Robert J. Sawyer, an Interview
by Kent Pollard - Tuesday Jan 29 2008 2:57 pm
Posted in: Interview, Authors, SciFi & Fantasy

By any measure, Robert J. Sawyer is one of Canada's most successful writers, an achievement made even more amazing by his ability to reach it while writing books that are consistently marketed as Science Ficton. Robert's latest book Rollback is out in paperback this month, so I'm pleased to present an interview, conducted via email recently.

KP: Rob, thanks for chatting with me. First off, could you share a few of the high points in your life that you feel have helped make you who you are, both personally and professionally?

RJS: The most significant high point to date was winning the Hugo Award – the world’s top honour in science fiction – for best novel of the year in 2003, for my novel Hominids. I’d won lots of awards before that, including the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America’s Nebula Award, but nothing had had such a big impact. My win was page-one news above the fold in the Ottawa Citizen, and it kick-started a lucrative sideline for me as a keynote speaker, talking all over North America about the future of science and technology.

KP: When and why did you begin writing?

RJS: I seriously got into writing in my last year of high school, and, in fact, sold a story I wrote then to an anthology co-edited by Isaac Asimov. I’d always wanted to be a writer, ever since I was a little kid; my mother has some of my efforts penned – or penciled! – when I was eight and nine that I suspect she’ll put up on eBay someday. But it was only at the end of high school that I decided to make a career out of writing, and, really, it’s the only job I’ve ever had, and I can’t imagine now doing anything else.

KP: What are you reading now, for fun, and/or research?

RJS: For fun, the novel The Alienist by Caleb Carr, and for research The Altruism Equation: Seven Scientists Search for the Origins of Goodness by Lee Alan Dugatkin; much of my upcoming WWW trilogy will deal with altruism and the mathematics of cooperation. Both books are excellent, by the way.

KP: Are there any new authors that you have found particularly interesting?

RJS: Ah, you play right into my hands! I edit the science fiction imprint for Calgary’s Red Deer Press, and have been in the wonderful position to actually buy and publish books by the exciting new writers I’ve encountered over the last few years, including Nick DiChario, Marcos Donnelly, and Danita Maslan; their work is absolutely first-rate, and, in fact, I’m just about to publish a second book by Nick, called Valley of Day-Glo; his first was A Small and Remarkable Life and it got us our first big award nomination, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Novel of the Year. Danita’s Rogue Harvest is a brilliant eco-thriller, and Marcos’s Letters from the Flesh is one of the best science-vs.-religion books the field has ever seen.

KP: I think many of your readers would like to know a bit more about the writing process, and how it works for you. Has writing always been fairly smooth for you, or are there particular aspects of the process that you find more difficult than others?

RJS: The first draft is excruciating for me – like pulling teeth. I love research, and love revisions, but staring at that blank screen and creating something out of nothing is very hard work for me. I love the research aspect most of all; I’d happily do nothing but research, just following my interests wherever they lead me.

KP: Do you write to any sort of time or word-count schedule?

RJS: In the first-draft stage, I try to get 2,000 words a day done. In the other stages – research, revision – I just try to put in an honest day’s work, somewhere between five and seven hours.

KP: Do you ever experience "writers’ block" and if so do you have any favourite technique for getting past it?

RJS: I don’t write in linear sequence; that is, I don’t start at chapter one and push through in order to the end. So, if I’m stuck on a particular point, having backed a character literally or figuratively into a corner, I just jump to somewhere else in the narrative. So, no, I’ve never really had writers’ block; I tend to think it’s a myth. I mean, could you get away with doing nothing for weeks on end by claiming “booksellers’ block”? Of course not; it’s only because some writers try to give the process a mystical quality that people accept that you can only do it when some ill-defined muse has struck.

KP: Many genre writers feel restricted by the categorizations. Have you found the SF label restrictive, and are there specific actions you have taken to get around such restrictions?

RJS: I have not at all found the genre label creatively restrictive. Every single thing I’ve ever wanted to do as an artist I’ve been able to do within the pages of SF: romance, adventure, comedy, tragedy; first-person narrative, third-person narrative, stream-of-consciousness, stylistic experimentation – all of that is possible in SF. But the genre label does server as a barrier, keeping a lot of readers out. I write science fiction that, according to the critics, can be “savoured by genre and mainstream readers alike” (as the Globe and Mail said of my latest, Rollback), but getting those mainstream readers to pick up an SF book can be hard. And, yes, I’ve taken a big step: I’ve sold my next trilogy separately to Ace Science Fiction in the USA, which will market it as genre, and to Penguin Canada here, which will market it as mainstream. I already have a large mainstream audience in Canada, but we expect this move to bring me an even wider readership here.

