Interview with Robert J. Sawyer on his novel The Downloaded

Hi, Patrick. I'm delighted to be here. Thanks for having me.

I'm a huge science fiction fan, and it has to do with when I was born. I was born in 1960. So, the backdrop of my first decade of life was the American effort to put a person on the moon: Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo. And that real life background that my generation was going to go into space absolutely captivated me. In fact, I had a great children's book called You Will Go To the Moon, and the final frame of that children's book, the writer was named Ira Freeman, is a picture of a guy on the moon looking at Mars in the lunar sky and saying, “that's where you're going to go next.” I read that when I was five or six years old and was captivated.

image credit: Boon,PJJ, CC BY-SA 4.0 Deed, WikiMedia, Thunderbirds, de belangrijkste figuren, speelgoed.jpg

Gerry Anderson, the great British science fiction puppeteer, famous for his supermarionation series such as Supercar, Fireball XL5, Stingray, Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons and most famously of all Thunderbirds were also all airing in the 1960s. And I was captivated by them. In 1966 Star Trek premiered when my parents were both liberal university academics and didn't want me playing with guns or watching violent TV shows. Man from U.N.C.L.E. was out, Mission Impossible was out. Even The Wild Wild West, can't watch that. But, Star Trek, they let my older brother watch it and I snuck down and in 1967, just days before my seventh birthday, saw my first Star Trek episode. The first time it aired The Devil in the Dark, the one with the Horta. And I was absolutely thrilled, absolutely captivated. The following year, 1968, my dad took me to see 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Now I mentioned up front I was born in 1960. If your birthdate starts in a zero, even when you're eight years old, the math is easy. 2001, okay, I'm going to be 41 when that's my reality. They're promising me and my dad sitting next to me, as I said, he was an academic, had children a little bit later in life because he was getting a PhD. So dad, how old is he? He's 43. Before I'm as old as dad, we're going to have, I was told, promised by Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick that we would have interplanetary crewed missions, we would have orbiting hotels, we would have a city on the moon, we would have cryogenic suspension for astronauts, and we would have true artificial intelligence.

Now as it turned out, 2001, we had none of those things, but the promise. And I think it was so significant to me what that date was. If it had just been called, as they were originally going to call it, “Journey Beyond the Stars,” or even just “A Space Odyssey,” I don't think it would've had the effect on me. But that promissory note in the title, by the time I'm 41, younger than my dad was at the time he took me to the film, this would be my reality. Well, I have to get on board. I got to devote my life to exploring and preparing for the future and a science fiction reader fan and ultimately writer was born.

a communication satellite

Budget is the issue.

Dreamers like Arthur C. Clark and like Gene Roddenberry never really constrained their imaginations by thinking about what will these things cost and who will want to pay for them. I think they both were naive in a sense that so many of us who are space buffs are in thinking that the whole world, the 3 billion people that were alive when Arthur C. Clark wrote 2001, the 8 billion that are alive today have at the top of our agenda going to explore space.

In fact, it's so far down the public agenda, and rightly so. Ending poverty, eliminating climate change, all these things should be more important. They are not necessarily always, but they should be right up at the front. But all thought, oh yeah, it doesn't matter that just any one of those miracles, the wheel shaped two level orbiting Space Station Five that we saw in 2001, meaning they were at least four others of these puppies, the city on the moon, Clavius Base, and the Russians having their own city, though we don’t see it, it’s just referenced.

All of this costs not thousands, not billions, but trillions of dollars. And we all thought, yeah, we're just blithely going to spend humanity's money that way. Well, it turned out, of course, no, sadly we spent way too much of it in the intervening period on war instead of on positive things. But nonetheless, just the reality that Clark and Gene Roddenberry with his fleet of faster than light spaceships, star fleet portrayed was just never going to be the agenda for human beings. It was only going to be an agenda for aficionados.

Hundred percent. It is au courant now to write dystopia. It is by far the most common form of science fiction and in a really interesting commentary on our society by far, the most common format of YA, young adult, fiction and science fiction.

We have a generation growing up, the first generation really in the last few centuries to be able to look at their parents and say, I am not going to have it better off than they did. Every other generation. I lived on a street that was built, literally built – the asphalt, laid the house – built by refugees from World War 2, and they were all working backbreaking, hard jobs. These men who were the parents of my kids that I was playing with on the street because they were making a better life for their kids. They didn't get to university, they didn't get to do what they wanted to do with their lives or doing hard manual labor, but they at least got out of the hellhole that was World War II Europe, and they knew they were doing everything for their kids.

I'm one of those kids, and I had a very privileged life in many ways, more advantage than either of my parents who lived through the Great Depression had, for instance. But I don't have any kids, but I look at the kids of my friends who are saying, oh, “dad had a career. I don't even know if I'm going to have a job next year.” Dad enjoyed a beautiful world. The world has fallen apart literally on fire all over the globe, literally burning. And the government, the officials, the business are saying, what are you going to do? Right? And we're not doing anything about it. So this dystopian mode is absolutely the default mode of science fiction these days.

