concept: all the heartbreak, all the joy, all the wonder. Of course, I had to find a reason why someone might want to live for a very long time that wasn’t petty and self-serving, and I soon settled on making the woman a SETI researcher who had been instrumental in decoding messages from aliens, and that the dialog, because of the light-speed delay, was going to take many decades if not centuries. And then that made me start thinking about morals and ethics, and how our view of right and wrong might change if we lived for a very long time, and the novel’s philosophical backbone is exploring what morals might actually be universal, transcending species boundaries. A novel accretes—a plot point here, a grace note there, a flourish, an ironic touch—but that was its genesis.
It really was a Hollywood-style high-concept pitch, by the way. I was actually under contract to Tor to write a different novel—a single, standalone volume to have been called Webmind about the World Wide Web gaining consciousness. And I was finding as I was working on it that the idea was too big for one book. But I had a contract to fulfill, and so I actually had a power lunch—I felt so Hollywood! I went out to lunch with Tor publisher Tom Doherty and my editor at Tor, Dave Hartwell, and said, look, I want to set aside Webmind, and do another book for you instead: and I gave them the high-concept pitch, and they green-lit it, as the saying goes.
Rollback was an emotionally draining book to write, I must say: I had to face a lot of my own thoughts and fears about aging and death; I freely confess that I cried while writing parts of it. But the response has been wonderfully positive from readers. Many of them have told me they cried in the right places, too—and, of course, laughed a lot, too: I always have lots of humor in my books.
I’ve now gone back to the conscious-Web idea, and have sold it as a trilogy: Wake, Watch, and Wonder—collectively, the WWW series. I’m well into Wake now, and it’s coming along nicely.
Q: Thanks, Rob.
(Recorded in the Summer of 2007.)
SARGASSO OF LOST STARSHIPS, by Poul Anderson
Originally published in Planet Stories, January 1952.
Basil Donovan was drunk again.
He sat near the open door of the Golden Planet, boots on the table, chair tilted back, one arm resting on the broad shoulder of Wocha, who sprawled on the floor beside him, the other hand clutching a tankard of ale. The tunic was open above his stained gray shirt, the battered cap was askew on his close-cropped blond hair, and his insignia—the stars of a captain and the silver leaves of an earl on Ansa—were tarnished. There was a deepenin
g flush over his pale gaunt cheeks, and his eyes smoldered with an old rage.
Looking out across the cobbled street, he could see one of the tall, half-timbered houses of Lanstead. It had somehow survived the space bombardment, though its neighbors were rubble, but the tile roof was clumsily patched and there was oiled paper across the broken plastic of the windows. An anachronism, looming over the great bulldozer which was clearing the wreckage next door. The workmen there were mostly Ansans, big men in ragged clothes, but a well-dressed Terran was bossing the job. Donovan cursed wearily and lifted his tankard again.
The long, smoky-raftered taproom was full—stolid burghers and peasants of Lanstead, discharged spacemen still in their worn uniforms, a couple of tailed greenies from the neighbor planet Shalmu. Talk was low and spiritless, and the smoke which drifted from pipes and cigarettes was bitter, cheap tobacco and dried bark. The smell of defeat was thick in the tavern.
“May I sit here, sir? The other places are full.”
Donovan glanced up. It was a young fellow, peasant written over his sunburned face in spite of the gray uniform and the empty sleeve. Olman—yes, Sam Olman, whose family had been under Donovan fief these two hundred years, “Sure, make yourself at home.”
“Thank you, sir. I came in to get some supplies, thought I’d have a beer too. But you can’t get anything these days. Not to be had.”
Sam’s face looked vaguely hopeful as he eyed the noble. “We do need a gas engine bad, sir, for the tractor. Now that the central powercaster is gone, we got to have our own engines. I don’t want to presume, sir, but—”