***

Robert J. Sawyer: The Philosophical Science Fiction Writer

By Edward Willett

The Canadian Light Source, the giant synchrotron in Saskatoon, does not immediately spring to mind as a likely venue for a writer-in-residence.

Unless, perhaps, that writer is renowned Canadian science fiction author Robert J. Sawyer. Then it seems like a perfect fit.

“Most of my books involve working scientists,” Sawyer notes. “I have often visited science institutions, but I’ve never been immersed for weeks on end in the ambience, the atmosphere in which science is done. That experience will lend an enormous verisimilitude to my future writing.”

The unusual pairing was born a few years ago when, after a tour of the CLS with fellow Canadian SF writer Robert Charles Wilson, Sawyer, Wilson, Matthew Dalzell, the communications coordinator for the CLS, and Jeff Cutler, director of industrial science, discussed over drinks the possibility of Sawyer returning and spending more time.

Sawyer suggested the writer-in-residence idea. Dalzell and Cutler were intrigued, and best of all, Cutler found money within his budget to pay for the residency, so no Canada Council grant was required.

Although the location was unusual, Sawyer’s duties as writer-in-residence were typical: he spent forty percent of his time mentoring writers and teaching and talking about writing (he gave a creative writing lecture every Monday at noon to CLS staff), and sixty percent on his own writing.

Sawyer’s appointment garnered “astonishing” media attention, locally, nationally, and internationally. “Everybody thinks this is unbelievably cool, myself included,” Sawyer says.

He says the most interesting aspect for him was the “wealth of little details” he picked up about life at a full-time research facility, from the weekly summer staff barbecues to how the shredding of sensitive documents was handled to the qualifications and salaries specified in job postings.

Getting the details of both science and the work of scientists right is important to Sawyer, whose current books are all set in the present or near future.

There’s a good reason for that. “I was writing what I felt were significant works of social commentary that weren’t being read by anybody but die-hard science fiction fans,” he says. Now that he focuses on the here-and-now (or at least the not-too-far-away), “there are all kinds of people who are Robert Sawyer readers who don’t think of themselves as science fiction readers.

“I’m able to write the kind of mind-expanding hard science philosophically rich stuff that I’ve always written. I don’t miss the spaceships and aliens.”

Sawyer thinks his brand of science fiction should ideally have a different name: he likes “philosophical fiction,” “phi-fi” instead of “sci-fi.”

“It really is a literature of ideas,” he points out. “It’s about fundamental questions. Who we are, where we’re going, whether we have free will, what value consciousness has, is there a God? These are the questions SF deals with. The name ‘science fiction’ really doesn’t convey that.”

But, he adds, “I proudly proclaim myself to be a science fiction writer, and never hide behind ‘speculative fiction.’”

Sawyer’s newest novel, Wake, the first book of a trilogy, grew out of a popular science article Sawyer read that mentioned that at some point early this century the Web will have as many interconnections as the human brain.

“That led me to wonder what might happen then,” he says. In Wake, he suggests that the Web could gain consciousness, just as we did in our evolutionary past when our brains reached a certain level of complexity.

“I spent four years researching the dawn of consciousness to see what parts were innately biological and what parts would be shared by anything that was becoming self aware,” Sawyer says. “One of the parallels that I found was the story of Helen Keller, who had been blind and deaf, in almost complete sensory deprivation, from her eighteenth month of life. She had no really sophisticated consciousness, no sense of personhood, no self-reflection. That became the template for me.”

If the Web gained consciousness, Sawyer thought, it would do so in a similar state of sensory deprivation, and, like Keller, would need help to move beyond it.

“I often say this is a high-tech retelling of The Miracle Worker,” Sawyer says. In Wake, the miracle comes from an unlikely source: Caitlin Decter, a blind teenage girl.

When he was twelve years old, Sawyer spent six days blind, eyes bandaged, after being hit in the face with a snowball. “I’ve been looking for the right place to organically, not gratuitously, use that life experience,” he says. “A writer ultimately cannibalizes his entire life.”

He didn’t rely entirely on his own experience: he also had seven blind people read the manuscript and comment on his depiction of what their lives are like.

Although Sawyer has had a taste of blindness, he’s never been a teenage girl. But then, he takes issue with the old adage to “write what you know.”

“Yes, we writers are told to write what we know,” he says. “But writers can also find things out. You can always decide to become knowledgeable about something.

“The most interesting thing as a writer is try to put yourself in somebody else’s shoes, get inside somebody who is not like you. It’s like being an actor. No ambitious actor wants to play the part that’s closest to who he or she actually is. They want to play the part that’s the biggest stretch for them.

“It’s the same for a fiction writer. I’m writing my twentieth novel. I’ve written a hundred significant characters. If they were all middle-aged bald white guys who watched way too much Star Trek when they were young, they’d be boring.”

Sawyer laughingly says that if the RCMP didn’t have a dossier on him before, it might now, because he spent a lot of time reading teenaged girls’ blogs and Facebook pages and frequenting the live video chat site Justin TV.

“The public nature of the life of young people today makes it easier to eavesdrop without having to hang around the schoolyard,” he says. He also had teenage girls read the manuscript and offer suggestions.

Like all of his books, Wake is set in Canada. Sawyer is proud of that.

“My books are published all over the world, in fifteen languages. Within science fiction, I have been allowed to be blatantly Canadian, to explore Canadian themes. I get to be a more Canadian writer in this genre than the mystery writers, western writers, romance writers or even the mainstream writers get to be. If you want to be flagrantly Canadian in your writing, and still have a world-wide market, science fiction is a very green pasture.”