KP: You do a great deal of traveling to promote your work. Do you generally find that invigorating, or is it a tiring process?

RJS: It’s both, and I know that sounds contradictory, but it’s true. It’s physically exhausting: I’m on the road between two and five months each year. But it’s creatively and emotionally very stimulating, and it’s wonderful interacting directly with my readers. Thank God I write well on airplanes!

KP: Next I’d like to ask a bit about your philosophy of writing. You’ve often used variations on the line that a Science Fiction writer’s job is about preventing the future not predicting it. Have you ever had any specific feedback that makes you feel that you, or another science fiction author may have successfully contributed to such a role?

RJS: Absolutely! There’s no doubt that the discussions of privacy vs. societal stability in my Neanderthal Parallax trilogy have had an impact on the public discourse on this topic (and have lead to me being invited to write about that topic in Maclean’s, be interviewed about it on CBC Radio’s Definitely Not the Opera, and to address the Gartner IT Security Summit in Washington, DC, later this year). And as a direct result of my novel Frameshift, which is about the future of the privacy of genetic information and its relationship to health insurance, I was invited by Canada’s Federal Department of Justice to participate in a forum about what sort of laws Canada should have in these very areas.

KP: Unlike most Canadian authors, you’ve never been afraid to make your settings unabashedly Canadian, while recognizing that the American market is critical to your success. Would you like to comment on that?

RJS: When I was starting out, everyone told me it wouldn’t work – that if I wanted an American audience, I’d need to hide the Canadian content in my books. But look at Rollback, which is set entirely in Toronto. One of the key scenes takes place at the CBC Museum, with the main character looking at props from The Friendly Giant and other Canadian programs. That didn’t stop the book from getting starred reviews in Publishers Weekly and Library Journal, from making the American Library Association’s list of the 10 best SF novels of the year, and so on. Telling me not to write about Toronto would be like telling Robert B. Parker not to write about Boston in his Spenser novels; it’s a crazy, uniquely Canadian notion. The world does know about us, and does care about us, and, in science-fictional contexts, we have an important lesson to teach about multiculturalism.

KP: Over your career, you’ve been one of the most encouraging of genre writers towards other would-be authors, from participating in writer-in-residence programs and running writing courses, to an extensive area of your website devoted to advice to new authors and a significant presence on-line. Does that remain something that you enjoy participating in, or do you find it has become more of a drain on your other projects.

RJS: Well, of course, it’s a drain; there’s zero benefit to it for me – but that’s not the point. The point is that I’ve been very lucky – I freely and frequently acknowledge that – and that, I firmly believe, comes with obligations: I owe it to the universe to pay back, and I do. As it happens, I do enjoy teaching, but it doesn’t pay nearly as well as my writing does these days; I do it because it needs doing – simple as that.

KP: I believe you made a conscious decision to drop a lucrative career in writing non-fiction, in order to concentrate on your love of writing science fiction. Were there points when you thought you weren’t going to make it, and do you have specific memories of how you felt when the first novel sold?

RJS: Sure, I remember selling my first novel, but even then that wasn’t the point where I thought I was going to make it; I knew full well that most first-time novelists never sell a second book. No, for me, it was very touch-and-go from 1988, when I started backing away from that lucrative career you mentioned, to 1996, when I won the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America’s Nebula Award for best novel of the year: every one of those eight years was precarious, despite selling nine novels in that time. But the Nebula changed everything. As my editor said the day after I won, “You’ve gone overnight from being a promising newcomer to an established bankable name.” Now, I do despair for the long-term health of SF, but I suspect I’ll be like Triceratops, which was one of the very last dinosaurs … I’m going to hold on to the very end.

KP: You’ve said in the past that many new writers fail because they fail to treat their writing as a business. What do you think is the single most important thing that a would-be writer needs to know about making a living at writing?

