Phil Marchand — long-time books columnist for The Toronto Star now writes for Canada’s National Post, and has a very thoughtful article on “How Fantasy Overtook Science Fiction” in today’s edition.
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My reading is one of the last events at the con: 2:00 p.m. Monday afternoon in Room P-512AE. It was to have been a joint reading with Joe Haldeman, but Joe will be gone by then, so Anticipation is giving me the full hour.
Among the things I’m going read, the first-ever public performance of “The Transformed Man,” a 1,000-word prose poem I was commissioned to write by Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre to accompany an art exhibition there.
Also, don’t forget that Robert J. Sawyer Books is co-sponsoring the SF Canada party Friday night in the Delta, Room 2815, at 9:00 p.m.
And please stop by the Robert J. Sawyer Books table in the dealers’ room, and pick up a copy of Distant Early Warnings: Canada’s Best Science Fiction, which I edited.
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My story actually was previously published (so please don’t accuse me of jumping on the current bandwagon!):
“Peking Man” copyright 1996 by Robert J. Sawyer. First published as the lead story in Dark Destiny III: Children of Dracula, edited by Edward E. Kramer, White Wolf, Atlanta, October 1996.
And, when it was reprinted in my own collection Iterations and Other Stories, I had this to say about it:
Ed Kramer wanted to do an anthology in honor of the hundredth anniversary of a particular literary character. That character wasn’t one I was fascinated with, but I did have a lifelong interest in paleoanthropology, although at this point, I’d never written any fiction on that theme (later, I went on to write a trilogy about Neanderthals). But having recently looked at a picture of a Chinese Homo erectus skull, and having thought, gee, those perfect, square teeth must be fake, an idea occurred to me that I thought might be right for Ed’s book.
To my delight, Ed used this story as the lead piece in his anthology (editors usually put what they consider to be the best stories in the first and last slots). I occasionally think about expanding the premise of this story into a novel; perhaps someday I will.
“Peking Man” went on to win Canada’s Aurora Award for Best English Short Story of the Year. You can read it, and 32 others, in John’s new anthology, on sale now.
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Thursday at 4:00 p.m.: Hugo Award-winners Robert J. Sawyer and Robert Charles Wilson and two-time Analog AnLab winner Paddy Forde signing Distant Early Warnings: Canada’s Best Science Fiction.
Saturday at 11:00 a.m.: Hugo and World Fantasy Award finalist Nick DiChario signing Valley of Day-Glo and A Small and Remarkable Life, both of which were finalists for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel of the Year.
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(But come an hour earlier to the same place for the launch of new novels by two of my writing students, Hayden Trenholm and Matthew Johnson, both of who have books debuting at Worldcon from Bundoran Press.)
And Robert J. Sawyer, Paddy Forde, and Robert Charles Wilson will all be signing Distant Early Warnings: Canada’s Best Science Fiction Thursday at 4:00 p.m. at the Fitzhenry & Whiteside / Robert J. Sawyer Books table at the Worldcon.
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For many years now, Seton Hill University’s Master of Arts program in Writing Popular Fiction has been one of the few places where genre-fiction writers (including those doing science fiction and fantasy, as well as romance and mystery) have been welcome in a graduate-level program in creative writing.
And now, Seton Hill has upgraded its program from a Master of Arts to a Master of Fine Arts (from an M.A. to an M.F.A.).
The significance, for those who don’t follow such arcana, is that an M.F.A. is considered a “terminal degree” in Creative Writing — and no, that doesn’t mean it’ll kill your writing career <grin>. Rather, it means it’s the highest academic degree offered in that discipline (whereas an M.A. is considered a waystation en route to a Ph.D.; the Ph.D. is the terminal degree in most disciplines that offer M.A. degrees).
The best-known graduate from the science fiction and fantasy stream of the the old M.A. program at Seton Hill is Nalo Hopkinson. The university is located in Greensburg, Pennsylvania.
More information on the program is here.
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by Robert J. Sawyer
The only novel of its year to be nominated for both the Hugo and the Nebula Awards
From the author of FlashForward, a far-future spaceships-and-alien hard-SF extravaganza in the tradition of Larry Niven.
The interstellar shortcuts are open. Discovery awaits.
Winner of the Aurora Award!