I don't know if it's that I've always been a contrarian. I happen to be wearing, we're doing mostly audio here, but I lift my leg for the YouTube clip – I'm wearing blue jeans. All through my childhood I would not wear blue jeans. I refused to conform. I've always been a contrarian. And so it's ironic that the contrarian position today is being upbeat and optimistic about the future. But hell's bells, I still have faith in humanity. Why I don't know, faith is, as Archie Bunker said, “You know what faith is? That's when you believe something that nobody in their right mind would believe. That's what faith is.” Well, I have faith in humanity for no good reason, but still believe that we're going to turn it around in that Roddenberry-esque and Clark-ian sense and make a better tomorrow than what we have any evidence for today.

No, no. You're exactly right. And I once had a family member who literally worked fast food, countered a fast-food joint, say to me, well, you don't have a real job. Fury! Fury! That was my face for those who are listening in audio. I mean furious face there for a second.

And I once had my mother call me and–. For the last, I've been lucky for the last almost 30 years, my wife has worked full-time for me as my salaried assistant. My business has done sufficiently well that I needed an employee. She's my employee. I have a corporation. She actually works for my company. But before that, my mother called, used to call during the day. My mother's passed away, but she used to call during the day and ask me questions that were actually related to my wife, my mother and my wife were going to go do something. So, I said, “mom, why are you calling me? Why don't you call Carolyn?” who had a day job then. And she said, “Oh, well, she's at work.”

“Well, so am I!” I said to my mother as I'm typing away on my novels. Right.

It's ironic that the contrarian position today is being upbeat and optimistic about the future.

So yeah, it was contrarian. And my father was a statistical economist. He taught economics at the University of Toronto, and I had planned an academic career. I was going to become a vertebrate paleontologist. My still great passion is dinosaurs for me. I was accepted to study that at the University of Toronto, had a place in residence at the University of Toronto, all set to go. And then I said to my dad, “I'm going to become a writer instead.”

And back in the day, didn't have home computers. Almost nobody had any kind of computer, maybe a few people in Commodore 64 or something. My dad went to the University of Toronto mainframe, tied into the database of Statistics Canada, which is the government Statistics bureau here in my country, got on tractor feed paper, a printout of the average incomes of writers in Canada for the last 30 years, and just left that tractor, never said a word, at my place at the table for breakfast one day. Because what he was saying was, of course, that's ridiculous, Rob, you were going to have an academic career.

And the irony was, again, he was thinking in his mindset, his academic career, very straightforward as it was for most academics of that generation. You get your bachelor's, you get your master's, you get your PhD, you become an associate professor, an assistant professor, a full professor. You get tenure if you're lucky, as my dad did become professor emeritus, you retire with enormously good index pension. That career doesn't exist anymore. My friends, my cohort people born in 1960s and later are struggling with multiple sessional instruction jobs. Tenure is the unicorn that nobody ever gets anymore.

But my dad thought, “no, no, my son is not going to make that mistake of becoming a writer. He should be an academic.”

And in fact, of course, it turned out exactly the opposite, that I had a wonderfully fulfilling writing career. And my friends who went down the academic path are still many of them going from sessional instruction: you get paid by the course. One of my wife's best friends, Heli, teaches sessional instruction, and they don't tell you until 72 hours before the course begins, whether there's enough enrollment. In other words, you have to block off those weeks of teaching, taking no other job. But the university or the college has the option of saying at extension the last minute, oh, I know you didn't take another job. I know you kept those weeks free. I know, but we're not going to offer it and you get no compensation. So being a writer turned out to be the right financial business career choice as well as of course being enormously creatively fulfilling for me.

I think all writers always, until the day they die, unless they're super arrogant, suffer from imposter syndrome. And I do to some point myself, you mentioned I've won a lot of awards. As I'm sitting here, I'm looking into my work computer, well, behind my work computer on the far wall there is my trophy case. I'm won over 60 writing awards, six zero writing awards, and they're there to remind me – and show off to my friends when they come – so that when I'm looking at this screen thinking I can't possibly do this, and I can look up a little bit, oh yeah, Hugo, Nebula, maybe I can do this. Right?

But for me, the moment you described happened in April of 1996. I was on the Queen Mary, the Great Luxury Boat, which is permanently docked in Los Angeles and used as a venue for all kinds of events. It was being used by the science fiction and fantasy writers of America that year for the Nebula Award banquet. And I won the Nebula Award for best novel of the year for my novel, The Terminal Experiment. And my editor from Harper Prism, which is a defunct imprint of Harper Collins, their brief science fiction imprint, turned to me at the table and said, “You have gone overnight from being a promising newcomer to an established bankable name because of that Nebula Award.”

