Sawyer graduated with a bachelor's degree in radio and television arts from Ryerson University in 1982, after which he embarked on a freelance writing career. He published more than 200 feature articles for magazines (such as Sky & Telescope and Archaeology) and eventually transitioned to full-time SF writing in the early '90s.

He is the author of 17 novels, the latest of which, Rollback, is due out in April. He is a past president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and has won all of the field's top awards for science fiction, including the Nebula Award (for The Terminal Experiment), the Hugo Award (for Hominids) and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award (for Mindscan). He is also a three-time winner of the international Premio UPC de Ciencia Ficción, and was recently presented with the Toronto Public Library Celebrates Reading Award, which is one of Canada's top book-related honors.

In addition to his writing, Sawyer also recently began editing his own imprint, Robert J. Sawyer Books, for Calgary's Red Deer Press. He also maintains an extensive author Web site, which is one of the longest-running and most comprehensive author sites on the Web.

SCI FI Weekly interviewed Sawyer via e-mail in February 2007.One of the themes you frequently explore in your fiction is immortality. In Mindscan, a kind of immortality is conveyed via transferring the mind into a robot body, and in your latest, Rollback, immortality is achieved through medical means—a kind of cellular regeneration. Which of these possibilities do you think is more likely to be put into practice someday, and do you think either will be available within our lifetimes?

Sawyer: I say in Rollback that, by the time of the novel—40 years from now—Vernor Vinge's technological singularity had still not come to pass. But I do think we will see enormous technological strides in the next 40 years, and they will far exceed those of the last 40, and that will include huge breakthroughs in both the areas you've mentioned. Absolutely, we'll make great progress in slowing down and conceivably rejuvenating our bodies. And I'm just as sure that we'll make a lot of progress in scanning human brains and being able to reproduce the fine structures of the brain—and therefore the mind that arises from that structure—at any level of resolution you care to name.

So, sure, both rollbacks and mindscans will be commercially available in our lifetimes (although only the former at Wal-Mart ...). Which of the two will be more popular depends on the prevailing psychology. Flesh and blood has a lot to be said for it, but it also means you can still go splat and die. Still, almost all people would immediately accept that a version of yourself that has been rejuvenated is still you; it's a bigger philosophical leap to recognize that a copy of you that exists when the original no longer does is also still you.So which is it? When the consciousness is transferred from one body to another, is that really you, or just a copy of you? Does the real you die, while an indistinguishable facsimile lives on?

Sawyer: You're asking exactly the sort of philosophical questions that I hoped readers of Mindscan would ask. Ultimately, it comes down to what makes you you. None of the immediate responses to that question—continuity of physical body, continuity of consciousness and having access to memories—are convincing, since we recycle the materials that make up our body over a period of years; you don't have continuity of consciousness with yesterday if you slept last night; and you can't remember anything at all before about the age of 2 but were still you then.

Now, some people will have no problem with the concept: When we move a computer file from one disk to another, we actually do that by copying the file first, then erasing the original—and yet we understand intuitively that a complete move, a total transfer with absolute fidelity has taken place.

There's a chapter in Mindscan in which a lawyer takes on a philosophy professor who is arguing that scanned minds are really nothing more than zombies, in the sense that philosophers use that term—the lights are on, but nobody's home. The attorney shows, in what I like to think is my own useful contribution to this ongoing debate, that, when you get down to it, the philosopher is really arguing for the existence of souls—and then the attorney pushes on to show how, even if you believe in souls, the theological arguments pertaining to them demand that they not only could but would transfer to the artificial body, too.

I love this sort of debate, and, as you know, there are scenes in Rollback, too, in which nothing happens except for characters debating philosophical questions—with wit and charm, I hope! Indeed, although I always try to get my science right, I've often said this genre might better have been called philosophical fiction—phi-fi, instead of sci-fi!What sort of problems might be caused by life-extension treatments (such as those depicted in Rollback)? With overpopulation already a problem, would lifespans that routinely reach into triple digits make an already serious problem even worse?

Sawyer: If you want to live forever, and you want to continue to reproduce, then you also must have space colonization; you have to open up new living areas. Now, at heart, I'm an idealist—I think we should boldly go, so to speak, simply because it enriches us as a species to do that. But overcrowding is a fine reason for emigration, too, and one with good historical precedent. And I agree with Stephen Hawking—it's stupid for us to have all our eggs in one basket, so if prolonged lifespans help push us out into space, so much the better.