“Sawyer’s latest should gladden the hearts of readers who complain that nobody’s writing real science fiction anymore, the kind of story that has faster-than-light spaceships and far-off planets and interstellar combat. Sawyer deftly juggles half a dozen sweeping questions of cosmology (not to mention everyday ethics and morality) while keeping the story moving ahead full speed. His scientific ideas are nicely integrated into the plot, yet they also hint at larger metaphorical levels. Enjoy.” — Asimov’s Science Fiction
“Mind-boggling. A complaint often heard these days is that there’s not enough `sense of wonder’ in today’s science fiction. Starplex ought to lay that complaint to rest for quite a while.” — Analog Science Fiction and Fact
“An epic hard-science adventure tempered by human concerns. Highly recommended.” — Library Journal
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After two months away, it’s good to finally be back home in Mississauga. Carolyn and I had a great time in Saskatoon, and already miss our new friends from there. Being the first-ever writer-in-residence at the Canadian Light Source synchrotron was an amazing experience.
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Con-Version 25, this year’s edition of Calgary’s annual science-fiction and fantasy convention, is fast approaching. Dates are August 21-23. Here’s the description of the con from the website:
Con-Version is a three-day festival devoted to science fiction, fantasy, and everything in between. Whether you love the groundbreaking sword and sorcery of Terry Brooks, the sexy, modern-day vampire stories of Tanya Huff, or the intellectual, thought-provoking science fiction of Robert J. Sawyer, Con-Version has something for you.
If you’re a fan of anything from Star Wars, Star Trek, Stargate, or even Battlestar Galactica — either one! — you’ll find people with the same interests (and maybe the same Stormtrooper costume).
Whether you like the Harry Potter books or just the movies, like Lord of the Rings on screen but not on paper, whether you’re a literary or a media fan, Con-Version is the can’t-miss event of the year!
Regular programming hours are full of demonstrations of medieval swordfighting, discussion panels on your favourite books, gatherings of costumers to share their secrets, and much more. The evenings are packed with entertainment: the dance, variety show, a concert, and Con-Version’s famous fundraising “Slave Auction.”
Join us on our Facebook group and let us know if you have any thoughts, questions, or suggestions.
We look forward to seeing you there!
For more information, see here.
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… conducted by current Aurora Award nominee Edward Willett just went online here. It’s a good, meaty interview about my residency at the Canadian Light Source and my new novel Wake.
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1. Outliers: The Story of Success
By Malcolm Gladwell
2. Master Your Metabolism
By Jillian Michaels
3. Twenties Girl
By Sophie Kinsella
4. Unmasked the Final Years of Michael Jackson
By Ian Halperin
5. Best Friends Forever
By Jennifer Weiner
6. The Devil’s Punchbowl
By Greg Iles
7. Wake
By Robert J. Sawyer
8. The Big Thaw: Travels in the Melting North
By Ed Struzik
9. The Host
By Stephenie Meyer
10. Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Deception
By Eric Van Lustbader
W00t!
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An exhibition at The Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation and Fantasy in Toronto:
Toronto’s Tomorrows
Celebrate the history of our city’s vibrant science fiction community!
The current exhibition in the display cases of the Merril collection features examples of science fiction, fantasy and horror set in Toronto.
It spotlights Judith Merril’s influential role in science fiction locally and worldwide, and remembers World Science Fiction Conventions held in Toronto.
The Merril Collection’s SF Writers in Residence, past and future are also profiled.
On display until August 15, 2009 in the lobby of the Merril Collection.
Note: The Merril Collection Writers in residence:
1987: Judith Merril
2003: Robert J. Sawyer
2009: Karl Schroeder
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Yesterday, we went to Lumsden, Saskatchewan, for the 20th anniversary of the Sage Hill Writing Experience.
Today: a barbecue at the home of bookseller and writer Kent Pollard, followed by dinner with Carolyn’s Saskatoon cousins.
Monday: my final weekly writing lecture for the Canadian Light Source staff, plus my final three one-hour one-on-one critiquing/mentoring appointments at the Light Source.
Tuesday: I’m on the noon Saskatoon CTV news program for an interview, then, at 7:30, it’s the launch for Distant Early Warnings: Canada’s Best Science Fiction at McNally Robinson
Thursday: I’m giving a talk to a fantasy writing workshop for 9-to-13-year olds.
Friday: the flight home.
We’re in Toronto for all of four days, then it’s off to Montreal for the World Science Fiction Convention (and I have other trips in August to Calgary, Regina, and Los Angeles). Whew!
