By Don Curren
Canada and science fiction are two of my favourite things.
But I haven’t actually read that much Canadian science fiction.
I started trying to remedy that a couple of years ago. Those efforts were redoubled last year when I refocused more of my cultural consumption on Canada after Trump began his campaign of threatening and belittling my country.
I started with two writers who have emerged as deans of the Canadian science fiction scene while I was more or less ignoring it in recent decades: Robert J. Sawyer and Robert Charles Wilson.
In the first “episode” of his occasional series, I wrote about a rather atypical book by Wilson.
In this one, I’m going to discuss five books by Sawyer.
Sawyer is an highly competent and sometimes excellent writer of science fiction.
I’ve never been significantly disappointed in any book of his I’ve read.
His general approach is well described by Robert Charles Wilson, the other focal point of my reading in Canadian science fiction, who has characterized Sawyer as “Asimovian.”
Here’s Wilson’s description of Sawyer in a blurb for one of his books:
“Sawyer has carried the banner of Asimovian science fiction into the twenty-first century. Hominids is based in contemporary, cutting-edge science - paleoanthropology, quantum computing, neutrino astronomy - among others, and furnished at the same time with touching human (and para-human) stories. Precise, detailed, and accomplished. The next volume is eagerly anticipated.”
Sawyer thus broadly falls into the sub-genre environment that used to be called “hard science fiction”; it’s based on premises that are consistent with recognized scientific realities, although along with some imaginative extrapolations.
I’ll get to Hominids, the book referred to in the blurb above, shortly. It’s part of Sawyer’s ambitious and largely successful “Neanderthal Parallax” trilogy.
Before that, I’ll briefly explore two shorter, self-contained works by Sawyer.
The first is The Oppenheimer Alternative, an alternate-history novel published in 2020 that Sawyer described as his best book so far in 2024.
As the title suggests, the book’s central character is Robert Oppenheimer. The first section is a pretty straight retelling of his involvement in the Manhattan Project and his subsequent security clearance hearings, the same material covered in Christopher Nolan’s film Oppenheimer.
The alternate history aspect in the novel comes into play when the fictional Oppenheimer discovers the Sun's core is unstable and will shed its outer layer in the late-2020s, engulfing the inner planets of the Solar System and destroying Earth.
Oppenheimer reassembles the scientific team of the Manhattan Project, along with polymath John Von Neumann and rocket scientist Werner Van Braun under the aegis of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, which Oppenheimer served as director for many years in our actual, historical timeline.
It's a gripping read that deftly weaves its science fictional aspects with real-history personalities and events to create a compelling narrative.
Sawyer’s 2012 novel Triggers is a more contemporary piece with something of a thriller feel to it.
The action of the tightly plotted novel is set in a Washington, DC, hospital where a Canadian “memory researcher” is experimenting with a device intended to erase traumatic memories.
The president of the US - a distinguished, reflective Republican named Seth Garrison - is brought to the hospital after being shot in an attempted assassination.
As the president is being operated on, an electro-magnetic impulse is unleashed by a terrorist bomb that destroys the White House, and it interferes with the operation of the machine in an unexpected and dramatic way.
When the president wakes up after surgery, he has mental access to the memories of a patient undergoing treatment with the experimental memory-erasing machine.
It rapidly becomes clear that several other people who were in the hospital have been affected. They all have access to someone else’s memories, but it’s not a one-to-one correspondence; the fact a person has access to someone else’s memories doesn’t mean that person will have access to theirs. Instead, there appears to be a tangled mess of shared memories.
Which means that someone has access to the president’s memories, creating a huge potential for security risks at a time when the US is already reeling from the attempted assassination and the destruction of the White House.
In a taut, tightly paced narrative, a handful of Secret Service agents rush to identify the recipient of the president’s memories amid the human complications that ensue from the shared memories.
Sawyer’s deft execution of his premise makes the book a genuine page turner.
But having set up an intricate framework of shared memories and resulting complications, Sawyer does something rather unusual: he blows it all up in a climax that can be read as deeply optimistic, but also deeply disappointing in terms of the book’s overall coherence and consistency.
There’s another aspect of Triggers that can be a little problematic, at least when reading it in terms of recent developments in the US.
Sawyer’s President Garrison is an idealized head-of-state - noble, dignified, thoughtful. In short, everything the current occupant of the White House is not.
It might be a bit hard for contemporary readers to take the book seriously when the president and his administration are so dramatically different from contemporary reality.
One could also make the argument Sawyer’s depiction of a venerable, serious president and a principled administration suggest how effectively American mythologies can colonize the minds of Canadian creators.
There are, I acknowledge, commercial reasons why a Canadian science fiction writer would want to set a novel in Washington and deploy time-honoured American tropes about the presidency. But it’s a little disturbing that the vision of US institutions that emerges is so unrealistically positive.
Sawyer avoids that problem in the three books that make up his Neanderthal Parallax trilogy: Hominids, Humans and Hybrids.
Those books, which were published in the early 2000s, are mostly set in Canada, with some excursions to the US, and to an Earth in a parallel universe where Neanderthals emerged as the sole human species.
Hominids won the 2003 Hugo Award,]and Humans was a 2004 Hugo Award finalist. In 2017, the full trilogy was presented Canada’s Aurora Award for Best of the Decade.
The events in the trilogy unfold when a Neanderthal computer scientist working on a quantum computer in his universe inadvertently transits into ours, arriving unceremoniously in a vat of heavy water at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory in northern Ontario.
The accidental linkage between the two different versions of earth is made permanent by Neanderthal scientists, creating the opportunity for sustained contact between the two Earths.
Sawyer makes excellent use of the premise. He does some intriguing world building, imagining how a Neanderthal earth would differ from one dominated by Homo sapiens.
His depiction of the Neanderthal civilization is detailed and plausibly rooted in established facts about the actual Neanderthals in this universe.
There are some pointed contrasts in the way the two species have managed their Earths, and Sawyer exploits the opportunity to make some implicit criticisms of our species’ behaviour.
But the effect isn’t preachy, as Sawyer also weaves an interesting plot around the interactions of the two species after a permanent bridge between the two universes is established.
Despite the size and complexity of the trilogy, the plot is tautly woven, and accelerates to a thriller-like pace by the third volume.
My one criticism of the books would be that some of the secondary characters are rather one-dimensional. Interestingly, that’s more true of the homo sapiens members of the cast of characters. The Neanderthal characters are mostly quite vividly drawn and compelling.
It’s a relatively minor failing when set against the overall accomplishment of Sawyer’s imaginative and thought-provoking trilogy.
Sawyer and Wilson, in my mind, represent two of the most accomplished writers in the mainstream of Canadian science fiction.
I’d like to explore some of more esoteric nooks and crannies next.
Gentle Reader, you might be able to help me in my quest. If you have any particular favourites among Canadian science fiction books or writers, particularly of the less mainstream variety, please feel free to reach out via email or in the comments.
Comments
Post a Comment