But the novel Rollback deals with the early days of life prolongation, before the population problem has become an issue. It does, however, deal with the gap between the haves and the have-nots: Initially, immortality will be very expensive, if for no other reason than that someone will control the patents related to it. In Rollback, I mostly engage with the questions that arise from the quandary Satchel Paige summed up nicely in a quote from him I use at the beginning of the book: "How old would you be if you didn't know how old you are?" The psychological issues related to being young but mentally mature, and to no longer be the same age as everyone else in your cohort, are going to be profound.What are some of the positive effects (other than the longer lifespan itself) that might come out of prolonged human lifespans?

Sawyer: Great art, for one. In the 40,000 years we've been creating art, no one has ever spent more than a few years—or maybe a decade or two at most—on any single creative endeavor. It's often said that books are never finished, only abandoned—and that's true for most complex creations. Also, there are philosophical questions that we've been wrestling with for thousands of years, and made very little progress on—in large part, I think, because no one person has ever been able to devote enough time to them, or brought enough life perspective to bear on them. I'd love to see what people who spend decades or centuries on a novel, or on a big ethical question, come up with.Rollback seems to riff on Carl Sagan's novel—and the Jodie Foster film based upon it—Contact. Was that the inspiration for the novel, and/or was Carl Sagan an inspiration to you in other ways?

Sawyer: Well, you can't write a novel about a SETI researcher without acknowledging Contact in some way, but I wouldn't say I riff on it here—although perhaps I did in my earlier novel about SETI, Factoring Humanity.

I actually object to a fair bit of what's in Contact. As my SETI researcher Sarah Halifax muses in Rollback:

The movie had its extraterrestrials beaming blueprints to Earth so humans could build a ship that could tunnel through hyperspace, taking Jodie Foster off to meet the aliens face-to-face. SETI, the movie hinted, wasn't really about radio communication with the stars. Rather, like every other cheapjack Hollywood space opera, it was just a stepping stone to actually going to other worlds. From the beginning with Jodie Foster's cockeyed math, through the middle with the stirring speeches about how this would completely transform humanity, to the end with the totally baseless promise that SETI would lead to ways to travel across the galaxy and maybe even reunite us with dead loved ones, Contact portrayed the hype, not the reality. If Frank Capra had made a propaganda series called "Why We Listen," Contact could have been the first installment.

Now, yes, in fact, Contact did inspire me once upon a time—but only the book, not the movie, and only the very end, in which Sagan proposes the eventual discovery of scientific proof that we do in fact live in a created universe. He writes "there is an intelligence that antedates the universe" and speaks—not metaphorically as Hawking did at the end of A Brief History of Time, but quite literally—about us discovering the artist's signature on this created cosmos we live in. Of course neither Sagan nor I actually believe that something like that is a likely revelation (to use a loaded word), but it sure is a fun one to explore, and thinking about that little bit of business—almost an afterthought—at the end of Sagan's novel doubtless was one of the inspirations for my own Calculating God.

As far as a work of fiction inspiring Rollback, I was much more influenced—as I'm sure Sagan himself was—by James Gunn's remarkable The Listeners, and I'm thrilled that Jim is this year's SFWA Grand Master. But the main inspiration for the SETI part of Rollback was me simply wondering what would be worth talking about over interstellar distances with lag times measured in decades or centuries. It certainly isn't "Hey, did you know that seven is a prime number?" or "Just checking—is pi 3.1415 over there, too?" No, the only reason to go to such efforts is to exchange cultures and opinions, not facts and figures.Another recurring theme in your fiction is religion. Reading your books gives one the impression that you might be a "tortured agnostic"—that is, you want to believe, but can't. Is that so? Or if not, why is it that you so often explore religion in your fiction? Is your interest in immortality derived from a lack of faith?

Sawyer: My interest in immortality has nothing to do with faith or a personal fear of death. I'm actually reasonably content with the notion of my own mortality; given my family history, at 46 I'm right about the halfway mark of my life, and I'm comfortable with that. But it seems to me that life prolongation, even to the point of effective immortality, is an interesting challenge, and we've made essentially zero progress on it in the last few thousand years; Plato lived to be 80 and Sophocles to 90, after all.