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INTRODUCTION
Thirty years ago, I was nineteen; I wasn’t part of that book. Except for Spider Robinson, none of the authors collected here were. Colombo planted a seed with Other Canadas; what you hold in your hands is — if I may be so bold — the cream of the crop that grew from that seed.
Recently, Jane Urquhart came under attack for The Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories, which she edited. To her critics, some omissions seemed glaring, some inclusions dubious. So, given that I’ve subtitled this anthology Canada’s Best Science Fiction, let me define my terms and explain my selection criteria.
By “Canada’s,” I mean authors who live in this country. I’m frankly tired of hearing Canadians trumpet that actors Pamela Anderson, Jim Carrey, and William Shatner are Canadians. No doubt they legally are, but they don’t live or work here. Likewise, I’ve left out authors who have decided to call somewhere else their home — my point being that there’s no need to reach beyond our borders to fill a book such as this.
“Best” is, I grant you, a subjective judgment — but let me point out an objective fact: every author in this book has either won or been nominated for the Hugo Award (the top international prize for science-fiction writing); or won or been nominated for the Nebula Award (the “Academy Award” of the science fiction field, given by the inaccurately named Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, which has members in 23 countries, and has had a Canadian Region since 1993); or has won Canada’s top SF book award, the Aurora.
(Specifically, Robinson, Sawyer, and Wilson have won the Hugo, and Forde, Gardner, Hopkinson, and Watts have been nominated for it; Robinson and Sawyer have won the Nebula, and Gardner and Hopkinson have been nominated for it; Czerneda, Hopkinson, Sawyer, Schroeder, and Wilson have won the best-novel Aurora, and Gardner, Robinson, and Watts have been nominated for it.)
By “science fiction,” I mean the real thing: stories that reasonably extrapolate from known science; stories that might plausibly happen. Thirty years ago, when Colombo pulled together his anthology, he needed to combine SF with fantasy, horror, magic realism, and folk tales to make a book. Today, we can easily fill a book not just with real science fiction authored by Canadians, but with real science fiction by world-class writers who just happen to be Canadian.
In addition to the words in the subtitle, I decided to add one more criterion for inclusion in the present volume: Colombo had scoured 400 years of history for his selections; my goal is to demonstrate that there’s a vigorous, active SF writing community in Canada right now. Every one of the stories in this book was first published in the 21st century. (This decision did have one sad effect: William Gibson, winner of the Hugo, the Nebula, and the Aurora Awards for best novel of the year, simply hasn’t written any short fiction this millennium.)
There is, of course, a separate literary tradition of French Canadian science fiction. I commend to your attention particularly the work of Joël Champetier, Yves Meynard, Esther Rochon, Daniel Sernine, Jean-Louis Trudel, and Élisabeth Vonarburg. Indeed, this book’s official launch will be in August 2009 at Anticipation, the World Science Fiction Convention, which this year is being held in Montreal, and is featuring programming in both French and English. Élisabeth Vonarburg is the Invitée d’honneur, Julie E. Czerneda is the toastmaster, and John Robert Colombo — at last getting his due — is keynote speaker (the first one ever at a Worldcon) for the convention’s academic track.
Distant Early Warnings isn’t dedicated to John Colombo because my wife Carolyn Clink and I dedicated our earlier anthology Tesseracts 6, part of the long-running series of Canadian science-fiction anthologies founded by the late, great Judith Merril, to him. But without John standing up and saying to the Canadian publishing world, and to Canada’s academics, that there was such a thing as domestic Canadian SF, the field would not be nearly as rich and varied as it is today, and my hat is off to him.
This book isn’t just intended for Canadian readers: after all, every single one of the authors included here has a significant international following (Paddy Forde is the one name that might not immediately ring a bell, since, to date, he has published only short fiction; however he has twice won the Analytical Laboratory Award from New York-based Analog, the world’s top-selling English-language SF magazine, for best novella of the year).
And since we are also catering to readers outside Canada, and since I’ve gone on at length about the subtitle, let me say a word about the title. The Distant Early Warning Line — or DEW Line — was a string of radar stations in Canada’s far north designed to detect incoming Soviet bombers during the Cold War. But the phrase also evocatively sums up what good science fiction does, providing us with advance reports of the wonders — and the dangers — that await us in all the myriad futures that might yet come to pass.
