Robert J. Sawyer

Fifty-five years ago, we got our first good look at the surface of Mars — a photo that figures prominently in my new novel The Oppenheimer Alternative. As I said five years ago, on the 50th anniversary of this picture from Mariner IV:

Possibly the saddest science photo ever. Our first close-up look at Mars, from Mariner 4, on July 15, 1965, showing not a twin of Earth but a dead, crater-scarred surface. No canals, no seasonal plant growth, no alien cities.

Somewhat spoilery, but here’s the scene from The Oppenheimer Alternative in which Robert Oppenheimer, Kitty Oppenheimer, and Nobel laureate I.I. Rabi are shown this photo by Wernher von Braun:

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“Let’s skip the appetizers and get down to the giblets,” said von Braun, still boyish at fifty-three. “The key photo is this one, number eleven.” He moved it to the table’s center, and the other scientists craned to look at it. Oppie felt his heart jump. He heard Rabi suck in his breath, and Kitty muttered, “Shit.”

“That was taken at a distance of seventy-eight-hundred miles,” said von Braun, who stepped back now so the others could see the photo better. “East to west, it covers a hundred and seventy miles. North-south, one-fifty.”

“Where?” demanded Oppie. “What co-ordinates?”

Von Braun consulted a series of stapled sheets he had brought with him. “It’s centered on thirty-one degrees south and one-niner-seven degrees east.”

Oppie turned his attention to the giant 1962 Air Force map of Mars, flattening out its creases with his palm. He quickly found the spot. On the map, a canal cut diagonally across the middle of that area starting in the southwest and running up to the northeast as if flowing from Mare Cimmerium to Mare Sirenum.

And in the Mariner photo, maybe, just maybe, if he really, really, really willed himself to see it, there was a diagonal line, although at a less steep angle, running … no, not into a sea, or even a plain, but into —

There was nothing else it could be, was there?

— into a crater. Only one-half of its rim was clearly visible, like the bowed part of a capital D, but it dominated most of the frame. And the bloody thing wasn’t alone. Oppie quickly counted seven — no, eight! — other craters in photo eleven. Given the size of the area being portrayed, the D crater was perhaps eighty miles across, the one adjacent to it was maybe thirty, two were twenty, and the rest were ten down to as little as five.

Oppie knew that Mare Cimmerium was named in honor of the Cimmerians, a people Homer mentioned in the Odyssey who lived in perpetual darkness. And after three and a half centuries of looking at the red planet through telescopes, that darkness had finally lifted, and mankind was at last seeing the true face of its celestial neighbor.

It was heartbreaking.

It was like looking at the goddamned moon.

In photo eleven, there were small craters within large craters, and some craters overlapped and obliterated parts of others. And, once you’d seen them in this, the sharpest of the pictures, you couldn’t help seeing them in the other photos, too. Craters everywhere.

But no sign of water.

No sign of water erosion.

Just dusty death.

Even worse than that. Death implied there’d once been life, but this planet’s surface looked ancient, untouched for millions or billions of years. Barren, sterile.

With von Braun’s guidance, Oppie next located the spot on the Air Force map captured by picture eight. That area was bisected by Erinnys, one of Percival Lowell’s more prominent canals, which, according to him, flowed from the west end of Mare Sirenum to Titanum Sinus in Memnonia. But this photo, too, depicted nothing but craters, albeit none as large as the one that dominated picture eleven.

“And there’s more,” said von Braun.

“Oh, joy,” said Kitty.

“Mariner IV didn’t go into orbit,” said von Braun. “It was a fly-by mission. Still, it did pass behind Mars from earth’s point of view, and just before it did so — and just after it emerged on the other side — its S-band radio, beaming toward earth at twenty-three hundred megahertz, passed through the Martian atmosphere. There was no specific occultation experiment aboard, but we can make some reliable conclusions thanks to the amplitude and phase changes that were detected. Based on them, we were able to confirm that the Martian atmosphere is almost entirely carbon dioxide. That, of course, suggests that, despite our best hopes, the polar caps don’t contain any appreciable amount of frozen water — which could have been melted for drinking or irrigation, or electrolyzed into hydrogen and oxygen for fuel — but are almost exclusively dry ice.”

“Which is fun at a kid’s birthday party or to shatter a goldfish,” said Rabi, “but otherwise pretty damn useless.”

“Yes,” said von Braun, nodding. “And the occultation also let us get a handle on the density of the Martian atmosphere. It’s thin — even thinner than we’d thought. Somewhere between four and six millibars.” Earth’s was roughly a thousand millibars, one bar originally having been defined as earth’s sea-level atmospheric pressure. The red planet had an atmosphere about one-half of one percent as dense as earth’s — and what little of it there was consisted of poisonous CO₂. Oppenheimer felt light-headed.

“The bad news isn’t over yet,” said von Braun. “Mariner IV had a helium magnetometer aboard. As it approached Mars, we expected it to detect the planet’s magnetic field. The sooner it detected it — that is, the farther from Mars Mariner found it — the stronger the field must be. We knew Mars couldn’t have as strong a field as earth. But based on the planet’s mass and rate of rotation, we figured it might have a magnetic field about one-tenth as powerful as earth’s, and so we expected Mariner to encounter the shock front many hours before making its closest approach to the planet. Now, I won’t say we didn’t find anything. There was one little hiccup slightly after closest approach that might have been the shock front. If it was, well, then Mars has a magnetic moment 0.03 percent of earth’s — and if it wasn’t, then it’s even less, or perhaps totally nonexistent.”

Oppie found a chair and collapsed into it, stunned. With such a minuscule magnetic field, Mars couldn’t possibly have anything akin to earth’s Van Allen belts. That lack helped explain the incredibly tenuous Martian atmosphere Mariner IV had detected — nothing to deflect the ever-present solar wind from stripping it away. But it also meant that any life on the surface — be it native lichen or refugee humans — would be pelted by long-range alpha particles that were always spewing out of the sun. The surface of Mars wasn’t just sterile; it was constantly being sterilized.

Oppenheimer looked from person to person. Von Braun’s eyebrows and arms were lifted in the classic don’t-shoot-the-messenger plea. Rabi, frowning deeply, was chewing at the edge of his thumbnail. Kitty was shaking her head slowly left to right.

“Well,” said Oppie, when he could at last find his voice again, “that’s just devastating  …”

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Robert J. Sawyer online:
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75th Anniversary of the Birth of the Atomic Age
Book an Expert Interview!

Award-winning author ROBERT J. SAWYER
has over 800 radio and TV interviews
under his belt

The atomic age was born 75 years ago in 1945. Commemorate these important anniversaries with an expert interview subject:

• Thursday, July 16, 2020: 75 years since the first atomic bomb exploded in the Trinity test in Alamogordo, New Mexico.

• Thursday, August 6, 2020: 75 years since the first use of an atomic bomb, destroying the Japanese city of Hiroshima.

• Sunday, August 9, 2020: 75 years since the last use of an atomic bomb in war, devastating Nagasaki.

Bestselling author Robert J. Sawyer‘s 27th book The Oppenheimer Alternative, about J. Robert Oppenheimer and his Manhattan Project team, has just been released specifically to coincide with the above anniversaries.

Perimeter Institute physicist Lee Smolin, the author of The Trouble with Physics, says, “I know the history of this period well and I’m one or two degrees of separation from many of these people. Sawyer’s portrayals ring true to me.”

Gregory Benford, physicist at UC Irvine, agrees: “The feel and detail of the Manhattan Project figures is deep and well done. I knew many of these physicists, and Sawyer nails them accurately.”

Based on the latest research and recently declassified documents, Sawyer will enthrall your audience with stunning revelations about the dawn of the atomic age. Did you know that:

• Following Hitler’s suicide, many Manhattan Project scientists did not want to continue the atomic bomb. The initial fear had been that the Nazis would get it before the Allies did, and, with the war in Europe over, they saw no reason to continue.

• The Japanese had been making overtures to surrender through diplomatic back channels for over a year before the US dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Had their one demand been accepted, the war in Japan would have ended in 1944.

• Franklin Delano Roosevelt shocked the hell out of Winston Churchill by deviating from their agreed script and demanding “unconditional” surrender from Japan in a live radio broadcast. Churchill only subsequently backed that demand so as not to be seen as contradicting the American leader.

