Robert J. Sawyer with just a few of his many awards.
Quick Links
8. Utopia attainable?
9. “We can’t possibly afford a manned space program to Mars, because we have to spend all this money on war.”
10. Civil rights > flying cars.
11. Calculating God, and calculating atheism.
12. Why nobody is buying what the New Atheists are selling.
13. Staring into the vastness of the universe.
14. Voluminous research.
LG: So on the point of empathy, then: How do we achieve that kind of understanding and empathy with our fellow human beings? Is utopianism or optimism simply a nice sentiment but unrealistic? Does realism necessarily have to involve pessimism or cynicism? The Star Trek future that I dreamt of as a teenager… is it attainable?
RJS: I think it is attainable. I think, in fact, the single greatest thing that Canada has to offer the world is an example of a multicultural society that mostly works, that mostly celebrates that multiculturalism, where people aren’t asked—the way they are in the United States—to give up where they came from and who they were, but instead to bring it and enrich us, so that we have things like Caribana in Toronto and Carassauga in Mississauga. All of these things are celebrations of the fact that we do have an ability to appreciate and celebrate all the diversity that is the human species. It won’t happen overnight, but it is inexorably what is happening. You go to countries that 50 years ago were ethnically undifferentiated, and you now find the incredible rainbow of human faces everywhere. I am optimistic about the future.
LG: The novel is very clearly anti-war. There’s a lot in here about the trauma of violence. Was the anti-war sentiment a part of how the novel got its start or did it emerge in some other way, perhaps while doing your research?
RJS: No, it was definitely there very early on in the process. I went to Washington, D.C. when I was writing the novel. And every time I go there, I go to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. It’s actually a funny name for it, because the memorial lists the names of all the people who died—veterans are normally thought of as people who survived. And it goes on for 50,000-plus names, incised in black stone, of people who died in a pointless, stupid war. It is actually one of the few really good war memorials.
And yet, President Bush started new wars for the United States; he wanted to be a wartime president. And the horrific mistreatment—not just under Bush, but really going right back to Vietnam—by the United States of its veterans very much sticks in the back of my mind.
My mother is an American. My parents met at the University of Chicago, where they were both graduate students. And the deal between them was whoever got the better job after graduation, they would move to wherever that job was. My dad happened to be from Toronto, and he got a job in Ottawa, so we moved to Ottawa and that’s where I was born. But I’m a dual citizen.
In 1980, when the United States reactivated Selective Service, which is their doublespeak for the draft, I had to go to the US Consulate in Toronto and register because I was the right age group, and I could’ve been drafted to go to Afghanistan back then. Fortunately, I was already in Canada. But if things had gone differently, if my either of my parents had gotten a better job in the States, I would have grown up there. And I, my brothers, and my cousins could all have been potentially involved in the Vietnam War and the subsequent American wars, without wanting to be. So I’m often conscious of that alternative reality, where my name, or more likely—because I’m a little young for it—my older brother’s name would’ve been one of those names in black marble.
And the ridiculousness of these wars just destroys the soul. Not just me, but of the whole species. We’re fighting, and killing, and accomplishing nothing. And it’s horrible. All of my fiction is pacifist; whenever I write about war, it’s anti-war. It’s crushing for me as a science-fiction guy, to see the public debate in the United States being:
“Oh, we can’t possibly afford a manned space program to Mars.”
“Why not?”
“Because we have to spend all this money on war!”
It’s horrible for the soul of the American people, actually, that they do that; that their best and brightest scientists, engineers and so forth don’t have noble pursuits to go into. They can go into military industrial complexes and the organized war effort, or they can go into entertainment arts or something, but you can’t go to the Moon, you can’t go to Mars, you can’t go to the stars—that’s no longer part of what’s available. And that’s such a change in my lifetime for what was on offer for the best and the brightest. It’s a horrible step backwards.
LG: Let’s shift gears a bit. You’ve been called a futurist, a title that comes with the job of being a writer of speculative fiction. What do you think of the disparity between the present day and the future promised to us by pop culture in the ’50s and ’60s—flying cars and that sort of thing? What predictions do you see for the future?