— Robert J. Sawyer
Mississauga, Ontario
April 2009
The book concludes with a section I’ve dubbed the “Lightning Round,” introduced thus:
The world’s top two scientific journals are the American Science and the British Nature. In recent years, Nature has been running very short science-fiction stories, each no more than 800 words in length, as a feature called “Futures.” The initial offering was by none other than Arthur C. Clarke. Five of the authors who have longer stories in this anthology have also contributed pieces to Nature, which we offer here — a final lightning round of distant early warnings.
Distant Early Warnings: Canada’s Best Science Fiction
Edited by Robert J. Sawyer
Stories by Julie E. Czerneda, Paddy Forde, James Alan Gardner, Nalo Hopkinson, Spider Robinson, Robert J. Sawyer, Karl Schroeder, Peter Watts, and Robert Charles Wilson
Poetry by David Livingstone Clink and Carolyn Clink
Cover by James Beveridge
Published by Robert J. Sawyer Books, August 2009, an imprint of Red Deer Press (a Fitzhenry & Whiteside company)
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Okay, admittedly it was the worst-kept secret in television (as David S. Goyer quipped today at San Diego Comic-Con), but it can now be officially announced that Dominic Monaghan, late (literally) of Lost, has joined the cast of FlashForward.
See here.
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(Note: this event was orginally announced for this Saturday afternoon but has been changed to Tuesday evening so that I can attend the 20th anniversary event for the Sage Hill Writing Experience.)
I’ll be reading from my Hugo Award-nominated short story “Shed Skin,” which is included in the anthology.
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I’ve been having a great time serving as writer-in-residence at the Canadian Light Source, Canada’s national synchrotron research facility. My final week begins today.
Here’s a sign that someone recently put up on my office door at the synchrotron:
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A nice three-minute video interview with Robert J. Sawyer conducted by Leila Lemghalef is online right here.
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Always nice to hear from a satisfied customer:
Hi,
After having picked up The The Terminal Experiment at a used bookstore and relegating it to my “Things To Read” bookshelf for far too long, I finally picked it up and was pleasantly surprised. So it was easy for me to grab Calculating God a few days later while perusing my local library, and I was completely BLOWN AWAY! As a former fundamentalist now devout atheist I found the book incredibly compelling, funny and superbly well-written with the many of the usual and not-so-usual arguments presented brilliantly. And for fear of sounding like a nerdy fanboy I really feel that you were robbed a Hugo against JK Rowling.
I then went and immediately read Rollback (another brilliant novel) and just now finished the thoroughly enjoyable FlashForward Flashforward (it’s been quite the RJS week) and felt I should take the time to send you short note of praise. You have a very accessible style full of compelling and new ideas.
While not normally prone to gush, I feel an artist likes to hear from someone who really appreciates their work instead of just critics. No need to respond, just wanted to say thanks for some very, very good literature and keep up the good work.
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Yann Martel, the Mann Booker Prize-winning author of Life of Pi, and his wife Ali Kuipers very kindly had Carolyn and I over to dinner shortly after our arrival here in Saskatoon last month. The New York Times is reporting he just sold US rights to his next novel for US$3,000,000. Way to go, Yann!
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In my novel Hominids and its sequels, I argue that our kind of humanity (referred to as Gliksins by the Neanderthals in those books) were responsible for the demise of the Neanderthals (which call themselves Barasts in my books).
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Photo: Phyllis Gotlieb and her husband Kelly Gotlieb.
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In honor of the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing, I’m uploading for free my short story “The Eagle Has Landed,” first published in the 2005 DAW anthology I, Alien, edited by Mike Resnick and Martin H. Greenberg. You can read the full text for free right here.
“The Eagle Has Landed” by Robert J. Sawyer.
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In Robert J. Sawyer‘s 2003 novel Hybrids, the U.S. president who comes to office in 2009 makes a speech calling for a crewed mission to Mars. The speech appeared broken into a series of excerpts at the beginning of each chapter of Hybrids, but, in honor of the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11, he’s providing it here in its entirety:
My fellow Americans — and all other human beings on this version of Earth — it gives me great pleasure to address you this evening, my first major speech as your new president. I wish to talk about the future of our kind of hominid, of the species known as Homo sapiens: people of wisdom.
And, as you will see, it is only our future — the future of Homo sapiens — that I will be addressing tonight. And not just because I can only speak as the American president. No, there is more to it than that. For, in this matter, our future and that of the Neanderthals are not intertwined.