• In the end, despite the posturing about “unconditional” surrender, the Allies gave the Japanese the one and only thing they’d wanted a year earlier, namely letting their divine emperor Hirohito retain his throne (which he did until his death in 1989).

• Leo Szilard, who got Einstein to write to FDR urging the creation of an atomic weapon, circulated a petition calling for a demonstration of the bomb for Japanese experts, rather than its use on Japanese cities. General Leslie Groves had the petition branded Top Secret and hidden away — so that the bomb could be dropped to end World War II, establishing a post-war order with America as the only superpower.

Further details about the above points with sources

MORE ABOUT SAWYER’S BOOK

Every character in The Oppenheimer Alternative is a real and famous historical figure, portrayed with Sawyer’s usual meticulous attention to accuracy. Besides J. Robert Oppenheimer, the book features the powerful and quirky personalities of Edward Teller, Richard Feynman, Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard, and German rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun.

“Incredibly realistic: the characters, locations, the era, and even the science. I felt like I was back in Los Alamos — and I should know: I worked there! Breathlessly riveting; Sawyer pulls it off masterfully.” —Doug Beason, former Associate Laboratory Director, Los Alamos National Laboratory

“Sawyer portrays brilliantly and poignantly the struggles of the scientists who started it all and were consequently obliged to bear an unbearable burden.” —James Christie, Chair, Project Ploughshares, member organization of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons

“An imaginative restructuring of a phantasmagoric life into an alternative phantasmagorical story. Oppenheimer fans will be intrigued.” —Martin J. Sherwin, co-author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer

Robert J. Sawyer is a member of the Order of Canada, the highest honor given by the Canadian government. He has been interviewed over 800 times on radio and TV and countless times in print, and has published in major newspapers worldwide as well as in the journal Science. He has served as a consultant to organizations including NASA and Canada’s Federal government.

For interviews, please contact publicist Carolyn Clink: clink.ink@gmail.com or 905-507-1346

Online press kit

This press release as a PDF

Robert J. Sawyer online:
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Production delays due to COVID-19 kept the audiobook of my new novel, The Oppenheimer Alternative, from coming out the same day the printed book and ebook did — but it’s out now, and it’s magnificent.

I told the audio publisher they’d need an actor who could do all the different character accents as well as correctly pronouncing the foreign phrases that appear in the text, and Josh Bloomberg masterfully rose to the occasion.

You can get the audiobook at Audible.com and other audiobook vendors worldwide. (And a physical-media CD-ROM edition will be out later this year.)

Robert J. Sawyer online:
Website • Patreon • Facebook • Twitter • Email

MORE SPOILERS — BIG ONES — YOU’VE BEEN WARNED!

Yesterday, in PART ONE of his discussion, I wrote about some of my problems with Delia Owens’s debut novel Where The Crawdads Sing. As I said then and I reiterate now, I did enjoy the book, and certainly don’t want to take away from anyone else’s admiration of it. It was, after all, the #1 bestselling book — both fiction and nonfiction — in the US in 2019; this novel clearly deeply touched a lot of people.

Again, though, I come at every reading experience cursed by being a writer myself. Yes, there are times when that perspective gives me joy perhaps beyond what a non-writer reader might get from a book: an appreciation of a technical achievement that is so apparently effortless on the page that most readers wouldn’t even notice what had been done. But it can also make stand out things that I, and most of my colleagues, would have done differently, and, we like to think, better.

The same is true, of course, for professional filmmakers, painters, athletes, musicians, dancers, and more: a trained eye or ear is a mixed blessing when it comes to enjoying works in your own field.

Indeed, that’s why my own field of science fiction has two major awards — the Hugo, so the readers can give an attaboy or an attagirl to works they liked, and the Nebula, so other pros can admire the craft. Although there have been times when both awards have gone to the same novel, more often they go to completely different works. There’s no doubt that Where The Crawdads Sing has taken the mainstream equivalent of the Hugo — the people’s choice award — but I doubt it’s likely to win major accolades from other writers.

Anyway, before I dive into the principal issue I wish to discuss, I want to say a bit more about Kya, the main character. Yesterday, I mentioned how much of an absolute genius she must be — world-class marine biologist based on reading a handful of books (plus, of course, years of field observation) and a painter of works so brilliant they’re collected into volume after volume, despite never having had a single art lesson.

But, on top of that, Kya is also drop-dead gorgeous. It’s said repeatedly in the novel: boys lose their heads over her (Chase damn near literally).

Now, yes, there were many a natural beauty in history, but we’re talking about someone who is gorgeous in the eyes of American teenagers and men in the era of blonde bombshells Marilyn Monroe and Tuesday Weld, and I’m not wholly convinced that a woman who has grown up in a swamp, who has never had a haircut except one she did herself, never had dental care, and never been to a doctor, would pass muster with that crowd. And, yes, I’d say precisely the same thing if Kya was a man; I’d very much be surprised to see all the women in Barkley Cove swooning over someone they called Marsh Boy.

So, we’ve got a genius-level intellect, a brilliant artist, a gorgeous face, and amazing figure, and someone who, in the end, gets away with killing the man who had mistreated here. You can see why so many people wanted to be that character — why this book has resonated with so many readers.

But, in fact, Kya precisely fits the definition of a Mary Sue. Per Wikipedia: “Mary Sue is a generic name for any fictional character who is so competent or perfect that this appears absurd, even in the context of the fictional setting. Mary Sues are often an author’s self-insertion or wish fulfillment.”

Of course, some might object that my own creation, Caitlin Decter in the WWW trilogy (Wake, Watch, and Wonder), is both intellectually gifted and physically attractive, so who am I to talk?

Indeed, yes, Caitlin has those attributes, and I won’t defend at length, except to say that her attractiveness serves a thematic point. Unlike Kya — who falls for Chase, the stereotypical high-school quarterback, who, in turn, wants her only because she is gorgeous and unrestrained in lovemaking — Caitlin’s attractiveness, which she is utterly indifferent to herself, having been blind almost her whole life, leads her to pick a worthy partner in the kind and supportive, but outwardly unattractive, Matt.

I was doing something thematic about inner lives, in a trilogy in which the central conceit is the exploration of an entity, Webmind, who has nothing but an inner life and no physicality at all.

Anyway, on to narrative voice.

The choice of how you’ll tell a story is one beginning writers rarely give much thought to, but it’s crucial to the impact you’re going to have on readers. Whose story is it? Does that mean that person should be the viewpoint character? Maybe … but maybe not: see Ishmael in Moby-Dick, Dr. Watson in all of Sherlock Holmes, and so on.

And in what voice shall the tale be recounted? In first-person (I did this); in second person (you didn’t do that!); or in third-person (he / she / they did something)?

For Crawdads, Delia Owens apparently made the most-common choice, which is that the main character is also the principal viewpoint character, and the story is told in third-person (Kya did this; she then did that).

But there’s more to a choice of narrative voice than just that. Third-person narration can be either limited (you are privy to the inner thoughts of only the viewpoint character) or omniscient (you get to hear the thoughts of all the characters in a scene).

The power of limited third-person (or first-person) is that the reader becomes the viewpoint character in a psychological sense: that’s precisely what we mean when we say the reader identifies with the character: by seeing the world through his or her eyes only, by knowing his or her thoughts only, you, the reader, become the main character, and the novel becomes your story. It’s the principal appeal of modern fiction, and it’s the one thing TV and movies can’t effectively emulate. In those latter media, you are a spectator, watching what happens to the hero, but in a novel, you are the hero, mind-melding with him or her.

Now, there are other possible versions of third person, and a good writer might employ them for specific reasons.

As I’ve often said, The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett is one of my favorite novels — and that’s not just because of the memorable characters, snappy dialog, and clever plot. I also love it because Hammett pulled off a technical tour de force. Although detective Sam Spade is the viewpoint character, inasmuch as we mostly follow him from scene to scene, we never enter his head; we never are privy to his thoughts.

Nor do we enter anyone else’s head. All we hear are the characters spoken words and all we see is their body language, which Hammett describes in almost forensic detail: every quirking of a mouth, lifting of an eyebrow, glance to one side, and more. He never tells us what people are thinking, but leaves us to deduce it, if we can, from posture and facial expressions.