I mean, I didn't define the moment, but somebody who was an industry insider said, here it is. This is the moment that defines that for you. And it was indeed at that moment, it was shortly thereafter that my wife came to work for me full time. I've never had any economic concerns since that point, but there were certainly leading up to that point.

image credit: MadEye Moody, public domain, WikiMedia,

I bought my first computer in 1983, December of 83, realized soon after that I needed to have a printer. So in January of 84, got to get a printer, had to get a daisy wheel printer, if you remember them, before laser printers. Editors weren't accepting matrix because it was hard on their eyes. Daisy wheel would do indistinguishable from an IBM selector typewriter quality print. And so Carolyn and I ate tomato soup for an entire month because I needed to save every penny to get the $650 in 1984 dollars to pay for that printer. So yeah, there was a moment, and as I say, John Douglas defined that moment for me, it was winning the Nebula.

And the hour!

Yeah. And I got to say, sadly, John, this is one of the sad things about being in the business so long. John has passed away. My previous editor, Brian Thompson has passed away. My editor who was my editor after John, David G Hartwell, has passed away. The editor who gave me my real start in magazine publishing, Patrick Lucian Price at Amazing Stories, has passed away. It's great to look back on a career and knowing that all these fine gentlemen, and there were some very fine ladies too, by the way, who fortunately have all still survived. I'm not enumerating them, but Susan Allison, Ginger Buchanan, Adrian Ker, so on and so forth, we're lucky enough that they're still with us. But after 40 years, you look back and think, oh my God, I'm still standing. But so many of the people that I would love to be able to thank once more and maybe look back fondly on these memories with have left us.

And that's even in The Downloaded, by the way, which of course is my most recent book. It started as an audio production for Audible in a six-month window where they had it exclusively, and now it's out in ebook and print. Well, the Audible production was directed and produced by Gregory J Sinclair, who had been the head of radio drama at the CBC. And I know Greg for 20 years been friends. He just passed away, and the Audible production of The Downloaded was the last thing he ever did. So even right now, every time I look around, I'm struck by the mortality of human beings.

One of the themes of my hard science fiction decade after decade has been defeating death in one way or another through life prolongation, through like in The Downloaded, cryonics, through uploaded consciousness, also in The Downloaded. And yet, every time I turn around, somebody who is dear and near to me and pivotal in our industry, has shuffled off this mortal coil. It's a very sobering thought.

It's an epistolary story, or a series of first-person narratives. Originally, it's ironic, Audible wanted fully immersive drama. Like I would write any novel, multiple characters in the scenes. And we were all set to do that. I was working on developing the project. And then Audible, I got a call from Audible, me and the director, Greg, and they said, flag on the play, gentlemen. COVID-19, our COVID safety coordinators here at Audible are saying, “We cannot allow more than one actor in studio at a time.” We'll have the actor, Greg, you're going to direct by Zoom. You're not going to be in the studio with them. Rob, you of course attend by Zoom, not in the studio with them. The only expendable guy is the audio engineer, and hey, they're a dime a dozen at Audible. We've got lots of those. So there's an Audible audio engineer and an actor. And I thought, how are we going to do this? I said to Greg, “I'm stumped.”

And Greg Sinclair said one word, just like William Daniels in the movie The Graduate who says to Dustin Hoffman, “One word young man, plastics.” Well, “One word,” Greg says, “Rashomon.” Rashomon, is the title of a film by Kurosawa based on a pair of short stories by a Japanese writer named Akutagawa. And I have to admit, film buff that I am, I had never seen Rashomon. But nonetheless I watched it. Brilliant piece of filmmaking. I watched the American remake that nobody remembers, called The Outrage, starring among others, William Shatner, which I actually enjoyed more. And went and read the Akutagawa short stories.

And of course, the shtick is, it's a series of individual narrations, to an unseen judge or panel of judges, who are passing judgment on the veracity and the character of the people who are making the narration.

And once Greg said that it snapped into place for me. Yeah, this is how to do it. So, it was not so much per-se that we were going to do an audio production. Never had any constraints originally. But the COVID-19 restriction on the audible production, shaped the form of the narrative of The Downloaded.

There are nine different first person narrators, which is quite a challenge for writers. A juggling act.

I've done first person narration books before. One of my most famous is Calculating God, it's all first person, or mostly except for a subplot that's in third act. And that's a normal thing, one first person narrator in a book. Nine? Very interesting. You have to make sure the voices are very distinct so that the reader never loses track.

Obviously, in the audio production, they can tell whether it's Academy Award winner Brendan Fraser doing one of the voices, or Emmy Award winner, Luke Kirby doing one of the voices, or Dora Mavor Moore Award winner, Vanessa Sears doing one of the voices or Canadian Screen Award winners, Andrew Fung or Colm Feore doing the voices. You can tell because their voices are different. I have to make that thing we ineffably call “voice” on the page be just as different in the print version of The Downloaded. I like to think I succeeded.