I said it during my campaign, and I say it again now: a president should be forward-thinking, looking not just to the next election but to decades and generations to come. It is with that longer view in mind that I speak to you tonight.
Let me begin by noting this isn’t about us versus them. It isn’t about who is better, Homo sapiens or Homo neanderthalensis. It isn’t about who is brighter, Gliksin or Barast. Rather, it’s about finding our own strengths and our own best natures, and doing those things of which we can be most proud.
Four decades ago, my predecessor in the Oval Office, John F. Kennedy, said, `Now is the time to take longer strides — time for a great new American enterprise.’ I was just a kid in a Montgomery ghetto then, but I remember vividly how those words made my spine tingle.
Jack Kennedy was right: it was time then for us to take longer strides. And it’s that time again. For the greatest strength we Homo sapiens have always had, since the dawn of our consciousness 40,000 years ago, is our desire to go places, to make journeys, to see what’s beyond the next hill, to expand our territories, and — if I may borrow a phrase coined just four years after JFK’s speech — to boldly go where no man has gone before.
Our strength is our wanderlust; our curiosity; our exploring, searching, soaring spirit.
It was that questing spirit that led our ancient ancestors to spread throughout the Old World.
It was that questing spirit that moved some of us to march thousands of miles across the Bering Land Bridge, which linked Siberia and Alaska during the Ice Age.
It was that questing spirit that caused others to bravely sail boats over the horizon, finding new lands in Australia and Polynesia.
It was that questing spirit that led Vikings to come to North America a thousand years ago, that drove the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria to cross the Atlantic five hundred years ago.
It was that questing spirit that lifted the wings of Orville and Wilbur Wright, of Amelia Earhart, of Chuck Yeager.
It was that questing spirit that made brave men and women like Yuri Gagarin and Valentina Tereshkova and John Glenn ride on pillars of flame into Earth orbit.
And it was that questing spirit that let Columbia and Eagle, Yankee Clipper and Intrepid, Odyssey and Aquarius, Kitty Hawk and Antares, Endeavour and Falcon, Casper and Orion, and America and Challenger fly to the moon.
There are human footprints preserved in volcanic ash at Laetoli, made by a male and a female australopithecine, the ancestors to both Gliksins and Barasts, just wandering, walking slowly, side by side, exploring: the original small hominids steps. And there are human footprints at Tranquility Base and the Ocean of Storms and Fra Mauro and Hadley Rille and Descartes and Taurus-Littrow on the moon — truly giant leaps.
But it has been more than three decades since Eugene Cernan became the last person to walk on the moon. The last person! Who would have thought that whole generations would be born after 1972 for whom the notion of humans on other worlds would be nothing but a lesson in history class?
How could that have possibly happened? How could we have given up that most noble of drives that had taken us from Olduvai Gorge to the lunar craters? The answer, of course, is that we’d grown content. The century we recently left saw greater advances in human wealth and prosperity, in human health and longevity, in human technology and material comfort, than all of the forty millennia that preceded it.
Here in North America, and in India and Japan and Europe and Russia and all across this whole wide wonderful world of ours, things are mostly better than they have ever been — and they’re getting even better all the time.
So: it’s perfectly reasonable that we took a hiatus, that we enjoyed the first few decades of post-Cold War prosperity, that we indulged in one of the other things that makes our kind of humanity great: we stopped and smelled the roses.
But now it’s time to resume our journey, for it is our love of the journey that makes us great.
Scientists tell us that our kind of humans moved up to the northern tip of Africa, looked north across the Strait of Gibraltar, and saw new land there — and, of course, as seems natural to us, we risked crossing that treacherous channel, moving into Europe.
Likewise, some of our Barast cousins, natives of Europe, came south to Gibraltar, with its famous rock, that wonderful symbol of permanence and stability. And from their vantage point, the Neanderthals could see south to the unknown lands of Africa.
But the Neanderthals didn’t cross the Strait of Gibraltar. There, at Gibraltar, we saw the difference between us and them. For, when we saw a new world, just a short distance away, we took it.
If the dangers posed by the collapsing of this Earth’s magnetic field teaches us anything, it is that humanity is too precious to have but a single home — that keeping all our eggs in one basket is folly.
So, yes, indeed, now is the time to take longer strides. But it’s not just time for a great new American enterprise. Rather, it’s time, if I may echo another speech, for black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics — and Hindus and Muslims and Buddhists, and men and women of all faiths, and men and women of none — for individuals from every one of our 191 united nations, for members of every race and religion that make up our unique, varied brand of humanity — to go forward together, in peace and harmony, with mutual respect and friendship, continuing the journey we Homo sapiens had briefly interrupted.