RJS: First I want to say that we live in the best time that’s ever been. The vast majority of us in the Western world have freedom of thought, movement, and belief—or lack thereof. We live healthy lives, we’re not prey to all the diseases that used to result in most children dying. We’re warm when we want to be warm, we’re cool when we want to be cool, we have plenty of entertainment, plenty of variety in what we eat—it’s hard to comprehend how privileged we are, compared to all of the human beings who existed in previous generations. We are enormously comfortable.
In my lifetime, I saw struggles for civil rights and gender equality, and now we’re close to the end, I’m convinced, of the struggle for gender orientation rights. Despite Rick Santorum and all the rhetoric you hear in the Republican primaries, the tide has turned. There’s no question now, that gay and lesbian lifestyles are accepted and are becoming more so every day, and that’s wonderful. Even my particular minority, atheists, are getting to come out of the closet, and not be vilified or run out of town.
Although it’s true that as much as they hate having a black man in the Oval Office, most Republicans would hate having a self-declared atheist in there even more. I’m sure there have been numerous atheist presidents in the past, but they were just required to posture in a certain way, just as, for a long time, leading men were required to posture in the movies. Rock Hudson felt that to be a leading man, he had to hide his homosexuality. Zachary Quinto is gay, and who cares? It’s the answer to a trivia question. It’s simply irrelevant to us.
We didn’t get flying cars, but they probably were never a safe idea to begin with. And we didn’t get food in pills, but that would’ve taken away the joy of eating. But what we did get is a world where the United States went from segregation to a black president in 50 years.
This is the best the world has ever been. It got better in the blink of an eye. It’s got a long way to go, but the momentum behind progressive social change is so powerful, that I think clearly the best is yet to come.
LG: You mentioned atheists in that response, and that’s something that I wanted to bring up. When Calculating God came out in 2000, I was 24 and still in the process of seriously questioning everything. Your novel was one of the works that got me to think deeply about the subject—it helped me immensely in my own journey towards atheism. That and George Carlin—he’s fantastic.
RJS: Oh he is, he is.
LG: So for one, thanks for that, it was very helpful.
RJS: You’re welcome.
LG: So you’ve already identified as an atheist, but I’m curious as to what brought you towards it. I mean, was it a matter of upbringing?
RJS: My mother is a Unitarian and my father is a non-practicing Anglican, but I was certainly brought up in a mostly secular environment. And it is a well-documented reality that almost all people are whatever religion their parents are. You don’t choose to become a Baptist, or a Jew, or a Muslim, or a Hindu, or a Catholic, or you name it—you are born into that, just as you are born into a nationality. And though there are people who change their nationalities as their lives go by, they are the vast, vast minority. The same thing is true for religion: if you’re brought up devoutly, you end up being devout; if you’re brought up secularly, you end up being secular. So that reality was one I was very conscious of: that I was who I was because of what my parents were.
When I set out to write Calculating God, I said to myself that I was tired of straw-man arguments, and I wanted to find the best—not the worst—arguments for God’s existence. I mean, the Holocaust is one of the worst arguments for God’s existence: “If God exists, how come the Holocaust happened?” “Well, we have to have free will.” Well, as one of my characters says, there are times when free will is not the most important thing. And a god who thinks free will is more important than preventing slaughter is not a god I’m congruent with and would feel any desire to worship as my superior.
But I wrote Calculating God to find the best arguments that each side put forward. And I have two really likeable people, one on each side, arguing their cases, and then I leave it at the end, basically as an exercise for the reader. Because if all you’ve heard are silly arguments about something and then you decide, “Well, that’s not for me”—you haven’t made an informed choice.
I know lots of religious people who are intelligent, questioning, curious, and thoughtful. And an important part of my growing up was to recognize that such people could exist, because I had always thought that it was impossible to be intelligent, inquisitive, thoughtful, scientifically literate, and be religious. And then lo and behold, you discover that actually there are a lot of people who are. Well why are they? And rather than approaching it from a position of arrogance—which is “They must be wrong and they must be stupid”—I wanted to explore why they felt the way they felt.
LG: So what do you think of the New Atheists?
RJS: I part company with the radical extreme of the atheist movement. They have no conception of how much damage they do to themselves through the pugnacious, vitriolic tone of their books. They’re great writers, but the only people who are reading them are atheists, so they accomplish nothing.
If you want something about atheism, the best thing to get is the audio program Letting Go of God, by Julia Sweeney, because she is never once disdainful or scornful. She was brought up as a religious person and realized as an adult that she had to let go of that faith in the face of rationalism. It, I think, changes peoples’ minds. She covers all of the arguments that Dawkins covers in The God Delusion, without once making a believer feel like they’re being belittled or treated like an idiot. Brilliant stuff.
