Robert J. Sawyer (edit name/settings)

Robert James Sawyer is a Canadian science fiction writer. His short fiction has appeared in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Amazing Stories, On Spec, Nature, and many anthologies. Sawyer has won over forty awards for his fiction, including the Nebula Award (1995), the Hugo Award (2003), and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award (2006).

Sawyer was born in Ottawa and is now a resident of Mississauga.

Sawyer's work frequently explores the intersection between science and religion, with rationalism frequently winning out over mysticism (see especially Far-Seer, The Terminal Experiment, Calculating God, and the three volumes of the Neanderthal Parallax <Hominids, Humans, and Hybrids>, plus the short story "The Abdication of Pope Mary III," originally published in Nature, July 6, 2000).

He has a great fondness for paleontology, as evidenced in his Quintaglio Ascension trilogy (Far-Seer, Fossil Hunter, and Foreigner), about an alien world to which dinosaurs from Earth were transplanted, and his time-travel novel End of an Era. In addition, the main character of Calculating God is a paleontologist, Wake features a chase scene at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, and the Neanderthal Parallax novels deal with an alternate version of Earth where Neanderthals did not become extinct.

Sawyer often explores the notion of copied or uploaded human consciousness, most fully in his novel Mindscan, but also in Flashforward, Golden Fleece, The Terminal Experiment, "Identity Theft", "Biding Time", and "Shed Skin".

His interest in consciousness studies is also apparent in Wake, which deals with the spontaneous emergence of consciousness in the infrastructure of the World Wide Web. His interest in quantum physics, and especially quantum computing, inform the short stories "You See But You Do Not Observe" (a Sherlock Holmes pastiche) and "Iterations," and the novels Factoring Humanity and Hominids.

SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, plays a role in the plots of Golden Fleece, Factoring Humanity, Mindscan, Rollback, the novelette "Ineluctable," and the short stories "You See But You Do Not Observe" and "Flashes." Sawyer gives cosmology a thorough workout in his far-future Starplex.

Real-life science institutions are often used as settings by Sawyer, including TRIUMF in End of an Era, CERN in Flashforward, the Royal Ontario Museum in Calculating God, the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory in Hominids and its sequels, the Arecibo Observatory in Rollback and the Perimeter Institute in the WWW Trilogy.

Another Sawyer hallmark is the mortally ill main character. Pierre Tardivel in Frameshift suffers from Huntington's disease, Thomas Jericho in Calculating God has lung cancer, and Jacob Sullivan in Mindscan has an arteriovenous malformation in his brain; one of the main characters in Rollback vividly suffers from that most fatal illness of all, old age. Sawyer nonetheless is known for tales that end on an upbeat, and even transcendent, note.

Sawyer is unusual even among Canadian SF writers for the blatantly Canadian settings and concerns addressed in his novels, all of which are issued by New York houses. His politics are often described as liberal by Canadian standards (although he contributed a story called "The Hand You're Dealt" to the Libertarian SF anthology Free Space, and another called "The Right's Tough" to the Libertarian SF anthology Visions of Liberty). He holds citizenship in both Canada and the United States, and has been known to criticize the politics of both countries. He often has American characters visiting Canada (such as Karen Bessarian in Mindscan and Caitlin Decter in Wake) or Canadian characters visiting the U.S. (such as Pierre Tardivel in Frameshift and Mary Vaughan in Humans and Hybrids) as a way of comparing and contrasting the perceived values of the two countries.

Sawyer's style is simple, with clear prose, that Orson Scott Card compared to that of Isaac Asimov. He has a tendency to include pop-culture references in his novels (his fondness for the original Star Trek, The Six Million Dollar Man, and Planet of the Apes is impossible to miss).