You could go back and listen to it now, absolutely. I'm very happy with both versions, but always I intended to write a novel. And so for me, the quintessential perfection, Aristotelian whole ideal of what this was supposed to be, is the book, The Downloaded. The print version or the ebook version, obviously the text is the same.

Yes. So yes, I got very sick during COVID. I got COVID twice, but I also got very sick. Sick another way, too.

It cost me a couple of years of productivity. But, I'm fine. You can see right now, happy and healthy. But yes, let's just say I put the, much maligned in the United States, Canadian healthcare system to its test. And it treated me spectacularly and saved my life. So I'm here and happy and healthy. Socialized medicine works. Guys don't buy into the Fox propaganda. It works.

[The United States] is the only developed country in the world not to have it, and not one country in the world that adopted it ever decided that it was a mistake and went back to not having it. Saved my life.

But absolutely, it cost me a couple of years of productivity being ill. It beats the alternative. But yeah, it was not quite a four-year gap – three and a half year gap between The Oppenheimer Alternative and The Downloaded. And that's just the vicissitudes of life.

I have a great interest in psychology. I did a minor in it while I was doing my undergraduate degree in broadcasting. And I have a great interest in philosophy. In fact, I've always said that science fiction would better be called philosophical fiction rather than science fiction. So not sci-fi, but fi-fi. However, that hasn't caught on yet, but FiFi trademark Robert J. Sawyer.

In both psychology and philosophy during the latter half of the 20th century— in other words, most of my growing up and while I was at university dualism – the notion that the mind and body were separate things was very much dismissed. Very much dismissed. It was all very much on the coming out of B.F. Skinner and the notion of operant conditioning, which is where if you punish a behavior you don't like, it'll disappear. If you reward a behavior you like, it will be reinforced.

The brain was simply a device: part of the body. And philosophically, those who were arguing that the mind and the brain were separate things, were creating a conundrum, which is, “well, if they're separate things, then how does one affect the other?” Right?

These are big posers in philosophical thought.

But that said, quantum physics seems to imply a primacy of the observer in terms of collapsing wavefronts into concrete reality, collapsing superposition of possibilities, the concrete reality. And some argue that that means there had to be concrete observers of some form, some form of consciousness innate in the universe, or the universe never could have had any concrete form.

Homo sapiens is 200,000 years old as a species. If we take that as the only truly conscious beings on the planet, having not only an inner life but a reflection on that inner life, which we've never demonstrated that in any other life form that we've demonstrated that animals, some animals have memories, have cognitive capabilities, but that inner reflection, “I wish I had not done that, Rob, you're thinking of having that donut, but you really want to stick on your diet.” Having an inner dialogue or monologue is something that possibly has only existed for 200,000 years. Homo sapien.

Alright, go back to the split between humans and chimpanzees, 7 million, wherever you want to go back. It hasn't been there rounded to the nearest percent for even 5% of the four point something billion years that the earth is old or the 13.8 billion years that the universe is old.

So, consciousness might arguably have to be separate somehow from physicality. And I write in the novel about these companies, Alcor™ is the most famous one that will cryogenically suspend your body after death with the implicit promise that by freezing your body, somehow they can bring you, not just your animated shambling corpse in a zombie form, but you the person who signed the check to pay for this service, back to life somehow.

And my big idea for The Downloaded was, well wait a minute, maybe you can freeze the body, but the consciousness disappears as soon as electrical activity in the brain goes. And just putting electrical activity back into the brain does not reboot consciousness. The consciousness has to be stored and saved somewhere. And I argue based on quantum mechanics that it probably has to be stored in a quantum computer.

I'm a huge fan of the most interesting interpretation of the science of consciousness, not necessarily the one that's going to turn out to be right, which is the Penrose-Hammeroff model that says there's something fundamentally non-classically computable about consciousness. Consciousness is quantum mechanical in nature. And if that's the case, then uploading it has to be not into the kind of classical computer that is mediating our conversation right now, but a quantum computer that can actually keep things in superposition. So that was my central conceit that you could store the body, but you also separately have to store the mind. And The Downloaded novel, all the action in that, devolves from that notion that storing the physicality of biology and the mentality of psyche and consciousness are two separate processes that can be reintegrated at the end conceivably. But during the storage period, we'll be absolutely separate.

Oh, of course I've read about it, absolutely. And yes, absolutely. We used to think, and Futurama made famous the notion just save the brain in a jar, right? Well, of course the brain, it's arbitrary. I mean, yes, you can point to the brain, but the brain is attached to the spinal cord. The spinal cord is attached to the distributive nerves that go right up to your fingertips and your toe tips. So, the idea that clearly if I cut off my little finger, I'm not conscious of having lost any significant amount of my memories cut off my head, I'm dead. Somewhere in between there's probably a dividing line where nothing that's related to consciousness is distributed in the central nervous system. But absolutely the central nervous system, not just the brain, is where all of this material is distributed in the body. We know memories are stored somehow physically in the body because brain damage to physical parts of the brain can cause portions of memory to disappear.

