Affiliates
| Works by
Robert J. Sawyer
(Writer)
[1960 - ] |
sawyer at sfwriter dot com
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Profile created May 27, 2009
Updated September 1, 2009
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Rollback
(2007) - Nominee 2008 Campbell Award;
Nominee 2008 Hugo Award
Dr. Sarah Halifax decoded the first-ever radio
transmission received from aliens. Thirty-eight years later, a second
message is received and Sarah, now 87, may hold the key to deciphering
this one, too . . . if she lives long enough.
A wealthy industrialist offers to pay for Sarah to have a rollback—a
hugely expensive experimental rejuvenation procedure. She accepts on
condition that Don, her husband of sixty years, gets a rollback, too. The
process works for Don, making him physically twenty-five again. But in a
tragic twist, the rollback fails for Sarah, leaving her in her eighties.
While Don tries to deal with his newfound youth and the suddenly vast age
gap between him and his wife, Sarah struggles to do again what she’d done
once before: figure out what a signal from the stars contains. Serialized in Analog.-
Mindscan
( 2005) -
Winner 2006 Campbell Award
Jake Sullivan has cheated death: he's discarded his doomed biological body
and copied his consciousness into an android form. The new Jake soon finds
love, something that eluded him when he was encased in flesh: he falls for
the android version of Karen, a woman rediscovering all the joys of life
now that she's no longer constrained by a worn-out body either.
But suddenly Karen's son sues her, claiming that by uploading into an
immortal body, she has done him out of his inheritance. Even worse, the
original version of Jake, consigned to die on the far side of the moon,
has taken hostages there, demanding the return of his rights of
personhood. In the courtroom and on the lunar surface, the future of
uploaded humanity hangs in the balance.
Mindscan is vintage Sawyer -- a feast for the mind and the heart.
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Calculating God
(2000) - 2001 Campbell Award nominee; 2001
Hugo Award nominee
An alien shuttle craft lands outside the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.
A six-legged, two-armed alien emerges and says, in perfect English, “Take
me to a paleontologist.”
In the distant past, Earth, the alien’s home planet, and the home planet
of another alien species, all experienced the same five cataclysmic events
at the same time (one example: the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs).
Both alien races believe this proves the existence of God: i.e., he’s
obviously been playing with the evolution of life on each of these
planets. From this provocative launch point, Sawyer tells a fast-paced,
morally and intellectually challenging story of ambitious scope and
touching humanity. Calculating God is SciFi on a grand scale.
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Factoring Humanity
(1998) - 1999 Hugo Award nominee
In the near future, a signal is detected coming from the Alpha Centauri
system. Mysterious, unintelligible data streams in for ten years. Heather
Davis, a professor in the University of Toronto psychology department, has
devoted her career to deciphering the message. Her estranged husband,
Kyle, is working on the development of artificial intelligence systems and
new computer technology utilizing quantum effects to produce a
near-infinite number of calculations simultaneously.
When Heather achieves a breakthrough, the message reveals a startling new
technology that rips the barriers of space and time, holding the promise
of a new stage of human evolution. In concert with Kyle's discoveries of
the nature of consciousness, the key to limitless exploration---or the end
of the human race---appears close at hand.
Sawyer has created a gripping thriller, a pulse-pounding tour of the
farthest reaches of technology.
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Flashforward
(Tor, 1999)
A scientific experiment begins, and as the button is
pressed, the unexpected occurs: everyone in the world goes to sleep for a
few moments while everyone's consciousness is catapulted more than twenty
years into the future. At the end of those moments, when the world
reawakens, all human life is transformed by foreknowledge.
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Frameshift
(1997) - 1998 Hugo Award nominee
This is the story of Pierre Tardivel, a scientist, and his complex battle
against deadly illness; an ex-Nazi war criminal still hiding in the US; a
crooked insurance company; and a plot to make Pierre and his wife the
victims of a bizarre genetic experiment. Sawyer juggles his plots smoothly
and gracefully, and never drops a ball. Frameshift is hard science fiction
at its best, full of complications and neat surprises.
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Starplex
(1996) - 1996 Nebula Award nominee; 1997 Hugo
Award nominee
Twenty years after the discovery of artificial wormholes launches Earth
space exploration to unforeseeable heights, Starplex Director Keith
Lansing investigates a mysterious vessel that soon threatens the station
with intergalactic war.-
The Terminal Experiment
(1995) - Winner 1996 Nebula Award;
1996 Hugo Award nominee.
To test his theories of immortality, Dr. Peter Hobson creates three
electronic clones of himself, who escape from his computer into the
international electronic matrix, where one of them begins to kill. Serialized as Hobson's Choice
in Analog Magazine. -
End of an Era
(1994)
Archaeologist Brandon Thackery and his rival Miles Klicks Jordan fulfill a
dinosaur lovers dream with historys first time-travel jaunt to the late
Mesozoic. Hoping to solve the extinction mystery, they find Earths gravity
is only half of its 21st century value and encounter dinosaurs that are
behaving very strangely. Could the slimy blue creatures from Mars have
something to do with both?-
Golden Fleece
(1990)
Aboard Argo, a colonization ship bound for Eta Cephei IV, people
are very close--there's no other choice. So when Aaron Rossman's ex-wife
dies in what seems to be a bizarre accident, everyone offers their
sympathy, politely keeping their suspicions of suicide to themselves. But
Aaron cannot simply accept her death. He must know the truth: Was it an
accident, or did she commit suicide? When Aaron discovers the truth behind
her death, he is faced with a terrible secret--a secret that could cost
him his life.