Why did Hammett do that? Simple: everybody in The Maltese Falcon has a hidden agenda, everyone is lying to everyone else, and the reader is left guessing right up until the end about what’s actually going on. If we were privy to Sam Spade’s thoughts, the whole novel would fall apart: we’d know what he was up to before the end. And there’s no natural sidekick (no Dr. Watson) with him in most scenes whose head we can enter either. And so Hammett devised a narrative technique that let him tell his mystery tale without ever once violating his own rules and thereby always playing fair with the reader.

Well, Delia Owens faced a similar challenge in constructing Where the Crawdads Sing, and, in my opinion, from a novelist’s perspective, her answer is a cheat.

Yes, she does give us pale imitations of Hammett’s dispassionate external appraisal by the narrator:

Kya returned to the porch steps later and waited for a long time, but, as she looked to the end of the lane, she never cried. Her face was still, her lips a simple thin line under searching eyes.

But sometimes Owens does want us to know specifically what Kya is thinking, and so we bore into Kya’s skull and are indeed able to access her stream of thought (in what’s called limited third-person point of view, the standard mode of most modern fiction):

Kya touched the words as if they were a message, as though Ma had underlined them specifically so her daughter would read them someday by this dim kerosene flame and understand. It wasn’t much, not a handwritten note tucked in the back of a sock drawer, but it was something. She sensed that the words clinched a powerful meaning, but she couldn’t shake it free. If she ever became a poet, she’d make the message clear.

So, sometimes we can hear her thoughts and sometimes we can’t. And when we can’t but Owens still wants us to know what Kya is thinking, she has Kya talk out loud to herself, which is clumsy as hell. For instance, upon finding a feather Tate has left for her, Kya speaks her inner monologue even though she’s all by herself:

“How’d it get stuck straight up in the stump?” Whispering, Kya looked around. “That boy must’ve put it here. He could be watchin’ me right now.”

But then Owens decides to essentially have no rules at all about what we can and cannot know, except as it serves her plot. For instance, suddenly, in the same scene, we go from watching Kya without knowing what Kya is really thinking to being right inside the head of Sarah Singletary, the grocery-store cashier:

Sarah glanced at Kya and remembered the little girl coming barefoot into the market for so many years. No one would ever know, but before Kya could count, Sarah had given the child extra change — money she had to take from her own purse to balance the register. Of course, Kya was dealing with small sums to start with, so Sarah contributed only nickels and dimes, but it must have helped.

Now, why does this bother me so much? Simple: the whole plot of the story depends on the reader not knowing what Kya knows, and not being privy to Kya’s thoughts on crucial matters. All the time Kya is sitting in jail, and all during her trial, we don’t get to know what Kya is thinking because, of course, any honest account of it would be that she was thinking things such as:

• Yeah, maybe they’ll send me to the electric chair, but I’m still glad I killed Chase.

• Ooops! I didn’t do as good a job of covering my tracks as I thought.

• Hah, fooled that witness! My disguise was good!

And, once you allow head-hopping (suddenly reading the minds of characters other than the original viewpoint character in a scene), you’re cheating if you don’t do it when the other characters in a scene have secrets. Chase must have been thinking all the time he was with Kya that if he kept falsely promising to marry her, she’d continue to provide wild sex. But if we’d known that, there goes the plot.

The artform Delia Owens tackled is a tricky one: the subgenre of mystery fiction in which either the detective is actually the killer or the presumed-to-be-innocent accused is. It’s very hard to play fair with the reader under such circumstances; it requires a lot of narrative finesse to pull off. And, despite all of its many other virtues, I simply found that finesse lacking in Where the Crawdads Sing.

For those who are curious, I talk more about the writer’s craft as related to point of view in this column:

Point of View

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I’d orginally posted the above, as well as yesterday’s post, which was also about Where the Crawdads Sing, on my Facebook wall, and that led to this question from a reader there and my answer:

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This is very insightful, thank you Robert :)

I feel I’m missing something important, though. Why do you regard the selective disclosure of internal information (thoughts/motivations) as worthy of a different treatment to the selective disclosure of external information (spoken words, body language, environment)? Isn’t selective disclosure the prime prerogative of the author?

As far as I can determine (and please forgive me if this seems reductive or uncharitable to someone at your level of his craft!), one might simplify a description of fiction to something like “the author tells you what they want you to know about a world they have imagined, in precisely the order they want you to know it.”

Based on this description I wouldn’t call Owens’ selective head-hopping “cheating” any more than I’d call withheld information in your novel Red Planet Blues “cheating,” because there couldn’t be a story without it. That to me suggests I haven’t understood why Owens’ approach is a faux pas.

Thanks!

My reply:

Well, in one sense, you’re right: the author can do whatever he or she pleases; that’s his or her prerogative.

But the reader is also entitled to accept or reject what the author does; that’s the readers prerogative. And when the author is clumsy, we have a term for it: we say the author has been manipulative. And Delia Owens was, in my view.

And speaking of prerogatives, what the character says vs. what the character thinks is actually the character’s prerogative (yes, I know, the author has created the character, but bear with me): if I see that lousy son-of-a-bitch I just can’t stand coming toward me — well, that’s what I’m going to think; I, the character named Rob, has no volition about what thoughts occur to me. But what I say to that person as he comes up to me — forced friendliness, open hostility, or nothing at all — is something I do get to choose.

What Owens did was show us the characters’ thoughts when it suited her and withheld them from us when it suited her: that’s both manipulation and lazy writing. In most other books, you either are or are not in the main character’s head; you aren’t pulled in and out at the convenience of the author.

It’s akin to the narrative rule that the description must include everything significant that a cursory examination of the scene by the viewpoint character would reveal. It’s fair to say this:

I opened the door, saw that there was a lion in the room but went in anyway, trusting that the animal wouldn’t kill me.

It’s unfair to say:

I opened the door, walked into the room, sat in the easy chair, picked up a magazine, did the crossword at the back, and then the lion — oh, hey, did I mention there was a lion in the room? — bit my foot off.

To your point about Red Planet Blues, well, I’m not going to provide spoilers for my own novel here (this thread clearly identified it as having spoilers for Crawdads only, and I prefer to limit it to that), but in my novel (which is told in first-person narration) you are 100% privy to Alex Lomax’s thoughts: you’re in his head and you hear exactly what his stream of consciousness would naturally be at each point in the novel; at no point does he conveniently become a black box impenetrable to the reader.

Now, the fact that you likely misinterpreted what he thought is me being artful — but it’s also natural, as I hope this slightly over-the-top example will demonstrate. If I’m feeling nostalgic, I might think something along these lines:

I miss my hometown.

That’s a legitimate transcription of my thought, precisely as I might think it. Now, what would not be natural would be if I’d purported to transcribe my thought thusly:

I miss my hometown, which is Ottawa, and although many people think where I live now — Toronto — is Canada’s capital, that’s not true; it’s just the provincial capital. Ottawa, formerly known as Bytown, is the national capital — although, interestingly, both Ottawa and Toronto are in the same province, the one called Ontario.

You might argue that, hey, the first version was withholding information that the second one conveys, but only the first one is what anyone would actually think in the moment, and Alex isn’t hiding anything in Red Planet Blues; you’re just guessing wrong about what he’s referring to when you read his thoughts: every time Alex thinks of the thing you’re wondering about in Red Planet Blues, he thinks about it precisely as he naturally would, and the thought is honesty and accurately relayed in the text.

Also, the plot of my novel does not in any way hinge on the thing I allowed the reader to misconstrue. It only affects how the reader might feel about Alex after he or she turns the last page.

But in Crawdads, the plot — the entire mystery — depends on us thinking we’re privy to Kya’s inner life only to discover that we’ve been lied to about that all along.

And that, my friend, in my view, is cheating.

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GO BACK TO PART ONE

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Robert J. Sawyer online:
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THIS IS PART ONE OF TWO; PART TWO IS HERE

SPOILER ALERT!

Last week, I finished reading Where the Crawdads Sing, the much-lauded bestselling debut novel by Delia Owens.

I’M NOT KIDDING: SPOILERS!

I understand that a great many people love this book, and I myself enjoyed it a lot, although parts of it — Kya’s abusive childhood, in particular — were very unpleasant reading, as, of course, they were intended to be.