But they know also other kinds of brain damage can cause you to be delusional, have absolutely vivid memories of things that never occurred. And we also all know why eyewitness testimony, although considered the gold standard in evidentiary stuff in a trial, is in fact unbelievably unreliable.

Every single time you're asked to recount an event, you rebuild it from scratch, from a few tiny bits of actual memory, and it becomes elaborated and changed and so on and so forth. So the nature of memory – where memory is stored, where personality is stored, what constitutes personality – is all still very much under investigation. Anybody who's had a parent that slid into dementia, or my God into the cruel thief that is Alzheimer's disease, has seen that the person is not a unitary thing that either is there or isn't there, but can diminish change and ebb away.

It's kind of interesting, there weren't a lot of people who lived into ripe old age, despite some patriarchs and Methuselah of the Bible, nobody back in the day, most people were dying in their twenties, thirties and forties. And so we saw them die of disease. We saw them die in battle. We didn't see them slowly ebb away. So, it's not surprising that for centuries, millennia, we thought there was a person within that body. But now all of us have had the tragedy of seeing somebody we love erode away bit by bit. And that makes it very complex when you start talking about what is the distinction between mind and body.

I've been fascinated by prisons for decades, and not because I've ever been a prisoner, but because it's so ineffectual. We send people to jail, to deprive them, for two reasons. Obviously, we put somebody in prison if they are a threat to other people, we're barricading them so that we don't have to deal with them. Okay? Violent offenders sometimes, or sexual offenders, sometimes that makes sense.

But the vast majority of people in prison are not in prison for violent crimes. And yet we throw them away and think somehow that decades later after they have been abused by prison guards, raped by fellow prisoners, treated like garbage, and then shone out the front door with essentially no support system that we have rehabilitated them has always struck me as insane.

And the United States has not just per capita, but in gross numbers, more people behind bars than any other country on the planet, including those that we identify as totalitarian regimes. It's become the default way of dealing with people who are malefactors, who have done something that goes against the so-called social code without any evidence that it works in terms of rehabilitation, that it works in terms of preventing recidivism. It just has become, as so many things in Western governance have become, cash cows. Whether it's the military industrial complex or the prison industrial complex, self-sustaining, not because the former brings peace and order to the world, and the latter brings rehabilitation to the world, but because they are huge cash cows for the industries that benefit from them.

And what are the alternatives? If we really wanted to deal with rehabilitation, number one, you don't have a guy and say, okay, you're going to jail for 20 years, and in that time, your wife or your husband, your spouse will leave you or cheat on you or disappear on you or die. In that time, any children you have will have grown up having been told by all their neighbors and everybody, they casually meet, “oh yeah, your dad, he's the prisoner, he is the bad guy.” Or your mom, the prisoner, the bad guy. Your job, whatever skillset you had, you name the skillset today and try to imagine how it's going to be applicable to the world of 20 years down the road. Not radio broadcaster, not science fiction writer, probably not surgeon, probably not lawyer, probably not clergyman. Whatever your job is, it's going to be done by AI. So we can say, you're going to have no career, you're going to have no family, and your kids will have grown up without you and probably despising you.

And that makes you a better person, that 20 years in jail?

No, it does not. It demonstrably hardens you and ruins you.

Science fiction is supposed to be about alternatives. What an alternative would be. Well, the idea that you got to serve your time, okay, we're not going to get the government to give up on that notion. We have this punitive notion that people have to be punished for their crimes.

I'm very interested in indigenous approaches, many indigenous approaches, native American, as you might say in the states, approaches to justice are not retributive. They're restorative. Restorative justice, where the goal is, okay, you've wronged me. How can you make it right? Not how can I punish you for having wronged me? You took my land, give me back my land. You killed by accident, one of my cattle. You got to give me a cattle, not go to jail. Make it up to me and then we're good again, we're copacetic, we go on. You did something wrong. You made it up. Okay, we're good. That's a very interesting approach to justice. That's all. But absence in the formal Western jurisprudence that's practiced in most Western countries,

An enormous number of people are in jail in the United States for victimless crimes such as drug use. They're the victim. They're the victim themselves.

An enormous number of people in the United States, and all levels of government, and in business, are demonstrable criminals. And yet because they can afford slick lawyering, avoid that fate.

So it is so disproportionately prison applied to male as opposed to female malefactors, to people of color as opposed to white malefactors, to poor rather than rich malefactors, that it's really hard to say, “oh, we're doing it to prevent, to protect us from bad people.”

