Robert J. Sawyer: The Shoulders of Giants

Robert J. Sawyer (1960- ), who lives and works in Ontario, near Toronto, Canada, began to publish SF short stories in the 1980s. His career as a novelist took off in the 1990s, and he became one of the SF popular success stories of the decade. After five well-regarded novels, he won the Nebula Award for The Terminal Experiment (1995), and has since published seven more novels, four of them Hugo Award nominees. He is a hard SF writer in the tradition of Isaac Asimov, more an idea writer than a stylist, often building neat puzzles with a complex moral dimension. His short stories are now infrequent, but clever and readable. His new novel, Hominids (2002), the first of a trilogy which involves an alternate contemporary world in which humans died out and Neanderthals are the only intelligent hominids, was serialized in Analog. His previous novel, Calculating God (2000), about what would happen if hard evidence were found for the existence of God, was a bestseller in Canada. Generally his novels involve overt politically charged dramatizations, and moral discussions of a broadly humanist nature (this is also the Asimov tradition), often of several different topics.

The frontier themes in hard SF are one of the major dividing points between North American and European SF. David Mogen wrote a good book on the subject of the frontier in SF years ago. Yet, still, the politics of Canadian SF writers is more closely allied to the politics of UK writers than of the US community in the 1990s.

The germ of this story came from Marshall T. Savage's nonfiction book The Millennial Project, in which Savage said that only a fool would set out for a long space voyage in a generation ship. Sawyer says, "my wife Carolyn and I rented a cottage, and in that rustic, wooded setting, I found myself thinking about pioneers and recalling previous trips to cottages as a teenager, during which I'd read much classic SF. The story of the colonists aboard the Pioneer Spirit is my attempt to capture the sense of wonder that drew me into our genre in the first place. The title, of course, is a tip of the hat to Asimov, Clarke, Clement, Herbert, Niven, and all the others upon whose shoulders the SF writers of my generation are fortunate enough to stand." Most specifically, it begins by retelling the classic A. E. van Vogt story, "Far Centaurus," (which introduced the idea of the ship full of slower-than-light colonists preempted by technological advance) and then taking the story farther into the future and into space.