It’s safe to say that Robert J. Sawyer loves being a sci-fi writer. In fact, his license plate literally reads “SF Writer.”
But when he was diagnosed with an incurable cancer, he worried that the treatment, known to cause brain fog, would make it impossible to continue writing.
“There’s nothing that I can do that gives me joy, or for a living, other than being a writer,” he said on an episode of Bookends with Mattea Roach.
“To lose that identity, really, I thought that would be losing me.”
Conversations with his friends and family, however, gave him an epiphany: there are other ways to define himself than being an author.
“It’s so important to me being a writer, and yet, if I couldn’t do it anymore, I could still have a meaningful life for whatever time I have left.”
Luckily, Sawyer made it into remission without experiencing brain fog — and has since written two more books.
In The Downloaded 2: Ghosts in the Machine, Sawyer grapples with the questions he faced when confronting his own mortality. The novel is set in a world where characters can upload their minds into a computer while their bodies are cryogenically frozen, waiting in suspended sleep.
Sawyer joined Roach on Bookends to discuss the philosophical questions that inform his science fiction and why he thinks science and religion are more closely linked than you’d think.
This conversation has been edited and condensed. Interview produced by Lisa Matthews.
These themes — about consciousness, about mortality, about what makes us us — are things you’ve been thinking about for a long time, even before you had to confront some of those questions in an existential way yourself. Where do you think that interest began for you initially?
When I was a teenager in the 1970s, there was a show called The Six Million Dollar Man, about somebody who is half man, half machine. This was kind of in the zeitgeist — that we had reached a point where just because you were getting old or you were having a cognitive impairment, that technology was going to be able to get you past that. As a science fiction writer, that’s just catnip. It’s story ideas.
My characters in The Downloaded 2: Ghosts in the Machine are uploaded and then downloaded again.
I never had this desire to be anything other than homo sapiens, a normal human being.– Robert J. Sawyer
I’d never been intrigued personally about doing these things. So even when [during my treatment, they proposed all these] technological things, including an autologous (meaning from my own body) stem cell transplant — which is science fiction right there — I thought, “Oh, well, that’s kind of cool, and the health plan is covering it, so I’ll go for it.”
But I never had this desire to be anything other than homo sapiens, a normal human being.
You wrote The Downloaded novels as you were undergoing cancer treatment, and you actually gave one of the characters in these novels the exact same cancer that you’ve been living with. What were you able to explore by talking about this in fiction that maybe you were exploring differently or couldn’t explore in real life right now?
I gave one of the characters the same disease, but 20 years before I got the disease, when it [would have been] an absolute death sentence.
This gentleman’s only option was either to die or to try this cryogenic suspension. So it was very much me working out the existential questions that I was grappling with and magnifying it — as one does in fiction. You magnify whatever your own little tragedies are. I magnified it to the point where he didn’t have any options: there was no treatment.
When I was diagnosed, they said, “We can put you into remission for X number of years and then you’ll die.” And now they’re saying, “We can put you into remission and when it comes [back], we have new treatments and hopefully [you] live long enough to stay ahead of the cancer research curve.
That was my option, but not my character’s option. It let me really, as one also wants to do in fiction, make the choice very stark.
One thing that you’ve alluded to throughout this conversation is that technology can reach a point of feeling almost mystical, beyond human comprehension, in the same way that spiritual things feel beyond human comprehension. At one point, you have a child character in these novels who imagines a quantum computer almost as God. What connections do you see between science and religion?
Stephen Jay Gould, a paleontologist and one of my idols growing up, wrote a book where he said that science and religion are non-overlapping magisteria. They have nothing to do with each other.
And I thought, “No, that is wrong.” They are two different ways of interrogating the biggest questions. If they’re looking at the same questions — where did we come from? Why are we here? Is there anything after we’re gone? — then they obviously are related.
I was lucky enough to win the Nebula Award, which is the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America’s award for best novel, in 1996 for a book called The Terminal Experiment. [It] was about a biomedical engineer who discovered scientific proof of the existence of God.
Throughout my career, I’ve dealt with the science and religion dialogue. In fact, one of the things I’m most proud of is that the University of Winnipeg gave me an honorary doctorate sponsored jointly by the Dean of Science and the Emeritus Dean of Religion, because I’ve engaged throughout my career with science and religion dialogue.
I finally became a top 10 best seller in this country … when Tom Harpur, the religion columnist for the Toronto Star, devoted one of his columns to a novel of mine called Calculating God. And suddenly, I went from selling like a genre fiction writer to a top 10 national bestseller.
It was because he said, “Wow, here’s a science fiction novel that is dealing with philosophical and theological questions without sneering at them.”
Is there a sentiment among people that maybe they think literature should always be philosophical and serious? Do they feel sometimes that science fiction sneers at those questions?
There’s a tendency for people to think of science fiction as atheist literature.
I have some colleagues who are very devout Muslim, Christian, Jews, Hindus, but by and large, there’s this feeling that by the time we get to our technological utopia, we’ll have dispensed with any need for the spiritual and for the numinous. It just simply seems implausible to me as a science fiction writer.
We have been a religious people since the dawn of homo sapiens 200,000 years ago. The idea that in decades, or even a few centuries, we’re going to have what some of my hard science fiction colleagues would say is the final epiphany, that it’s all rational and there’s nothing supernatural, I don’t think that’s ever going to happen to homo sapiens. And so I embrace that in my work. I’m a non-believer, but I respect those who look at things with a different lens than I do.