Oh, we've increased the average lifespan, and in the developed world done a lot to reduce infant mortality, but we haven't increased the upper limit in any significant way, and that puts a damper on a lot of things: not just creativity, as I mentioned earlier, but space travel, too. We could go to the stars right now, if we were so inclined—it would just take more than a current human lifespan to get there. But if we lived a thousand years or a million, not just Alpha Centauri but also the Andromeda galaxy are in our grasp.

On the faith question, I'm more frustrated than tortured: frustrated that people believe things in defiance of the evidence, or dismiss science as just being a substitute for religion. Well, as the saying goes, if science is a religion, not playing chess is a hobby.

My personal belief, based on the measurable external evidence, is that no God who cares about human beings on an individual basis exists. (The sound you just heard was the great whoosh of my inbox collapsing into a black hole.) But I do think it's possible, and interesting, to contemplate whether this universe might be an advanced being's science project, and, as Sarah Halifax says in Rollback, if so, not just what obligations we have to its creator, but what obligations its creator has to us.Is it important for scientists to have an atheistic world view? Do you think that religious scientists would even bother to pursue the idea of immortality, since religions generally promise some kind of eternal afterlife? Does religion make people too complacent with the way things are, and is it thus a detriment to someone devoted to inventing and discovering new things?

Sawyer: Yes, for many religions, the carrot is indeed an afterlife, and, in fact, not just an afterlife, but an afterlife of great joy—or one of great misery, if you don't do what the religion says you should do. To date, there's been no alternative to death: You can postpone it by at most a few decades, but you can't escape it. But, yes, if science does give us an alternative to dying, many religions do lose their ultimate stick, and so have an interest in preventing that. I do think that, down deep, that's why a lot of fundamentalists are against stem-cell research, cloning and so forth; they see that as a way people they want to control might use to opt out of death.

As for the need for scientists to be atheistic, well, it's often been said that Islamic science led the world until it reached the point where its findings were clearly in conflict with scripture, and so one or the other had to be abandoned. And certainly, U.S. science led the world in much of the previous century, but the notion of abandoning or watering down the teaching of evolution because it conflicts with scripture is appalling.

I was asked by The Globe and Mail, Canada's national newspaper, to name the most important book of last year, and I chose Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion. It is high time we stopped giving people a free pass on any wacko belief they might claim—or any human-rights violation they might perpetrate—just because it's a tenet of their religion.Your novel The Terminal Experiment explores the idea of the afterlife and the human soul. Do you think either could ever actually be proven? If so, what effect do you think such proof would have on human society?

Sawyer: Well, science can only prove a positive: It can prove there's a black hole at the heart of our galaxy; it can't disprove that there's a giant aardvark in a French maid's outfit there. But if souls exist, they do have to interact with the material world somehow—the great Cartesian problem. Otherwise, they would have no control over what our material bodies do, and it therefore would be ridiculous to judge them for the actions our bodies perform. And that interaction does mean souls could be detected in principle.

Will we ever detect them? I don't think so, because I don't think they exist. We haven't touched on my best-known work in this interview, but Hominids and its sequels explore my take on this issue at length: The Neanderthals are astonished that we came up with these notions of gods, souls, an afterlife and so on, and are even more astonished that once coming up with them, we didn't outgrow them. Still, to answer your question, I suppose if we found out that an afterlife exists, we might devalue this life ... which, of course, is what so many religious people of all stripes already do.

As my Neanderthal quantum physicist Ponter Boddit says in Humans, the sequel to Hominids, as he stands in front of the Vietnam memorial in Washington: "As long as your people keep thinking that this life is prologue, that more is to come after it, that those wronged here will be rewarded in some there yet to come, you will continue to undervalue life, and you will continue to send young people off to die."

So, I guess I'm like Lady Ashley, who said of Darwin's notion that she and an ape might share a common ancestor: "Let us hope that it is not true; but if it is true, let us hope that it does not become widely known." If there is an afterlife, I can't see much positive coming from proving its existence.Speaking of the Neanderthals featured in Hominids and its sequels, why did you have their culture develop the way it did? On the plus side, they're much more advanced technologically than us, and much more peaceful; on the downside, they live in a society in which privacy has been devalued in favor of security. Part of the difference is clearly because they developed without religion; do you think our own development might have more closely mirrored theirs if not for religion getting in the way? Or was it a more complicated combination of factors?