But, as a writer, this novel bothered me because of things that perhaps only a writer would worry about — indeed, obviously they bothered only a vanishingly small number of Delia Owens’s readers.

This, of course, goes to the heart of the problem with teaching writing: we writers tend to overemphasize things that readers may not care about at all: that’s why Dan Brown likely outsells all the books by all the full-time faculty in all the M.F.A. creative-writing programs in the United States combined. In the end, all the reader cares about is how they felt, not how that feeling was accomplished.

So, as the saying goes, your mileage may vary — indeed, it almost certainly did vary from mine. In this post, I’ll talk about some of the issues that tripped me up; in another post, I’ll tackle prose and narrative voice issues. Here goes:

Of course, I bring a science-fiction writer’s perspective to some of this that simply won’t resonate with mainstream readers. But, in many ways, Kya, living alone in a swamp, is an alien being.

And so, despite briefly having a teenage teacher in Tate, who taught her to read (very late in life, so late that it would be very difficult to do), she learned on her own to become a world-class expert in marine biology? Maybeeee, but my plausibility-meter is starting to move toward the red zone.

But then Kya is also a world-class painter, without a single lesson — good enough that her first book of paintings of marsh life got her an advance in 1968 of US$5,000, and that without an agent? That’s US$38,000 today. Well, good on her, I say, but … really?

Still, ignore those superior intellectual achievements; the plot doesn’t hinge on them. But it does hinge on this: Although growing up in the middle of the last century, Kya has never heard a radio drama, been to a movie, seen a TV show, or, from what’s said in the book, read any novels or any nonfiction except poetry and science books.

And yet, somehow, she’s savvy enough to know that if she is to get away with murder she needs an alibi (and a very elaborate one, at that, involving her suddenly becoming a master of disguise and not one but two secret journeys).

Okay, so somehow she learned that you have to cover your tracks for a crime (which she literally does), and indeed, somehow learned that fingerprints are evidence, too. Bright woman!

(Although she apparently doesn’t know about fiber analysis, leaving obvious clues that the detectives say she must have missed out of ignorance: “She probably had no idea fibers would fall off the hat onto his jacket. Or that the lab could identify them. She just wouldn’t know something like that.”)

But then she does the incalculably stupid and takes from Chase’s body the one thing that links her to the crime, the necklace she had given him years before and that he’d worn every day since. For what possible reason? She either does know how to cover up a murder or she doesn’t.

And why is she the only suspect? Why doesn’t Chase’s widow Pearl fall under suspicion? Chase had been cheating on Pearl and — making it worse! — with someone far beneath what Pearl considered to be their social station. Yes, Chase attempted to rape Kya — and that is horrendous — but Pearl is the woman scorned in the eyes of the community, and the police never so much as think about her as a suspect?

And that brings us to the next problem: Kya beats the living daylights out of Chase when he tries to rape her, right? Kicks him in the balls and repeatedly in the kidneys, and leaves him incapacitated, saying loudly enough not just for him but for others to hear that she’ll kill him if he ever comes near her again, right?

So just how does she lure him not back into the marsh, and not just back to her shack, but all the way back to the fire tower, up the ladder, and onto the platform? Why did he go? When did they make up enough (in his eyes) for him to want to go? Yes, we can speculate answers — but there are none in the text.

And if Kya did want to kill him, surely there were easier ways, and ones more likely to succeed than hoping he’d stand facing her just so and then let her push him through the open grate that he’d conveniently not closed behind him (he fell backward, remember, not forward; he was not leaning over to close the grate when pushed).

So what would have been an easier way? Well, Chase was out boating alone often. Kya could have lain in wait for him — she was repeatedly portrayed as skilled at hiding in the marsh from both him and Tate — kill Chase, then dump the body somewhere where it wouldn’t be found, or just make it look like a boating accident. Done.

The elaborate murder she committed instead required Chase’s cooperation to make it possible: he had to willingly go with her to the Fire Tower. And despite all the careful planning to conceal her involvement, she chose to kill him at a location that she had no reason to believe Chase hadn’t connected to her in his bragging to the other boys. And then, again despite all her planning, she took the necklace she’d given him, the one piece of evidence that tied her to him (and then kept it in her home — she’s lucky the cops were incompetent in searching it!).

Yes, her Columbo-esque elaborate murder might have satisfied all sorts of symbolic needs, but it also led to her being a hair’s breadth from the electric chair because the case so clearly pointed to her being the culprit.

And, remember, the murder depended on a very tight schedule, made even tighter by the night-time bus she took back to Barkley Cove running twenty-five minutes late. As Tom (her defense attorney) says quite clearly:

“Those actions would have taken one hour seven minutes minimum, and that does not count time supposedly waiting for Chase. But the bus back to Greenville, which she had to catch, departed only fifty minutes after she arrived. Therefore, it is a simple fact: there was not enough time for her to commit this alleged crime.”

The Sheriff’s only rebuttal is that she could have done it if and only if she’d gone to the fire tower by land, but she did not; she was seen by the fishermen — three of them — leaving there in her boat.

And speaking of the Sheriff and his deputy, these were completely cardboard characters who spent most of the book doing classic “As you know, Bob” dialog:

“That’s very curious,” Ed said. “What was it strung with? Maybe it came off when he fell.”

“It was a single shell hung on a piece of rawhide that was just long enough to go over his head. It wasn’t loose and was tied in a knot. I just don’t see how it could’ve flung off.”

“I agree. Rawhide’s tough and makes a mean knot,” Ed said.

There was no chemistry between the cops; no conflict; no witty banter. They were just there to provide exposition and move the plot forward. Contrast them with the brilliant portrayals by Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey of the two bayou detectives in the first season of True Detective.

Speaking of dialog, the constant attempt at transcription of Southern dialect got tiresome for me awfully fast, not to mention arguably being offensive:

“He’s done come sev’ral times now, Miz Clark, either brings sump’m or asks to see ya. Won’t ya see him today, Miz Clark? It’s Saderdee, no court, nothin’ to do in here the livelong day.”

The wording is evocative without all the misspellings and contractions. A little of that at the beginning of the novel would have sufficed for me, with the author then easing off and trusting us to hear the accents:

“He’s done come several times now, Miss Clark, either brings something or asks to see you. Won’t you see him today, Miss Clark? It’s Saturday, no court, nothing to do in here the livelong day.”

Robert B. Parker‘s novels are set in Boston, and if he had Spenser constantly saying things like, “Let’s pawk the caw ovah by Hawvaad Yaad,” people would have surely objected — and rightly so. So why isn’t this offensive when it’s done to portray Southerners and/or poor people?

Anyway, yes, in the end, the murder was satisfying emotionally — Kya killed Chase, the bastard who had toyed with her heart callously and then tried to rape her.

And, like most readers, I had the cathartic reaction Delia Owens intended to the fact that Kya got away with murdering this monster: Good for her!

But as a writer who wants a plot to go snick-snick-snick, as a mystery-fiction reader who expects the murderer to be clever and the murder plausible, it left me scratching my head.

Tomorrow, I’ll ruminate here on the narrative-technique issues in Where the Crawdads Sing that bothered me. But, again, let me say I did enjoy the book and am glad I read it.

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GO TO PART TWO

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I’m chuffed to be the first clue in today’s Quizword crossword in the Sunday Mirror in the UK (Sunday, June 21, 2020). “6 Across” is “1999 science fiction novel by Robert J Sawyer.” I never foresaw that! ;)

(Click picture for larger version.)

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Six years ago, on June 12, 2014, the University of Winnipeg — the oldest university in the province of Manitoba, Canada — gave me an Honorary Doctor of Laws Degree; former Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chréitien also received the same degree that day.

I was nominated for the honorary doctorate jointly by the Dean of Science, Dr. James Currie, and the Emeritus Dean of Theology, Rev. Dr. James Christie, in part in recognition of the thoughtful treatment of the science-and-religion dialogue in my work.

This was my second honorary doctorate; I also hold an Honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, which was awarded in 2007.

So, does that mean I can call myself “Dr. Sawyer”?

In many contexts, yes, and, indeed, almost always when I speak at a university the professor introducing me does so by calling me “Dr. Sawyer.” Here’s an excerpt from the definition of “Doctor” in the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language:

a. A person who has earned the highest academic degree awarded by a college or university in a specified discipline.

b. A person awarded an honorary degree by a college or university.