But rather that we're doing it to get out of our site poor people of color, because we cannot expound our fundamental egalitarian dogma if we constantly have in our face the utter failure to give everybody equal opportunity to the American dream.

So a sexual offender, and I'm drawing an interesting point there because the main character of the downloaded is Roscoe Koudoulian, who was a murderer, but not a career criminal. He was taunted, he's cracked in the moment, and he killed his tormentor, Who is both his tormentor as an adult and as a child. You don't forgive that. He must be punished for that. The crime must be answered for.

But you understand that there is never an excuse for sexual crime, for rape, for sexual abuse of children, for human trafficking. There's never an excuse. You can't say, “oh, in the heat of the moment.” That's not an excuse. “Oh, I was provoked,” no, that's not an excuse. And so I wanted to make a very deliberate contrast between Roscoe who committed what the law would say in terms of penalty, there's no question.

We do not have the death penalty in the United States, we don't have it at all in Canada, for sex crimes. We only have it for murder. There's only one crime we do it for. And so we clearly say murder is worse. Even though, of course, because murder obviously the person you killed, there's no coming back from that. But I wanted to contrast Roscoe, who did one incredibly stupid thing once and spent 20 years of virtual time trying to better himself and overcome and make up for what he had done versus a sexual predator – who I have 0, 0, 0 sympathy for.

You never find a sexual predator who did it once, never did it again, never occurred to me in the past, never going to occur to me again in the future. It was in the heat of the moment that one time, that's just not the profile. So yeah, I want to make that very distinct contrast. So Roscoe people, I mentioned the Akutagawa, short stories and the film Rashomon that had been an influence, but also an influence on this is absolutely Les Miserables by Victor Hugo. Les Miserables is about Jean Valjean who was punished cruelly by a system that had no interest in rehabilitating him because he stole a loaf of bread to help feed his family. And Jean, Jean becomes mayor of a town. Rehabilitates. Turns himself around. And that very much was the template for the Roscoe Koudoulian character in The Downloaded who also ultimately becomes mayor of a town.

Yes, absolutely. And not to have any spoilers or anything, but it turns out it's our own damn fault. And this is I think one of my all time favorite science fiction movies in the top three from 1967. It's a film called Quatermass and the Pit was released originally in North America with an alternate title Five Million Years to Earth. Although now everybody's gone back to the original British title, Quatermass and the Pit, which was a film version of a 1958 BBC television serial called Quatermass and the Pit. And in both versions, there's a line – so going back to 1958, okay? That's 66 years ago now.

Two scientists are talking, and one of the scientists says to the other “Roni,” that's the name of the scientist he was addressing, “If we were to discover that our planet was doomed, say by climactic change, what will we do about it?”

And the other scientist says, “Nothing, just go on squabbling as usual.”

And that was before we had the slightest hint that in fact, we were absolutely destroying our own ecosystem and paving the way to our own destruction. But it was so prophetic because to this day right now in my country of Canada, protests going on left, right and center because the federal government wants to institute a tax on carbon use to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Well, of course, nobody wants to pay a tax and nobody cares about what happens to their children or their grandchildren or their great-grandchildren. They just want more spending money in their pocket. And so they're fighting it tooth and nail. This ostrich syndrome, the ostrich being famous for putting its head in the sand when confronted so that it doesn't see the danger. I mean, that's apocryphal, I'm sure, but that's the metaphor that we use.

Even Leticia Garvey, who has the right stuff by definition, an astronaut, super bright, nonetheless has these blinders on that humanity is hellbent on its own destruction. And I think having that being brought up in her face is a crucial part of the narrative. I mentioned the original Star Trek as a big influence on me for many decades. I said my favorite episode of Star Trek was also a first season episode, although I did not see it in first run, Errand of Mercy written by Gene L. Coon, who ironically also wrote The Devil in the Dark, the other episode I referred to.

Errand of Mercy introduces the Klingons, and at the end of the episode, captain Kirk and Commander Kor, two great Canadian character actors, William Shatner and John Colicos squaring off against each other are about to start an interplanetary war between the Klingons and Earth's Federation.

And Kirk is arguing with the Organians who are putting a stop to the war, “We have the right!”

And the Organian leader, Ayelborne, says, “To rage war captain? To destroy life on a planetary scale? Is that what you are defending?”

And Kirk, who has become a war hawk in this episode has to face the fact that his own narrow-mindedness was leading down the path to destruction.

It's not quite the same thing with Leticia Garvey, but it is the blinders on about the existential threats of climate change and nuclear war that we still face for the first time in history today.

Right now, not one but two nuclear powers are actively engaged in war: Israel and Russia. We've had individually one or the other, or the United States being engaged in war, but never before have we had two nuclear powers fighting a shooting war right now.