With Wake launched, Sawyer is looking ahead to the final two books in the trilogy, Watch and Wonder. Watch is written; Wonder is underway, and the whole trilogy will be out in paperback in 2012—the year in which it is set.

Sawyer, who writes a novel a year, divides each year into four phases: research, first draft, revision, and promotion.

The latter takes him away from Mississauga, where he lives with his wife, Carolyn Clink (herself a poet), three or four months a year.

Fortunately, he can write anywhere. In fact, he says, “I get my best writing time on the road because the phone isn’t ringing and the Internet access is usually pretty nonexistent. The Internet is my crack!”

Sawyer believes strongly in his chosen field of literature. “The ideas of science fiction are still current, and there are new ideas,” he says. “The science is more sophisticated now than ever before, and so the storytelling possibilities are more sophisticated today.”

Science fiction, he says, is “the only scientifically literate form of literature—and it is the only one that has as its brief to deal with fundamental questions.”

He notes that many recent bestselling novels from mainstream publishers, such as Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, are science fiction, and thinks that might represent a trend away from science fiction being published by specialized imprints.

In Canada, by Sawyer’s choice, Wake is published by the mainstream imprint Viking. “Ninety-five percent of everybody who goes into a bookstore never goes into the science fiction section. One in twenty does. And yet I think I have things of value to say to the other nineteen.”

But no matter who his publisher is, he’ll continue writing science fiction.

“Within the confines of science fiction I have written high adventure, deeply moving personal drama, comedy, courtroom drama, medical thrillers, satire. I can’t imagine any other genre where I would be given the latitude to experiment that my publishers now only allow me to have, but expect me to exercise.”

Saskatchewan could soon be home to Canada’s first synchrotron, and if your first reaction is, “So what?” then, dear reader, you must read on.

Physicists are a lot like small boys: they like to see what makes things tick by smashing them up. In the case of small boys, those things may be clocks or model cars; in the case of physicists, they’re atoms and molecules. Small boys use hammers; physicists use particle accelerators, which speed up subatomic particles to enormous velocities and then smash them into targets.

The first particle accelerator, built in 1932, was an ordinary high-voltage transformer, but more specialized devices soon followed. Two of them, the betatron and cyclotron, accelerated particles inside a circular ring, and led directly to today’s particle accelerator of choice, the synchrotron.

A synchrotron resembles a doughnut; it’s main feature is a “race track” ringed with magnets. Particles which have already been given an initial boost with a linear accelerator (which accelerates particles in a straight line) are injected into this “race track,” and are speeded up faster and faster as they pass through the magnets’ fields, which are gradually increased until the particles are moving at the desired speed. Then the particles are siphoned out of the race track (properly known as a “storage ring”), and smashed into the target.

Just like cars on a race track squeal and smoke their tires, charged particles on a race track throw off electromagnetic radiation as they’re forced to deviate from a straight line, ranging from infrared, visible and ultraviolet light all the way up to X-rays.

At first this “synchrotron radiation” was just an unavoidable nuisance, but in the 1960s, researchers who needed powerful X-rays realized synchrotron radiation provided them, and began to piggy-back their experiments onto existing particle accelerators. Today, many synchrotrons are being built expressly for the purpose of creating synchrotron radiation.

If we want to see something clearly, we shine a bright light on it; the brighter the light, the more detail we can see. Synchrotrons provide extremely bright light of all types, and X-rays can be thought of as the brightest light of all.

Ordinary light has a wavelength of about 500 billionths of a metre; with it, you can see details as little as 200 billionths of a metre apart. That sounds pretty good, but molecules are much, much smaller than that. X-rays, with a wavelength a thousand times shorter than visible light, can reveal details even at the molecular level.

This has tremendous value in both basic and applied research. Pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, for example, are using synchrotron radiation to determined the structure of cells, bacteria and viruses, which will lead to the more intelligent design and development of drugs. Synchrotron radiation can help other companies build microscopic machines and more powerful computers; develop new materials; create new and safer pesticides; even enhance oil recovery. Before you can improve on anything, you have to know exactly how it’s made; synchrotron radiation provides that information in spades.

Canada is the only leading industrialized nation without its own synchrotron; by contrast, Japan is now building its 30th. Currently, more than 200 Canadian scientists are finding time on foreign synchrotrons, but it’s anticipated all foreign synchrotrons will be at full capacity by 2000.

Early last year the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council called for proposals to build and operate a Canadian synchrotron, called the Canadian Light Source, or CLS. Proposals from the University of Western Ontario and the University of Saskatchewan were presented to an international panel, and last week the Canadian Institute for Synchrotron Radiation approved the panel’s recommendation that the CLS be built in Saskatoon.

Of the $115-million required, the Universities of Saskatchewan and Alberta will contribute $22.7 million, including facilities; the province will provide $10.5 million, industry will chip in $4 million and the city of Saskatoon will ante up $1.2 million. The rest of the money will have to come from the federal government, something which as yet hasn’t been confirmed.

Assuming the feds do come through, the CLS will create 85 permanent jobs and draw several hundred scientists from all over the world every year–and help keep Canadian science and industry in the forefront of this exciting new field.

I can only see one downside. Just try saying “Saskatchewan synchrotron” very fast a dozen times in a row…and pity the province’s radio announcers.