RJS: It’s a cliché, but it’s also true: don’t quit your day job. You need a financial cushion. Most writers are part-timers; I’m extraordinarily lucky to be able to do it full-time, and even luckier that I can support myself and my wife doing so – most of those who are full-timers are the secondary income earners in their households. The second piece of advice: recognize that you’re building a brand. Define your brand’s qualities – in my case, it’s books set in the present day or near future that combine the intimately human with the grandly cosmic – and deliver it in a reliable fashion, meaning book after book, on a regular basis, that give the consumer the things they want from your brand.

KP: Now I’d like to move on to your recent and future work. Your latest collection Identity Theft and Other Stories is due shortly, accompanied by a new edition of the earlier collection, Iterations. Do you feel the new work will be a departure for those who read the first, or will it feel like a comfortable continuation of the earlier work?

RJS: If you liked my earlier short stories, you’ll like the new collection: there are several SF/mystery crossovers in Identity Theft,, just as there were in Iterations, and whereas Iterations had an Arthur Conan Doyle pastiche, Identity Theft, has an H.G. Wells pastiche – both of which are among the best stories I’ve ever written, in my humble opinion. Both collections have lots of award winners and nominees, and I’m very proud of both books. But they also mark the end of an era for me: I don’t intend to do any more short fiction; these two volumes collect all of my short work, and I’m just not finding myself drawn to that form anymore. I much prefer writing novels.

KP: Your most recent novel, Rollback,, while not really about SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, is set peripherally around their activities. Do you have any thoughts on our failure to find any signs of intelligent life off of Earth?

RJS: I was invited last summer to participate in a joint NASA Ames Reaserch Center / SETI Institute conference on that very topic. It was an incredibly high-powered think-tank: Marvin Minsky, Freeman Dyson, Jill Tarter, Seth Shostak, etc. etc. And the conclusion we all converged on was this: intelligent life in the universe is probably common, but the desire to have material things and boundless energy will put any environment so at risk that any civilization may have a very short lifespan. It was an interesting change of perspective: if you’d asked 40 years ago what had happened to all the aliens, the consensus response might have been nuclear war; now it is environmental collapse. We’re at the tipping point of our own environmental collapse, and it seems likely that all races face that … and only a few survive long enough to engage in decades- or centuries-long dialogues with other star systems.

KP: I believe your next book is set to be about the rise of consciousness within the World Wide Web. Human-like intelligence in machines was also touched on in Rollback and played a significant role in Mindscan. Combined with your statement that science fiction is about preventing the future, this seems to indicate that you feel that machine intelligence is close enough that we need to think about the repercussions now. Would you say that is the case?

RJS: Totally, and, in fact, I make my strongest statements about that in two earlier novels of mine, both still in print: the Aurora Award-winning Golden Fleece, and the Hugo Award-finalist Factoring Humanity. But I think just sounding warning bells is only part of the SF writer’s job, and in my new project – a trio of novels called Wake, Watch, and Wonder – I’m really trying to come up with a new synthesis: a way in which we can share this planet with a superintelligence without giving up our essential humanity, our individuality, or our physical bodies. We’ll see if I can pull it off; the first book will be out next year.

KP: Do you think that we will be ready to identify machine intelligence when it emerges?

RJS: That presupposes that it hasn’t already; it might well have, and we could be unaware of it. But, yes, I do think we’ll know when machines start to think, just as we know when a baby starts to think for itself: it will say “no.”

KP: Many writers find that they can’t look at earlier work without wishing they could go back and do it over again. In light of your time spent preparing for the “WWW” series, if you had to do Mindscan all over again, would you change anything?

RJS: No – not because it’s a perfect book, but because that would be pointless. I love Douglas Adams, but he spent his whole life tinkering with the same basic story, instead of giving us much that was new. When I finish a book, it’s “fixed in a permanent form” (as the copyright legislation phrases it), and that’s just fine: it’s a snapshot of who I was and how I saw the world at a given time, warts and all. I never go back and re-read my books; in fact, when my first novel, Golden Fleece, came out in 1990, I said I wouldn’t start re-reading each one until 40 years had passed, so I’ll re-read Golden Fleece in 2030, when I’m 70 years old. But in the meantime, I’d much rather push ahead and write new works than go back and relive the past … which is exactly what one might expect a science-fiction writer to say!

I'd like to thank you for the chat, Rob. I don't think I'm taking a big risk by predicting that all of your fans will be waiting for the new books with some impatience.

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