Tag: Robert J. Sawyer

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I’ve been thinking a lot about Robert J. Sawyer’s Quantum Night the last few months. It links human cruelty, psychopathy, and mob behavior to the nature of consciousness, mostly focusing on the main characters but playing out against a global crisis brought on by a rising tide of xenophobia.

More recently, I’ve been thinking about Frameshift. His 1997 novel deals with (among other things) eugenics, Neanderthals, Nazis, and health insurance companies doing everything they can to avoid covering people with pre-existing conditions.

I can’t imagine why that keeps coming to mind….

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Red Planet BluesSorry I don’t have a new article on Reading Les Misérables this week. I took a break to read Robert J. Sawyer’s latest novel, Red Planet Blues. It’s a detective noir story set on a future Martian colony where people have perfected the art of transferring human minds into robot bodies. It’s expensive, but it also makes modern fingerprint, DNA and other biometric forensics useless, forcing investigators to fall back on good old-fashioned sleuthing. The colony itself is essentially a gold rush town, only instead of gold, people have gone to Mars seeking fossils of long-extinct Martian life.

Sawyer read an excerpt from the novel during his author spotlight at Chicon 7 last summer. It sounded like great fun, and it lives up to its promise.

Unless I get totally swamped, I should be back to Victor Hugo next week…well…probably. There’s a new Julie Czerneda book out, and I’m really tempted to read that now that I know it’s out. I don’t want to lose too much momentum on Les Mis, though.

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I’ve been re-reading Robert J. Sawyer’s original Flashforward novel…

Flash Forward and Flashforward

…for obvious reasons.

Adaptation

It’s been interesting to look at both where the TV series diverges from the book: the setting, the time scale, recordings, and in most cases the cast — and where it tracks: the concept, the impact of the worldwide blackout on people now, the way different people approach their foreknowledge, a main character investigating his own murder, and the way the viewpoint organization just pulls together to take point on investigating the incident.

And every once in a while, a specific conversation is adapted. Demetri’s “You’re going to be murdered” phone call from Hong Kong and Theo’s phone call from South Africa are very similar. And there’s a discussion on the likelihood of an event hitting exactly on the hour that was practically lifted for episode two.

I doubt the TV show will tackle the question of whether the universe exists without observers (sort of “If a tree falls and no one is there to hear it, does it make any sound?” taken to the extreme) or the long-term implications of life extension. And somehow I doubt the Large Hadron Collider and search for the Higgs boson are involved (though I noticed the TV show’s Lloyd Simcoe works at Stanford, which does have their own particle accelerator).

It’ll be interesting to see where they go with this.

Prediction

Entirely separate from the TV show, it’s also been interesting to look at the book’s predictions for the present day. Most of it takes place in 2009, but it was published 10 years ago. I list a few items — like getting the Pope’s name right, but missing the explosion of cell phones — in my review of the book from when I read it last year.

Then there’s the suggestion made that one could prove the future can be changed by demolishing some major landmark that many people saw in their visions, but “I don’t suppose the National Park Service is going to let us do that.” In my head, I imagined a deadpan voice saying, “You can’t blow up a national monument.” Hmm, I doubt the cause of the blackouts in the TV show will be robots from space. 😉

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One of the events I made sure to hit at Comic-Con was the Flash Forward panel. Flash Forward is a new series launching on ABC this fall — you’ve probably seen ads for it — about what happens when everyone in the entire world blacks out for two minutes and has a vision of what they will be doing at a specific time in the future. This incident has two major consequences:

  • Millions of people die, worldwide, in the space of moments. Cars and airplanes crash, people standing on staircases or ladders fall to their deaths, swimmers drown, etc.
  • The survivors know exactly what they’ll be doing for a two-minute slice of time in the future…but they don’t necessarily know why.

Flash Forward

It’s based on the novel Flashforward by Robert J Sawyer, which I reviewed last December. It’s a great book, and I highly recommend it. The focus seems to be different, though: the book follows the scientists whose experiment accidentally triggered the event, in which everyone sees visions of 21 years in the future. The TV show is following, to start with anyway, an FBI agent investigating the event.

So where the book is mostly philosophical science fiction, the show looks like a mix of action, mystery and drama.

Both have, as their major theme, a single question: If you knew what your future was going to be, what would you do? Would you try to change it? Would you try to make it happen? If you saw a future you wanted, would you slack off, confident that things would work out in the end, or would you put in extra effort knowing you’d succeed?

To start with, they brought out the producers of the show, had some discussion, then ran the first two acts of the pilot episode.

Read on for a write-up and photos from the panel. Continue reading →

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About a year ago I posted a list of authors I wanted to catch up with. I read quite a few books last year, but how did I do with this list?

In the Company of OthersJulie E. Czerneda — I read the Trade Pact Universe trilogy last year, and I’m about half-way through the stand-alone novel, In the Company of Others, which means I’ve read just over half her novels. That leaves the Web Shifters trilogy and the two books so far of Stratification.

RollbackRobert J. Sawyer — since last year I’ve only read two of his books: Rollback and Flashforward (reviewed here). Though I made a point of attending his panel at Comic-Con International in July.

Robert Charles Wilson — Somehow managed not to read anything of his last year.

The Hounds of AshGreg Keyes — Re-read the first three books of The Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone, then read the final volume, The Born Queen, after it was released. Received The Hounds of Ash for Christmas, a collection of short stories set in the same universe as The Waterborn and Blackgod, and I got two stories in before I decided I wanted to re-read the novels.

The Graveyard BookNeil Gaiman — I read The Graveyard Book when it came out last fall (thanks to my brother for sending a signed copy from the SF reading!), but I can’t think of anything else (other than his blog) that I’ve read during the past year.

Other authors/titles I’ve read over the past year: Connie Willis (Bellwether), Robert Asprin (several Myth Adventures books), Naomi Novik (Fifth Temeraire novel, Victory of Eagles), Larry Niven (entire Ringworld series), George R.R. Martin (A Game of Thrones, sorry, not a fan), JMS (various B5 scriptbooks). Soon I Will Be Invincible (reviewed), Gateway, Night in Times Past, The Flash Companion, plus bunches of comics and tons of stuff online.