But I never use the title Doctor, or the abbreviation in front of my name, myself for several reasons:

First, my father worked really hard to get his PhD. Although he was incredibly proud when I received both of my honorary doctorates, him well understanding how rare and special an honor those are, I honor him by not using the title himself earned.

Second, even though my father was indeed Dr. Sawyer, he refused to use the title “Doctor.” We happened to live three doors up the street from an M.D. when I was growing up. My dad once said to me, when I asked him as a kid why he didn’t use “Doctor” that, if someone gets hit by a car out front of our house, he wants the neighbors to run and get Dr. Jacobs, who can help save the person’s life, not Dr. Sawyer, who can explain Keynesian and Neo-Walrasian macroeconometrics to the poor sap while he exsanguinates.

Third, for that matter, my father — and, by osmosis, I — resent the use of the related title my father was entitled to until the day he died by those who don’t have a PhD, namely “professor.” These days, every sessional instructor at a junior college swans around referring to themselves as Professor So-and-so, but professor traditionally an earned title, too, normally reserved for those who have a PhD.

My father earned the even rarer title of Professor Emeritus when he retired, upon recommendation of his colleagues and approval of the dean, meaning his contributions to his university had been of such magnitude that he’d continue to be considered a faculty member, with the privileges thereof (including supervising grad students if he wished) after he’d retired.

Fourth, honestly, I have honors far rarer than either an earned or honorary doctorate. I’m a Member of the Order of Canada, my nation’s highest honor, and a Member of the Order of Ontario, my provinces’ highest honor (and the latter, on a per-capita basis is an even rarer honor than the former).

Only on those extremely rare occasions on which one must peacock (the top line of my C.V., for instance), do I have more letters after my name “Robert J. Sawyer” than there are in my name:

C.M., O.Ont., B.A.A., D.Litt., LL.D.

Still, as I wrote in The Oppenheimer Alternative, when General Leslie Groves is talking with Los Alamos security chief Peer de Silva, who is the first speaker:

“Of course, he figured I couldn’t make head nor tail of them, or of what he was saying about them.”

“The intellectuals’ hamartia,” said Groves.

“Sir?”

“My goodness, son, don’t they teach the classics at West Point anymore? Their hamartia; their fatal flaw. Arrogance. They assume that anyone without a string of letters trailing behind his name like pretentious ducklings can’t possibly grasp their thoughts.”

So, as I say to everyone, “Just call me Rob.” ;)

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Users of Kobo E Ink reading devices,something has gone wrong at the Kobo servers, and the master file of The Oppenheimer Alternative seems to have been corrupted. I’ve just uploaded a replacement version, and I’ll let you know when it goes live. It was fine on launch day, and I don’t know what happened at their end.

Meanwhile, if you’re having trouble on a Kobo E Ink derived — text running the entire width of the screen left to right and top to bottom; no page breaks at chapter breaks — EMAIL ME at sawyer@sfwriter.com and I’ll get you the correct version immediately.

My apologies!

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Yesterday (Tuesday, June 2, 2020) was the official publication date of my 24th novel, The Oppenheimer Alternative — and where better to launch the book than the place where it all began? I spent an hour in conversation with Mike Shinabery of the New Mexico Museum of Space History on his morning show on KRSY-AM radio.

You can download the full interview as an .mp3 file or stream it, if you prefer, from this .m3u link.

The show starts at the 1-minute mark with Benny Goodman’s “The Glory of Love,” which I use in my novel as the theme for Oppie and Jean Tatlock.

The outro is the great satirist Tom Lehrer singing his atomic-bomb song, “We’ll All Go Together When We Go.”

Commercials included, and, as a bonus for Star Trek: Discovery fans, the one at 27:17 is a PSA from Sonequa Martin-Green.

Since Mike and I couldn’t be together for the interview (my planned trip to Alamogordo having been scrubbed thanks to COVID-19), here’s a picture of Mike when he and Nichelle Nichols both flew on NASA’s SOFIA (Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy) 747 in 2015.

Robert J. Sawyer online:
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Robert J. Sawyer online:
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Today is the 90th birthday of SETI pioneer Frank Drake. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Frank several times, and his work makes an appearance in The Oppeheimer Alternative:

“Yeah, that wouldn’t be so bad.” Feynman held up the latest Astronomical Journal, dated October 1959. “But Frank Drake’s got a note in here. He found decimetric radiation coming from Jupiter. Deci, not deca; DIM, not DAM.”

Oppie gestured for Feynman to hand him the journal. Dick had placed a slip of paper in it to mark the page, but Robert was momentarily confused. There were two notes from Frank Drake published in this issue, one after the other. The first was irrelevant, but the second — “Non-thermal microwave radiation from Jupiter” — was the one Feynman was concerned about. It actually had a co-author, which the journal listed as S. Hvatum. Oppie figured the initial was a typo; he knew the first name of Drake’s colleague at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Greenbank was Hein.

Sadly, the rest of the brief piece — just three paragraphs, taking up much less than a full page — was harder to find fault with. Drake was a good empirical research scientist: steady, reputable, occasionally brilliant.

And for those of you wondering if any of my signature quotes from Star Trek would make it into The Oppeheimer Alternative, there’s one in the last line above: “A good empirical research scientist: steady, reputable, occasionally brilliant.” Spock describes Dr. Leighton in the same words in “The Conscience of the King.”

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Today is the 50th anniversary of the release of Beneath the Planet of the Apes, the second film in the series. I gain more respect for that film on each viewing.

There were production choices, dictated by budget I suppose, that bothered me when I first saw it as a kid:

• the use of so many extras in masks instead of full make-up appliances, especially in the Ursus “Invade” speech scene
• the ridiculous ape body suits Zaius and Ursus wore in the steambath
• the terrible matte work when Taylor disappears into the illusory cliff face
• the fairly crappy looking crash site (even as a kid, I recognized the Jupiter 2’s landing gear)
• the pretty unimpressive looking Alpha-Omega bomb.

And, even as a kid, the continuity errors bothered me:

• Brent on a rescue mission for Taylor — why? As far as Earth knows, Taylor is doing just fine, thanks.
• Zaius calling both Zira and Cornelius “animal psychologists,” when Cornelius is, of course, an archaeologist.
• Nobody in all the time they were making the film bothering to slap the first reel of the original onto a projector to check what the date meter said in Taylor’s ship so that the year in Beneath is 3955 instead of 3978.

And, of course, I keenly felt the lack of Roddy McDowall and was pissed off that they cut a line out of his resued reading from the Sacred Scrolls before the opening credits.

But I’ve come to appreciate the film more and more:

• James Gregory is absolutely wonderful as Ursus
• David Watson’s take on Cornelius is actually fine
• Of course, Paul Dehn’s dialog is terrific
• And the mutants and their ceremonies have grown on me over time.

It’s not a magnificent film, but it is a good, thoughtful, and ambitious one, and probably the best they could do given that Heston refused to appear in any more than just a cameo. And, given how graphically violent it is, it’s satisfyingly pacifist in its messaging.

And, as one reviewer noted, it still stands as “the most batshit insane G-rated movie of all time.”

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There’s just one week left until The Oppenheimer Alternative comes out, so here’s our penultimate real-life chapter-head epigraph from the novel:

“The history of science is rich in the example of the fruitfulness of bringing two sets of techniques, two sets of ideas, developed in separate contexts for the pursuit of new truth, into touch with one another.”

–J. Robert Oppenheimer

Certainly, this is true of the science in The Oppenheimer Alternative. Oppenheimer started out as a chemist, his own pre-war work was in astrophysics, and only after the Manhattan Project became public was he famed as an atomic physicist.

And my novel brings together disparate thinkers indeed, including the physicists who built the bomb and rocketeer Wernher von Braun.

But, more than that, I think Oppie’s quote is particularly applicable to the field I’ve devoted my life to: science fiction. Indeed, when asked to define science fiction, I sometimes call it “the literature of intriguing juxtapositions.”

Where else would one find, for instance, quantum physics and paleoanthropology cheek-by-jowl except in a novel such as my Hominids? Or life-prolongation technology and SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, as in my Rollback? Or experimental psychology and (again) quantum physics as in Quantum Night?