Sawyer: I took two different paths in creating my modern Neanderthal society. The first was to do something based on what we actually know about Neanderthals. The interpretation I used in the novel—that the males and females lived largely separate lives—comes from the description by anthropologist Lewis Binford of the Neanderthal site at Combe Grenal in France. Now, that's not the mainstream view, but it is in the literature—and, as I always say, the job of the SF writer isn't to present the most likely interpretation, but rather the most entertaining one that isn't easily ruled out by what we already know.

I also took the lack of Neanderthal religion from the anthropological record: Long after we'd started having a belief in gods and an afterlife—as evidenced by burying our dead with things of value that could only be of use in a putative hereafter—the Neanderthals, who doubtless were aware of what we were doing, did no such thing.

The second path was a personal one. My mother is an American-born in rural Minnesota, raised in California—and my father is a Canadian, born and raised in Toronto, and I myself am a dual Canadian/American citizen. My whole life has been about the interface between those two worlds, and so I set out to gently contrast Canadian and American values in the books, by having the Neanderthals stand in for Canadians.

The difference between the two countries is usually summed up by quoting parallel passages from their founding documents. The U.S. promises "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," while Canada promises "peace, order, and good government." Polls show that Canadians are more secular than Americans, more peace-loving, more environmentally conscious, more accepting of homosexuality, fonder of cold weather and more willing to sacrifice freedom for security—all the traits my Neanderthals exhibit.

As to the Neanderthal world's constant monitoring of everything people there see and do, well, that sort of monitoring is inevitable; one of the epigrams I begin Hominids with is from Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems: "You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it." But given that widespread monitoring is unavoidable even in our world of webcams and cell-phone cameras—just ask Michael Richards—I did try to portray a system that put the power in the hands of the watched, rather than in the hands of some shadowy watchers, and I think it's important that we have a dialogue about how we might actually do that.

George Orwell did a lot of good, but he left us so terrified of the possibility of Big Brother that we may have gone too far in the other direction. One of the reasons Hominids starts with a brutal crime in a public place on our version of Earth is to raise that question: Why, in this day and age, is it still dangerous for a woman to walk alone from her office to her car after dark? Why don't we embrace technology to fix that?Was their world in any way a utopian vision to you? Do you think that system's better than the one we've got in real life?

Sawyer: Hominids, Humans and Hybrids are often taught in utopian-literature courses, and that's cool, but I didn't set out to portray a utopia—only an alternative. And in Hybrids you certainly see some of the downsides of the Neanderthal system. But, yes, for the record, I do think accountability is a good thing in society, and that actually having a record of what really happens is valuable. But remember, too, that although my Neanderthals have some technology that exceeds our own, they've never been to the moon, or even into orbit. There is something wonderful about our kind of humanity and its constant questing to see what's over the next hill.What's next? What are you working on now?

Sawyer: A trilogy about the World Wide Web gaining consciousness; the three volumes are entitled Wake, Watch and Wonder, giving the trilogy the overall title of WWW.

I've always been fascinated by the stories about nascent consciousness, but in so many of them the big event happens offstage, as in Neuromancer, or in a completely unbelievable way. Many of the SF scenarios about computers becoming sentient make me think of that Sidney Harris cartoon in which two scientists look at a blackboard full of complex equations, in the middle of which are the words, "Then a miracle occurs," and one scientist says, "I think you should be more explicit here in step two." I'm trying hard not to skip any steps in these books, and to really take a credible stab at this.

I'm also trying to come up with an alternative to the traditional SF visions of us being subjugated by computers—although I for one welcome our new machine masters! No, seriously, I do think that artificial minds vastly exceeding the capabilities of our own are inevitable; I suspect it's quite possible that they will emerge spontaneously—the existence proof for that being the spontaneous dawning of our own consciousness 40,000 years ago—and I think it's time for some new science-fictional visions of how we might co-exist in a win-win way with such things. The research is daunting, but I'm having a blast working on this.