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Hominids
(2003) - Winner 2003 Hugo Award;
2003 Campbell Award nominee
Hominids
examines two unique species of people. We are
one of those species; the other is the Neanderthals of a parallel world
where they became the dominant intelligence. The Neanderthal civilization
has reached heights of culture and science comparable to our own, but with
radically different history, society and philosophy.
Ponter Boddit, a Neanderthal physicist, accidentally pierces the barrier
between worlds and is transferred to our universe. Almost immediately
recognized as a Neanderthal, but only much later as a scientist, he is
quarantined and studied, alone and bewildered, a stranger in a strange
land. But Ponter is also befriended—by a doctor and a physicist who share
his questing intelligence, and especially by Canadian geneticist Mary
Vaughan, a woman with whom he develops a special rapport.
Ponter’s partner, Adikor Huld, finds himself with a messy lab, a missing
body, suspicious people all around and an explosive murder trial. How can
he possibly prove his innocence when he has no idea what actually happened
to Ponter?
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Humans
(2003) - 2004 Hugo Award nominee
Robert J. Sawyer, the award-winning and bestselling writer, hits the peak
of his powers in Humans, the second book of The Neanderthal
Parallax, his trilogy about our world and parallel one in which it was
the Homo sapiens who died out and the Neanderthals who became the dominant
intelligent species. This powerful idea allows Sawyer to examine some of
the deeply rooted assumptions of contemporary human civilization
dramatically, by confronting us with another civilization, just as morally
valid, that has made other choices. In Humans, Neanderthal physicist
Ponter Boddit, a character you will never forget, returns to our world and
to his relationship with geneticist Mary Vaughan, as cultural exchanges
between the two Earths begin.
As we see daily life in another present-day world, radically different
from ours, in the course of Sawyer's fast-moving story, we experience the
bursts of wonder and enlightenment that are the finest pleasures of
science fiction. Humans is one of the best SF novels of the year,
and The Neanderthal Parallax is an SF classic in the making.
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Hybrids
(2003)
In the Hugo-Award winning Hominids, Robert J. Sawyer introduced a
character readers will never forget: Ponter Boddit, a Neanderthal
physicist from a parallel Earth who was whisked from his reality into ours
by a quantum-computing experiment gone awry - making him the ultimate
stranger in a strange land.
In that book and in its sequel, Humans, Sawyer showed us the
Neanderthal version of Earth in loving detail - a tour de force of
world-building; a masterpiece of alternate history.
Now, in Hybrids, Ponter Boddit and his Homo sapiens lover,
geneticist Mary Vaughan, are torn between two worlds, struggling to find a
way to make their star-crossed relationship work. Aided by banned
Neanderthal technology, they plan to conceive the first hybrid child, a
symbol of hope for the joining of their two versions of reality.
But after an experiment shows that Mary's religious faith - something
completely absent in Neanderthals - is a quirk of the neurological wiring
of Homo sapiens brains, Ponter and Mary must decide whether their child
should be predisposed to atheism or belief. Meanwhile, as Mary's Earth is
dealing with a collapse of its planetary magnetic field, her boss, the
enigmatic Jock Krieger, has turned envious eyes on the unspoiled Eden that
is the Neanderthal world . . .
Hybrids is filled to bursting with Sawyer's signature speculations about
alternative ways of being human, exploding our preconceptions of morality
and gender, of faith and love. His Neanderthal Parallax trilogy is a
classic in the making, and here he brings it to a stunning,
thought-provoking conclusion that's sure to make Hybrids one of the
most controversial books of the year.
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Far-Seer
(1992)
The Face of God is what every young saurian learns
to call the immense, glowing object which fills the night sky on the far
side of the world. Young Afsan is privileged, called to the distant
Capital City to apprentice with Saleed the court astrologer. Buth when the
time comes for Afsan to make his coming-of-age pilgrimage, to gaze upon
the Face of God, his world is changed forever- for what he sees will test
his faith... and may save his world from disaster!
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Fossil Hunter
(1993)
Toroca, the son of Afsan the Far-Seer and a geologist
searching for the rare metals needed to take his species to the stars,
discovers an artifact that may reveal the true origin of the dinosaurs.
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Foreigner
(1994)
In Far-Seer and Fossil Hunter, we met the
Quintaglios, a race of intelligent dinosaurs from Earth and learned of the
threat to their very existence. Now they must quickly advance from a
culture equivalent to our Renaissance to the point where they can leave
their planet.
While the Quintaglios rush to develop space travel, the discovery of a
second species of intelligent dinosaur rocks their most fundamental
beliefs. Meanwhile, blind Afsan -- the dinosaurian Galileo -- undergoes
the newfangled treatment of psychoanalysis, throwing everything he thought
he knew about his violent people into a startling new light.
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WWW: Wake (2009)
Caitlin Decter is young, pretty, feisty, a genius at
math—and blind. Still, she can surf the net with the best of them,
following its complex paths clearly in her mind. But Caitlin’s brain long
ago co-opted her primary visual cortex to help her navigate online. So
when she receives an implant to restore her sight, instead of seeing
reality, the landscape of the World Wide Web explodes into her
consciousness, spreading out all around her in a riot of colors and
shapes. While exploring this amazing realm, she discovers something—some
other—lurking in the background. And it’s getting more and more
intelligent with each passing day…
WWW: Watch
(April 6, 2010 release)
WWW: Wonder (Future release)
Biography: Robert J. Sawyer
(2007)
An article from: Contemporary Authors Online by Gale
Reference Team (Digital - HTML) -
Robert J. Sawyer
(2003)
A Biographical Essay from Gale's "Dictionary of Literary
Biography, Vol. 251, Canadian Fantasy and Science-Fiction Writers"
(Digital - PDF)
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