At most universities, professors in such disparate departments probably don’t even know each other (unless they have to serve together on some cross-faculty committee).

When McMaster University decided to hold a three-day academic conference in honor of the donation of my papers to their archives, they took my suggestion and called it “Science Fiction: The Interdisciplinary Genre,” and we had papers presented by academics in such diverse fields as theology, theater, literature, philosophy, astronomy, and gender studies.

I initially set out to be a paleontologist — but you can’t just be a paleontologist; you have to drill down the tree of subspecialties until you end up being a paleontologist (level 1), a vertebrate paleontologist (level 2), a dinosaurian vertebrate paleontologist (level 3), a dinosaurian vertebrate paleontologist who specializes in theropods (level 4).

But I am interested in ALL THE THINGS, and being a science-fiction writer was one of only two possible career choices that would let me hop freely from scientific discipline to discipline (the other is science journalist).

And so, The Oppenheimer Alternative: a novel that combines political history, military history, the history of atomic and nuclear physics, astrophysics, quantum physics, rocketry, and Martian observational astronomy, along with — in the character studies — psychology into a single whole, which, to paraphrase Oppie, brings multiple sets of ideas, developed in separate contexts for the pursuit of new truth, into touch with each other.

The novel comes out one week from today, on June 2, 2020, in print, ebook, and audiobook worldwide.

Pictured, left to right, at Einstein’s 70th birthday party at the Institute for Advanced Study (where much of my book takes place):

Eugene Wigner, Hermann Weyl, Kurt Gödel, I.I. Rabi, Albert Einstein, Rudlof Ladenburg, and J. Robert Oppenheimer — all but Weyl and Ladenburg are characters in The Oppenheimer Alternative.

(Click picture for a bigger version.)

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Forget all those (cough, cough) rave reviews of my novel The Oppenheimer Alternative, coming out in eight days. Here are the reviews one of my top-five favorite novels got when it was first published in 1930: The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett. It’s a great read for a hot summer day!

“This department announces a new and pretty huge enthusiasm, to wit: Dashiell Hammett. Moreover, it would not surprise us one whit if Mr. Hammett should turn out to be the Great American Mystery Writer. The horsepower of Mr. Hammett’s pen must be sampled to be believed. In short, The Maltese Falcon is the best one … in Lord knows when. Read it and see.”

— Will Cuppy in The Herald Tribune

“If the locution ‘hard-boiled’ had not already been coined it would be necessary to coin it now to describe the characters of Dashiell Hammett’s latest detective story.”

— The New York Times

“First and foremost among the new thrillers comes Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. It stands out among the rest like a .45 among a flock of cap pistols. The story has plenty of action, a good plot, excellent characterization, and a startling denouement. Also, Mr. Hammett knows all about detective work, and the authors who really know that can be counted on the thumbs of one hand. This is not only probably the best detective story we have ever read, it is an exceedingly well-written novel. There are few of Mr. Hammett’s contemporaries who can write prose as clean-cut, vivid and realistic.”

— Walter Brooks in Outlook

The Maltese Falcon is in the public domain in Canada and many other countries (but not yet in the US, the UK, or the EU).

For those in countries with copyright terms of 50 years or less after the author’s death, here’s a FREE EBOOK VERSION

I took the text from Gutenberg Canada, cleaned up the formatting (smartening the punctuation and indenting the paragraphs), and added the cover from the first edition. FREE!

• ePUB (Kobo, Nook, Apple, etc.): hammett–the-maltese-falcon-rjs.epub
• MOBI (Kindle): hammett–the-maltese-falcon-rjs.mobi

Enjoy!

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Just two weeks — a scant 14 days! — left to get my latest novel The Oppenheimer Alternative at the pre-publication special ebook price of an atomically small US$4.99 or local equivalent at Amazon, B&N, Apple Books, Kobo, etc., worldwide. After that, the price goes up, up, up like an Orion rocket!

Worldwide ebook buying links are here.

“My favorite Sawyer book of all; a solid award contender!” —Amazing Stories

“Science fiction fans will devour this smart speculative tale.” —Publishers Weekly

“I loved it!” —Lee Smolin

“This book has everything a reader wants from Sawyer.” —Analog

“Oppenheimer fans will be intrigued.” —Martin J. Sherwin

“I felt like I was back in Los Alamos — and I should know: I worked there!” —Doug Beason

“I knew many of these physicists, and Sawyer nails them accurately.” —Gregory Benford

“A compulsive fictional narrative.” —Jem Rolls

“Sawyer portrays brilliantly the struggles of the scientists who started it all.” —James Christie

“A novel as expansive as the physics (and physicists) under whose watch the original Project Orion was launched.” —George Dyson

“A realistic and intriguing look at Oppenheimer and his work.” —Booklist

“A terrific story.” —Eric Flint

“Sawyer has outdone himself!” —Jonas Saul

“I was hooked from the beginning to the end.” —Andre Bormanis

“I read this book at a gulp — now I’m going to go read it again. Bravo!” —S.M. Stirling

Get your discounted ebook copy from your favorite ebook store here.

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We spent an interesting evening watching the 1947 movie The Beginning Or The End, which was the first-ever dramatic treatment of the Manhattan Project (the subject, in part, of my new novel The Oppenheimer Alternative, coming out two weeks from today).

Overall, the film ranges from charmingly earnest to sappily sentimental to just this side of propaganda. But, that said, I quite enjoyed it. J. Robert Oppenheimer is a minor character in the film, affably portrayed by the Canadian actor Hume Cronyn, the first person ever to portray Oppenheimer in any medium.

The film’s star is Brian Donlevy, playing General Leslie R. Groves, and he does the character credit. (Donlevy went on to portray Professor Bernard Quatermass in the movie version of The Quatermass Xperiment).

The second and third leads are Robert Walker (the father of the actor of the same name who played in the classic Star Trek episode “Charlie X”) and Tom Drake.

Walker plays a version of Groves’s right-hand-man Kenneth Nichols so fictionalized that they had to change his name to “Nixon.” And Drake plays a wholly fictitious character, whose romance with his new bride (a stunningly beautiful Beverly Tyler) is tacked on as “human interest” that the film really doesn’t need, although the actors are pleasant enough.

The film gave to Drake’s character the story of Canadian physicist Louis Slotin, who accidentally triggered criticality and saved others at the cost of his own life. That event that actually happened in May 1946 in Los Alamos, but the filmmakers move it to August 1945 and Tinian airbase just hours before the Enola Gay takes off from there to obliterate Hiroshima.

The movie does do a good job of showing people conflicted about their work on the bomb and has a nice (but wholly fictitious, as far as I can tell) bit with a Quaker and two other scientists giving their resignations to Enrico Fermi after the Stagg field atomic-pile test because of their pacifist beliefs.

But the film out-and-out lies about the people of Hiroshima having been warned by an air-drop leaflet campaign for ten days leading up to the bombing of Hiroshima so that they could safely evacuate. As the review in the March 1947 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists says, this was “the most horrible falsification of history” in the movie.

Unlike so many of the American fictional treatments of the Manhattan Project, this film repeatedly gives Canadians (and the Brits!) their due, with an actor portraying C.D. Howe, Canada’s Minister of Munitions and Supply.

I spotted an uncredited John Hamilton (later Perry White of the 1950s Superman TV series) as Harold Urey. The recreated bomber sequences involving the Enola Gay and its two companion planes — which seemed to be done with a trio of actual bombers, rather than miniatures — are really well done, as are the atomic-blast sequences.

The movie is available from Warner Archive, and the print and the transfer is as clean and crisp as one could hope for from a film this old that hasn’t undergone a clean-up restoration.

The one special feature is the theatrical trailer — and that must be seen to be believed. Rather than scenes from the movie, it consists of supposed interviews with movie-goers on preview night (all of who are actors in scripted parts, it seems) praising the movie to the skies and debating in measured tones the wisdom of atomic energy. The trail over the top; stunningly so.

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Each year, July 16 marks the anniversaries of two of the defining moments in the entire history of Homo sapiens, both of which are still within living memory for some.

For this year, 2020, July 16 is the fifty-first anniversary of the day on which human beings first embarked on a voyage to another world, with the launch of Apollo 11.

