SOURCE: OTTAWA CITIZEN
Here’s something that tells you straight off that Robert J. Sawyer is a science-fiction author. He’s about to become the first writer-in-residence at Saskatoon’s Canadian Light Source synchrotron lab — not a place most people would associate with the literary world. For the uninitiated, the synchrotron is a type of particle accelerator, the sort of gizmo that wouldn’t seem out of place in the latest remake of Star Trek.
Genre writing is where the real money lies in publishing these days and Sawyer, a 48-year-old dervish of futuristic thinking and unabashed self-promotion, is turning a pretty penny from it.
“I like to say I’m not stinking rich, but I’m somewhat redolent,” Sawyer said in a telephone interview from his home in Mississauga.
ABC recently wrapped filming on the pilot for a new TV series based on Sawyer’s 1999 novel, Flash Forward, that features the likes of Joseph Fiennes and Courtney B. Vance in the cast. The show is already drawing early buzz, with The Hollywood Reporter declaring: “ABC might finally have launched a strong companion to Lost.”
If the show is picked up for the fall season, which seems likely, Sawyer will be getting paid more each week as a series story consultant than he received for the sale of his first novel, Golden Fleece, back in 1990. And that’s on top of the money he got for selling the original film rights.
“Hollywood, you can’t go wrong,” marvelled Sawyer, who estimates he’s made “hundreds of thousands of dollars” in film options off his books over the years.
One of only seven writers to win all three of the world’s top science fiction awards, Sawyer took home the Hugo Award in 2003 for his novel Hominids, the Nebula Award in 1996 for The Terminal Experiment and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 2006 for Mindscan.
In his latest novel Wake, which features a “Webmind” that is just becoming aware of the outside world. Sawyer turns the tables on the default assumption that this vast, globe-spanning intellect is a malevolent force.
“For 50 years now we have been inculcated by science fiction, so we have to take the blame for it as writers, I guess, that computers are inherently evil. Starting with HAL in 1968 (2001: A Space Odyssey), every computer that Captain Kirk every dealt with, The Matrix, the Terminator films … all of this stuff preaches that AI, artificial intelligence, is going to be humanity’s downfall,” Sawyer said.
“I’ve done my fair share of that myself in some of my earlier books. But I got to thinking about whether that was inevitably true. What I set out to do with this trilogy is to find a new synthesis, a way in which we can retain our essential individuality, humanity and freedom without any longer being the most intelligent beings on the planet.”
It’s not a dystopian vision he’s pursuing, Sawyer said, but a new utopian one.
“It’s inevitable that we’re going to face things this century that are brighter than us so we’ve got to start thinking about ways that we can make that work for us, instead of sort of throwing up our hands.”
| Submit Scoop | [−] |
0 comments