One of the things that a lot of religions teach is humility. Not a lot of teaching of humility amongst atheists. I think you can be good without God, but you can also be humble. Looking up at the night sky can—if you’re disposed in a certain way—make you feel closer to God, and that might make you feel humbled to be beholding greatness. And if you’re not disposed that way, it can make you feel humble because you’re recognizing how small you are and how much wonder there is that is indifferent to your existence. Either way, a dose of humility does one good.
LG: A few summers ago, the family spent a week at a cottage. And we were walking on the beach at night coming back from dinner with my cousins, and it was a pitch black, clear night. And I said to my youngest sister, as we looked out at the sky over the ocean: “Look at that—you’re staring into the rest of the universe right now. Think about that. You’re standing in the shadow of the planet, and you’re looking at everything there is.” And it blew her mind.
RJS: Oh, absolutely. And the more you know about it, the more wonderful it is. Here’s something else to consider: when you’re looking all of those incredible numbers of star systems, you’re also looking back in time, because the light has taken time to reach you. When you look at the Andromeda Galaxy, you’re looking back in time 2 million years because it’s 2 million light years away. Two million years! You’ve got to get outside of Mississauga to see it, but you get out to the Kawarthas on a nice summer night and you can see it. It’s right below Cassiopeia, very easy to spot.
And knowing that it’s 2 million years old is mind-blowing. And knowing that it’s another galaxy, in fact a galaxy that’s larger than our galaxy, is also mind-blowing. And the only way something 2 million light-years away could be visible to the naked eye is because it is in fact, so incredibly gigantic in size. There’s just nothing better than looking at the night sky to awaken the sense of wonder in a human being.
If you go anywhere in the southern hemisphere, or even the southern tip of Florida, you can see Alpha Centauri, the closest star besides the sun—that one’s only 4.3 light-years away. But that’s amazing—that’s the nearest other star. And yet, that’s what it looked like in 2007, 4.3 years ago, not what it looks like right now. It could be gone, it could be destroyed. We don’t know, we won’t know. The sun could be destroyed right now and it won’t be eight minutes before we would know, because that’s how far away it is: eight light-minutes.
LG: You do months of research for your novels, which, as a writer of hard science-fiction, is to be expected. That said, aside from New Scientist—which is mentioned in Triggers—what other science magazines do you recommend? Which ones produce good, credible science news?
RJS: We have this whole industry, actually, of making science accessible to the public through things like Discovery Channel and their program Daily Planet, magazines like New Scientist, Scientific American, Discover, Astronomy, Sky & Telescope, American Scientist, Sky News (the Canadian one) for astronomy… all of those are marvellous, and I skim them all to keep abreast of what’s new and exciting. I’m also lucky enough at this point—21 years a novelist, 31 years a science-fiction writer—that scientists will send me e-mails saying “Did you know about this? Here’s a paper, here’s a link, this is exciting, you should be aware of it,” and that’s an important part of it.
But you know, I write books, and so I’m naturally predisposed to books. For example, in Triggers, the character of the White House physician appears briefly. So I read The White House Doctor, by Connie Mariano [her memoirs], so I could write exactly what it’s like to be the White House physician. This book, Memory: From Mind to Molecules by Eric Kandel, Nobel prize–winner for his research into the chemical nature of memory, was a hugely significant book, about how memory actually works on a chemical basis, from the guy who actually knows how it works because he discovered how it works. This one, Synaptic Self, by Joseph LeDoux, is all about how the structures in our brains give rise to personality. I read tons of books about the US Secret Service, so that I could write authoritatively about that.
And of course, going to Washington and actually figuring out the assassination attempt was also essential. I’d been to the Lincoln Memorial a few times and had not really been conscious of the fact that there’s an elevator that comes up out of view in the chamber. I thought wow, that’s cool—that’s probably a security hole. So I made use of that.
And the beauty of it is that, for a writer, all books are research and all books are tax-deductible, so I always have an order coming in from chapters.indigo.ca. Once a week, books show up with whatever I need. Even though I happen to live close to the magnificent Mississauga Central Library—it’s one of the reasons I chose this location.
Leo Graziani 