And that same day this year is the seventy-fifth anniversary of the world’s first atomic-bomb explosion, the Trinity test, conducted near Alamogordo, New Mexico. As I put it in The Oppenheimer Alternative — which comes out in just sixteen days and is available for pre-order now: “For the first time, humans were doing what only the stars themselves had previously wrought, converting matter directly into energy, Einstein’s E=mc² graduating from mere textbook formula into a devastating weapon.” Indeed, it’s this platinum anniversary that the release of my novel is timed to coincide with.

The ostensible reason for developing the atomic bomb was to defeat the Nazis. But, as I say in my novel, “In the end, conventional troops pressing in on Berlin — and maybe, Oppie mused, Hitler having learned of Mussolini’s corpse being strung up by its ankles and stoned and spat upon by those who had suffered under his regime — had moved Der Führer to accomplish with a single bullet what Oppie’s multi-million-dollar gadget was supposed to do: end the war in Europe.”

Of course, after the war, key Nazis were tried at Nuremberg; indeed, Oppenheimer’s best friend, Haakon Chevalier, was one of the translators at those trials. But some Nazis were given a free pass on their atrocities because the knowledge they possessed was deemed useful to the victors. And so Wernher von Braun, an S.S. officer, whose V-2 rockets, which had devastated London, had been built by slave labor, was able to surrender to the Americans, along with the rest of his German rocketeers.

His war crimes were ignored, and he was put in charge of the development of the Saturn V, the rocket that took humans to the moon. And although J. Robert Oppenheimer is the main character in my book, Wernher von Braun also figures prominently; indeed, in a fictional meeting between the two men, I have von Braun draw parallels between them, saying they were both cut from the same cloth:

“Both of us the brains behind massive technological efforts. Each with his sometimes benighted military supervisor — you with Groves, me with Dornberger. Both now celebrated for our war-time accomplishments. And both with a larger purpose, science —” Von Braun stopped, but the lilt of his voice suggested he’d originally intended to utter more. Oppie suspected the rocketeer had halted before the words “Über alles” could pass his lips.

When von Braun had surrendered to the Americans, his arm, which had been broken in two places, was in a huge cast, stuck in a half-raised position. In the novel, I call it “a stillborn Sieg Heil.”

We’ve only recently learned just how dark von Braun’s past was. Here’s a real-life chapter-head epigraph from The Oppenheimer Alternative, which references the fact that his history had been classified secret by the U.S. government:

Not included among the dossiers is one for rocket scientist Wernher von Braun. It was never transferred to N.A.R.A.

—U.S. National Archives and Records Administration

Pictured: Wernher von Braun, with his arm in a cast,
surrendering to the Americans in May 1945.

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In my new novel, The Oppenheimer Alternative — coming June 2, 2020, and available for pre-order now — the following exchange occurs between J. Robert Oppenheimer and his wife Kitty (with Kitty employing a racial slur that was regrettably all-too-common during the Second World War):

“They … they’ve dropped a second bomb,” Oppie said, holding her. “Apparently Kokura was clouded over, so they …” His voice caught; he’d intended to say “they hit Nagasaki instead,” but it didn’t matter, he realized; they were just names to Kitty, and to him, alien syllables.

“I’m so sorry,” she said softly. Kitty was much shorter than Oppie; the words were spoken into his bony chest.

“Why didn’t they surrender?” asked Oppie. “After the first one, why didn’t they surrender?”

“Truman said it had to be unconditional,” Kitty replied, still holding him. “Charlotte Serber thinks that’s the problem.” She disengaged from Oppie’s embrace but took his hand and led him to the couch by the stone fireplace. “She thinks the Japs want to keep their emperor. They think he’s divine; a god. She says unconditional surrender would be like asking the United States to agree to renounce Jesus.”

Was Charlotte Serber, the librarian at the Manhattan Project’s secret Los Alamos facility, correct? Yes.

Sure, in Killing the Rising Sun, often said to have been written by Bill O’Reilly, the case is made that the U.S. had to drop atomic bombs on Japan. But that’s simply wrong.

From July 17 to August 2, 1945, the leaders of the “Big Three” Allied countries — Soviet General Secretary Joseph Stalin, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill (replaced on July 26 by newly elected Prime Minister Clement Attlee), and U.S. President Harry S. Truman — met in Potsdam, Germany, to negotiate terms for the end of World War II. Four days after the end of this Potsdam Conference, on August 6, 1945, the United States unilaterally dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima; three days later, it dropped another one on Nagasaki.

But this was unnecessary. The key issue that had come out of the Potsdam Conference, which O’Reilly and Martin Dugard, who actually wrote the book, gloss over, is that Japan was willing to surrender well before the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; they simply weren’t willing to surrender unconditionally. They considered their emperor (Hirohito) to be divine, and they needed him to at least putatively remain as post-war head of the Japanese state (under whatever international oversight might be imposed).

The war could have ended in July 1945, or earlier, if the U.S. had been willing to forego the “unconditional” requirement. From the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes:

On the other hand, [U.S. Secretary of War Henry L.] Stimson had argued, because of the mountainous Japanese terrain and because “the Japanese are highly patriotic and certainly susceptible to calls for fanatical resistance to repel an invasion,” America would probably “have to go through with an even more bitter finish fight than in Germany” if it attempted to invade. Was there, then, any alternative? Stimson thought there might be:

I believe Japan is susceptible to reason in such a crisis to a much greater extent than is indicated by our current press and other current comment. Japan is not a nation composed wholly of mad fanatics of an entirely different mentality from ours. On the contrary, she has within the past century shown herself to possess extremely intelligent people, capable in an unprecedentedly short time of adopting not only the complicated technique of Occidental civilization but to a substantial extent their culture and their political and social ideas. Her advance in these respects … has been one of the most astounding feats of national progress in history ….

It is therefore my conclusion that a carefully timed warning be given to Japan ….

I personally think that if in [giving such a warning] we should add that we do not exclude a constitutional monarchy under her present dynasty, it would substantially add to the chances of acceptance.

Within the text of his proposal the Secretary of War several times characterized it as “the equivalent of an unconditional surrender,” but others did not see it so. Before [U.S. Secretary of State Jimmy] Byrnes left for Potsdam he had carried the document to ailing Cordell Hull, a fellow Southerner and Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of State from 1933 to 1944, and Hull had immediately plucked out the concession to the “present dynasty” — the Emperor Hirohito, in whose mild myopic figure many Americans had personified Japanese militarism — and told Byrnes that “the statement seemed too much like appeasement of Japan.”

It may have been, but by the time they arrived in Potsdam, Stimson, Truman and Byrnes had learned that it was also the minimum condition of surrender the Japanese were prepared to countenance, whatever their desperate situation. U.S. intelligence had intercepted and decoded messages passing between Tokyo and Moscow instructing Japanese ambassador Naotake Sato to attempt to interest the Soviets in mediating a Japanese surrender. “The foreign and domestic situation for the Empire is very serious,” Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo had cabled Sato on July 11, “and even the termination of the war is now being considered privately …. We are also sounding out the extent to which we might employ the USSR in connection with the termination of the war …. [This is] a matter with which the Imperial Court is … greatly concerned.” And pointedly on July 12:

It is His Majesty’s heart’s desire to see the swift termination of the war …. However, as long as America and England insist on unconditional surrender our country has no alternative but to see it through in an all-out effort for the sake of survival and the honor of the homeland.

And this whole insistence on unconditional surrender dated back to an off-the-cuff ad lib by now-deceased president Franklin D. Roosevelt from 1943. Also from Rhodes:

The month [journalist Henry C.] Wolfe’s call to aerial battle appeared in Harper’s — January 1943 — Franklin Roosevelt met with Winston Churchill at Casablanca. In the course of the meeting the two leaders discussed what terms of surrender they would eventually insist upon; the word “unconditional” was discussed but not included in the official joint statement to be read at the final press conference. Then, on January 24, to Churchill’s surprise, Roosevelt inserted the word ad lib: “Peace can come to the world,” the President read out to the assembled journalists and newsreel cameras, “only by the total elimination of German and Japanese war power …. The elimination of German, Japanese and Italian war power means the unconditional surrender of Germany, Italy, and Japan.” Roosevelt later told [U.S. Secretary of Commerce] Harry Hopkins that the surprising and fateful insertion was a consequence of the confusion attending his effort to convince French General Henri Girard to sit down with Free French leader Charles de Gaulle:

We had so much trouble getting those two French generals together that I thought to myself that this was as difficult as arranging the meeting of Grant and Lee — and then suddenly the Press Conference was on, and Winston and I had had no time to prepare for it, and the thought popped into my mind that they had called Grant “Old Unconditional Surrender,” and the next thing I knew I had said it.