And so I stand here today to usher in the next phase. It is time, my friends, for at least some of us to move on, to leave our version of Earth and take the next giant leap.
It is time, my fellow Homo sapiens, that we go to Mars.
I believe we, the humans of this Earth, should commit ourselves, before another decade has gone by, to launching an international team of women and men to the red planet.
And although our Neanderthal cousins will be welcome to join us in this grand Mars adventure, should they so choose, it is something it seems few of them will desire.
But whether the Neanderthals come with us or not to the red planet, we should adopt their view of that world’s color. Mars is not a symbol of war; it is the color of health, of life — and if it is, perhaps, barren of life now, we should not let it remain so any longer.
Of course, once we’re there, once we have planted flowers in the rusty sand of the fourth planet from our sun, once we’ve nurtured them with water taken from Mars’ polar caps, we Homo sapiens might again briefly pause to smell those roses.
But smelling Martian roses will be only a pause, only a brief catching of breath, a moment of reflection, before we will again take up the journey, driving ever outward, farther and farther, learning, discovering, growing, expanding not only our borders but our minds.
We — the kind of humanity called Homo sapiens, the kind our Neanderthal cousins call Gliksins — have a drive unique among all primates, a drive singular in the realm of conscious beings. And that drive will compel us onward and outward.
And yet, some of us will stay permanently on Mars. Now, in the pages of science and science fiction there have long been notions of terraforming Mars — making it more Earth-like, by enhancing its atmosphere and liberating its frozen water, thus creating a world better suited for human habitation.
But there have been objections to terraforming Mars from those who feel that, even if it has no indigenous life, we should leave its stark natural beauty pristine and unspoiled — that if we visit it, we should treat it as we do our Earthly parks, taking nothing but memories and leaving behind nothing but footprints.
Who would have thought that both destinies for Mars could be fulfilled? But, of course, now they can. We will travel to the Mars of this universe, the one that graces the night skies of the Americas, Africa, Europe, Asia, and Oceania, and, as has ever been our way, we will conquer this new frontier, making an additional home for Homo sapiens there.
And although someday we may also travel to Dargal — for that is what the Neanderthals named the red planet of their universe, the crimson beacon that beams down upon the continents of Durkanu, Podlar, Ranilass, Evsoy, Galasoy, and Nalkanu — we will leave that version of Mars as we find it. Truly, like so much in this new era we are now entering, we will have our cake and eat it, too.
And it is a new era we are entering. The Cenozoic — the era of recent life — is indeed all but over. The Novozoic — the era of new life — is about to begin.
The dawn of the Cenozoic, the famed Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary when the dinosaurs died out, was marked by a layer of clay, found on both versions of Earth. The beginning of the Novozoic in this universe, our universe, the universe of Homo sapiens, will be marked by the footsteps of the first colonist on Mars, the first member of our species to leave the cradle that is this Earth, never to return.
It has been suggested by some scientists that since there was, apparently, only one universe until 40,000 years ago when consciousness arose on Earth, then there is no other consciousness anywhere in this vast universe of ours — or, at least, none older than our own. If that is true, then exploring the rest of space isn’t just our destiny, it is our obligation, for there is no one but we Homo sapiens with the desire and means to do it.
And if that notion isn’t correct — if this and other universes are, as some scientists and philosophers believe, teeming with intelligent life — then we have another duty when we take our next small steps, and that is to put our best foot forward: to show all the other forms of life the greatness that is Homo sapiens, in all our wonderful and myriad diversity.
And we are just that: a great and wonderful people. Yes, we have made missteps — but we made them because we are always walking forward, always marching toward our destiny.
My fellow human beings, my fellow Homo sapiens, we will continue our great journey, continue our wondrous quest, continue ever outward. That is our history, and it is our future. And we will not stop, not falter, not give up until we have reached the farthest stars.
An excerpt from Hybrids by Robert J. Sawyer.
Copyright © 2003 by Robert J. Sawyer. All rights reserved.
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Robert J. Sawyer’s 1999 novel of the same name inspired this drama about a global catastrophe …
The article includes the picture below of series stars John Cho and Joseph Fiennes.
More about the FlashForward novel by Robert J. Sawyer
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