Sounds Like Canada

I'm going to be on CBC Radio One's Sounds Like Canada with Shelagh Rogers tomorrow morning (Wednesday, April 25, 2007) -- one of Canada's most-popular radio programs, heard coast-to-coast in Canada. Of course, we'll be talking about my just-released 17th novel Rollback.

I'm arriving at the Toronto CBC studio at 9:45 a.m. Eastern time on Wednesday -- so that's the earliest the interview can be aired; I think the show is time-delayed in some parts of Canada, and I suspect I'm not going on until after the 10:00 a.m. Eastern time newscast. But, wherever you are, you can listen online to CBC Radio One's live audio feed; in fact, you can probably hear the interview multiple times, by picking an appropriate local CBC feed. Try the Toronto feed between 9:45 a.m. and 10:15 a.m., and you'll hear me.

I've been on Sounds Like Canada before, but this time the interview is particularly apt. Sarah Halifax, the SETI researcher in Rollback, is interviewed on Sound Like Canada, in chapter 14:

"We'd been so wrong," Sarah told Shelagh Rogers the next morning. Don wasn't the Toronto sound engineer for Sounds Like Canada -- Joe Mahoney was doing that these days -- but Don stood behind Joe as he operated the board, looking over Joe's shoulder at Sarah.

And, while doing so, he reflected on the irony. Sarah was in Toronto, but Shelagh was in Vancouver, where Radio One's signature program originated -- two people who couldn't see each other, communicating over vast distances by radio. It was perfect.

"Wrong in what way?" Shelagh's voice was rich and velvety, yet full of enthusiasm, an intoxicating combination.

"In every way," Sarah said. "In everything we'd assumed about SETI. What a ridiculous notion, that beings would send messages across the light-years to talk about math!" She shook her head, her brown hair bouncing as she did so. "Math and physics are the same everywhere in the universe. There's no need to contact an alien race to find out if they agree that one plus three equals four, that seven is a prime number, that the value of pi is 3.14159, et cetera. None of those things are matters of local circumstance, or of opinion. No, the things worth discussing are moral issues -- things that are debatable, things that an alien race might have a radically different perspective on ..."

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