It's no surprise to me that The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which figures very prominently – the creation of it and is a recurring motif – in my novel, The Oppenheimer Alternative, the real Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved its doomsday clock, which measures how close we are to total annihilation as a species, the closest to midnight that it's ever been right now. Because of those two existential threats that are absolutely human caused climate change and potential of nuclear obliteration. And yet we still have these blinders on, and I want Leticia to have to have that wake-up moment in the downloaded where a bright, intelligent, well-educated person nonetheless continues to deny the realities that are so starkly in her face.

If it energized our agency. Our agency, in psychology, is your ability to change your circumstances. You have agency if you can do something about it. You have no agency if you can't.

So if it had energized our agency, if we had said, oh, a nuclear war, we could not do that climate change. Okay, okay, I got to cut down on my emissions. I got to stop doing this and that. I got to put solar panels. I can do that. If it had made us make those fundamental shifts, then yeah, it would be very comforting to think that the only likelihood of you, me, our children, our grandchildren, our friends and neighbors dying this century is if we do something stupid, that would be a comforting thought if it in any way energized us towards avoiding that stupid fate.

Instead, of course, the utterly oblivious, indifferent, cold uncaring universe might also snuff us out at any moment, a nearby supernova, a coronal mass ejection from our sun. We have no idea what it's going to do to our technological civilization when our magnetic field inevitably collapses and reverses as it does periodically, but never has during the civilization time where we've used electronics as the basis of our civilization. We have no idea any number of things could wipe us out.

In The Downloaded, there's an incoming, as if I don't have enough other ways to wipe out the planet, an incoming asteroid that's going to impact Earth at some point. Earlier we mentioned Arthur C. Clark, you gave him credit, quite rightly, for the invention of the notion of the geostationary orbit, 23,000 miles above the equator, which gave rise as Clark pointed out, to the ability to have geostationary telecommunication satellites that make possible all of our telecommunications today.

Clark also in his novel Rendezvous with Rama,1973, was the first to propose that we really needed something he called a spaceguard, really need something to monitor our solar system for asteroids that they periodically cross earth's orbit that will cross earth's orbit at the same point where earth happens to be in the orbit. In other words, an impact. When Clark put that forward in ‘73, we hadn't yet articulated that it was an asteroid impact that was responsible for what we now call the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction. It used to be called Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction, but tertiary has been deprecated as a geological distinction in the official stratigraphy now. So, it's the paleogene at the beginning of the Cenozoic era that we're in now.

Anyways, we didn't know even then that it was an asteroid impact, that it wiped out the dinosaurs. We know it now to more of a certainty than the certainty that has put most black men behind bars for crimes that they've been convicted of, which is supposed to be beyond a reasonable doubt. It's not funny. It's not funny. We know to a much greater degree of certainty what killed the dinosaurs, that what many innocent men are languishing behind bars for crimes supposedly that we know to a moral certainty that they committed.

So, Clark put that forward, and we do now look for these things. But our solar system, if you look at it, is flat. It's a pancake. It's not a sphere. Yes, there's the Oort Cloud that’s a sphere way, way out. But almost everything in the solar system is in a flat plane. One of the many reasons Pluto got demoted from being a planet is it's not in that flat plane. It's quite significantly inclined to the plane of the solar system. So we look for asteroids coming in in that flat plane. We call it the ecliptic, and that means we probably will detect one that's drifting in from the asteroid belt, which is a belt in that flat plane. But if one comes in from high above the ecliptic or below the ecliptic, an extra solar origin asteroid, we don't have the resources to monitor the sphere 360 degrees. And it might well be way too late to deflect it by the time we discover it.

So yeah, the universe can punch our card and check us out anytime it pleases. This is not the Hotel California, right? You can never leave, and the universe will get rid of us if we don't get rid of ourselves at some point.

Yes, you're absolutely right. As I mentioned way at the beginning of this interview, my parents, liberal Canadian academics in the sixties. The campuses were full of protests against Vietnam and environmental protests and so forth. And so I wasn't allowed to watch violent protests.

Well, they succeeded. They raised a pacifist. I'm absolutely a pacifist. I abhor the fact that so much of the planet is at war all the time. I don't own and will never want to own a handgun. You can get them in Canada. They're not banned as people think they are, but they're certainly not readily available. I would never want to own. I never want to own a device, the purpose of which is to end the life of another human being. It's who I am. Okay, other people have other choices. You're asking about what led to this in The Downloaded, and yes, I do think that the meek shall inherit the earth, but the meek got to be organized.

And there only are a handful of ways to deal with malefactors, bad actors. And one of those is you're either with us or you're against us. You're in or you're out. You can benefit from the society we've put together but got to play by its rules. You don't play by its rules then go somewhere else. This is the Mennonite characters of my novel and the real Mennonite code. You either adhere to our rules or you can't be part of our society.

And you'd say we all routinely decry surveillance as our conversation is being recorded right now, but we're looking at the reality that Microsoft is just announced their new system for tracking every single thing you do on your computer that's supposed to help you recall things, and they say, “oh, it'll be safe. It won't be hacked,” and blah, blah, blah.

The only reason Microsoft does anything is the same reason that any publicly traded corporation does anything to maximize shareholder return on investment. There is no other reason, which is why Citizens United, why the decision of the United States Supreme Court that said corporations are people was wrong. People can have motives other than venal profit. Corporations cannot. They are not people in that they cannot, by law, have a conscience. Whereas people, we expect in the court of law, that's where you're found wanting. You have to have rea mens, so you have to have the mental desire to commit a crime. It's not a crime if you weren't mentally desiring to do something that you knew was against your conscience. So, the surveillance society that we already have slipped enormously into with very little pushback, I think is pretty much an inevitability at this point. We have given up our right to privacy.

I used a quote from Scott McNealy who was the CEO of Sun Microsystems at the beginning of my novel Hominids, which won the Hugo Award, came out 22 years ago, and it was, you have zero privacy. Anyway, get over it. It was a high tech mogul saying it. And that was basically the agenda for Google, for Microsoft, for Apple, for everybody who scrapes every little bit of data. And right now we have this performance theater going on in the United States, and to a little bit lesser degree here in Canada, TikTok. TikTok is evil.

Why is TikTok evil? Because the Chinese are scraping your data and it's just look over there and get mad at the Chinese while Apple, Microsoft, Google, and everybody else scrapes every bit of activity, monetizes it, uses it against you.

So I'm a huge believer that we've already given up our personal privacy, and we did it for for free email. We did it so that we could have the joys of Facebook. We did it so that YouTube could put up every video everybody ever took. Any time we did it without the way the world ends, the way privacy ends, the way any human right ends, apparently not with a bang, but with a whimper.

Well, The Downloaded is my 25th novel. It may very well be my last novel as well. I had a great time writing it, but science fiction has been very good to me. And although, as I say, I'm healthy now, having a brush with mortality makes one assess what one wants to do with whatever number of years. Either my own health or the vicissitudes of human stupidity in climate change and nuclear war, or the utter indifference of the universe to the continued existence of homo sapiens might allow me to have.

I have won every major award. As you mentioned, I was guest of honor, co-gues of honor, along with my friend, Liu Cixin, the author of The Three Body Problem, the World Science Fiction Convention this last year. I've had all the career capstone honors there are in the field just about.

I used to be asked in interviews, this is one of many thousands I've done over the years, “What are your hobbies?”

And I used to say, “Where I to have time for a hobby, my hobby might be…” and name some things.

Maybe it's time to pursue some of my hobbies. If I get excited and inspired and decide to write another book after The Downloaded, perhaps I shall, I won't seek a contract for it in advance. I will write at my own pace and then either traditionally or self-publish it as the vicissitudes of the marketplace dictate at whatever time I might finish it.

But as a capstone to my career as a final coda, as my valedictory address to science fiction – that was very much part of the agenda of The Downloaded to end, as you say, on that upbeat, optimistic note. And to revisit throughout that a number of themes that had been signature Robert J. Sawyer topics in my oeuvre leading up to this: cheating death one way or another, life prolongation, uploaded conscious cryogenics, the notion of the scientific nature of consciousness, the dualism of the mind and body.

I mentioned the day that my career got anointed as having really taken off when John Douglas said, “you've now become a bankable pro.” Bankable name was the day that The Terminal Experiment, my novel about the discovery of scientific proof for the existence of the human soul, won the Nebula Award. All these themes that I dealt with and my general interest in the malleability and the ability to rehabilitate human beings. All of those themes I wanted to address one last time and give, and if you read over my entire oeuvre, all my 25 novels, my 45 short stories, and the TV series, FlashForward, all this stuff. If you look at all of it, my thinking has changed and evolved as one should, any nimble intellect should change and evolve their thinking over the decades. I wanted to have a final visitation of those topics, those themes that had defined the body of work. That is the Robert J. Sawyer oeuvre and give my final concluding statements on those themes. And that's what The Downloaded is to me.

Well, thank you. Artists of all type are famous for announcing their retirement and then coming back. And I have to say, when I did Quantum Night, I said much the same thing, and then some ideas did seize me, and so we'll see. We'll see. I'm not hanging up my hat. I have no intention of dying anytime soon, unless of course, a nearby supernova or coronal mass ejection or some human folly wipes us all out. But I intend to go with, not a whimper, but quite the loud scream and a bang.

Well, my pleasure, Patrick, and if we can bring it all kind of full circle. Let's go back to Gene Roddenberry and the famous statement from Star Trek, which humanity still strives to do and should hopefully be able to accomplish for every single one of the 8 billion of us. Let's hope we all live long and prosper.

My pleasure.