Churchill immediately concurred — “Any divergence between us, even by omission, would on such an occasion and at such a time have been damaging or even dangerous to our war effort” — and unconditional surrender became official Allied policy.

As for the Emperor being allowed to retain his throne being the sticking point, it was — right to the very end, even after Nagasaki. From Rhodes’s final chapter:

The military leaders of Japan had still not agreed to surrender. The Emperor Hirohito therefore took the extraordinary step of forcing the issue. The resulting surrender offer, delivered through Switzerland, reached Washington on Friday morning, August 10 [, 1945]. It acknowledged acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration except in one crucial regard: that it “does not comprise any demand which prejudices the prerogatives of His Majesty as a Sovereign Ruler.”

In addition to Rhodes’s book, another excellent source on this topic is the more-recent Inferno: The Fall of Japan 1945 by Ronald Henkoff, which states:

The Americans were aware the Japanese had approached the Russians; the Army Signal Corps had long since cracked Japan’s diplomatic code and had been intercepting messages from Tokyo since 1940. In all the cables the Americans had decoded, Tokyo’s message remained the same: “Unconditional surrender is the only obstacle to peace.”

By late May [1945], Truman’s top advisers were beginning to grasp that, on this point, the Japanese would not bend.

Secretary of War Stimson, his deputy John McClory, and Acting Secretary of State Joseph Grew argued that if the Japanese knew no harm would come to their emperor, peace might be within reach — and postwar reconstruction might be easier to manage. Hirohito’s presence could lend legitimacy to the regime put in place by the Americans.

And, as I wrote in The Oppenheimer Alternative, the Japanese did finally get that one concession — after tens of thousands had died in atomic hellfire in Hiroshima and Nagasaki:

The Japanese had surrendered two weeks ago, on August 15, 1945, although the formal ceremony, to be held aboard the U.S.S. Missoui was still several days away. In the end, they’d received the only thing they’d wanted since first making overtures to surrender a year ago, in the summer of 1944: Hirohito, their divine Emperor, would retain the Chrysanthemum Throne. No other solution had ever been possible: the post-war world required a functioning domestic government on the Home Islands. But Truman had continued to insist on unconditional surrender, not making the Hirohito concession until after the two American atomic bombs had been dropped — after the new world order had been set.

Hirohito retained his throne until his death in 1989 at the age of eighty-seven — forty-four years after the end of World War II.

So, since the atomic bombings weren’t necessary, why do many American and Japanese history books continue to claim that they were? Writing in the magazine Foreign Policy (in an adapted excerpt from his book Five Myths About Nuclear Weapons), Ward Wilson, a senior fellow at the British American Security Information Council, gives a plausible answer:

Put yourself in the shoes of the emperor … The war, in short, has been a catastrophe and, worst of all, you’ve been lying to your people about how bad the situation really is. … So which would you rather do? … Issue a statement that says that you miscalculated spectacularly, made repeated mistakes, and did enormous damage to the nation? Or would you rather blame the loss on an amazing scientific breakthrough that no one could have predicted? … The Bomb was the perfect excuse for having lost the war. No need to apportion blame; no court of enquiry need be held.

Wilson also believes letting the bomb take all the blame suited Japan’s diplomatic needs in the post-war era:

Being able to recast Japan as a victimized nation — one that had been unfairly bombed with a cruel and horrifying instrument of war — would help to offset some of the morally repugnant things Japan’s military had done. Drawing attention to the atomic bombings helped to paint Japan in a more sympathetic light and deflect support for harsh punishment.

Wilson goes on to say that crediting the surrender to the bomb also strongly served American purposes:

If the Bomb won the war, then the perception of U.S. military power would be enhanced, U.S. diplomatic influence in Asia and around the world would increase, and U.S. security would be strengthened. The $2 billion spent to build it would not have been wasted.

The final version of Microsoft’s Encarta Encyclopedia was dated as 2005 and published in 2004. It contained an excellent essay by historian Gar Alperovitz that is no longer readily available; the online version of Encarta is long gone, too. The essay consists of 2,700 words of considerable wisdom, and I’ve unearthed it here.

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Many years ago, I attended a talk by Cynthia Good, publisher of Penguin Canada. When asked what was the first thing she looks for in a book submission, she said, “A way to get the author on TV.”

I’ve now got over 400 TV appearances to my credit, and an equal number of radio interviews — and I’m already booked to add significantly to that number for my 24th novel for The Oppenheimer Alternative, coming on June 2, 2020.

The easiest way to get press interest is by tying your book into an anniversary, an upcoming or current news story, or, at the very least, a local appearance. Even then, you should hand it to them on a silver platter: why they should do a story, why you should be the one interviewed for it, and precisely what you can say that’s interesting and provocative. This press release entitled “75th Anniversary of the Birth of the Atomic Age” makes precisely those points.

But what about talking about the actual book? Again, you need a way to make your novel be more than “There’s this guy, see, and he’s off on an adventure, and then — bam! — something happens, and then …” No one is going to schedule an interview with you so that you can just give a plot synopsis. But pointing out why your book is different and special and how it came to be can do the trick. Take this press release, “The Secret History of the Manhattan Project,” for instance.

Finally, there are many blogs and a few trade journals devoted to publishing-industry news. They want a completely different kind of approach. Hence, this release about the “Precedent-Setting Deal for Sawyer.”

Using similar approaches in the past, I’ve gotten media attention from countless places that do routinely cover fiction — and also from a great many that normally don’t.

Robert J. Sawyer online:
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Robyn Meta Herrington, active member of both SFWA and SF Canada, passed away fifteen years ago today, on Monday morning, May 3, 2004, in Calgary, Alberta, after a courageous multi-year battle with cancer.

Robyn’s short fiction appeared in such places as On Spec, Talebones, Adventures of Sword and Sorcery, Parsec, and in Mike Resnick‘s DAW Anthologies Return of the Dinosaurs (her first sale), Women Writing Science Fiction as Men, and New Voices in Science Fiction; one of her stories was produced by CBC Radio as part of its Alberta Anthology series. Her genre poetry appeared in Tesseracts 6 and Chiaroscuro, and she was working on a novel.

Robyn was an acquisitions editor for EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy, and was instrumental in bringing Australian writer K.A. Bedford‘s first novel, Orbital Burn, to market.

Robyn was a beloved mainstay of Calgary’s SF&F workshop, the Imaginative Fiction Writers Association, where she was known for insightful, compassionately presented critiques. She was also a frequent member of the committee for Con-Version, Calgary’s annual SF convention (including in 2002, when Con-Version was the CanVention–the Canadian National Science Fiction Convention), and was often involved with the con’s writers’ workshop and annual short-story contest.

Robyn was born in Melbourne in 1961, and grew up in Elizabeth Fields, South Australia; she moved to Calgary 40 years ago. She was employed as a graphics designer by the University of Calgary (and edited the publication New Currents In Teaching Technology there). She was also an accomplished glass blower and an inveterate traveler.

The Calgary writers conference When Words Collide holds the annual In Places Between: The Robyn Herrington Memorial Short Story Competition in her honour.

Robyn is survived by her husband Bruce Herrington, universally known in Calgary as “the wonder spouse,” her parents, and sister Sandy Van Damme.

Robyn had time to draft her own eulogy before passing, to be read at her funeral, at her request, by her friend and mentor, Robert J. Sawyer. Here it is:

Wow. A Eulogy. A moment when we pause and reflect — and a moment when those gathered aren’t allowed to get up and leave — it’s an awesome responsibility. What do I say? What is it that I really want you all to know? The long printed version has the really important stuff (pick one up @ the door) — but what about now?

I need to tell you that my parents, brother and sister and their families are amazing people. John and Gisela Brown will give you the shirts off their backs if you asked them to — but don’t try it now because it’s probably more than a little inappropriate. They have always been there to give me whatever I needed and would still do. IFWA — if you need a place for the annual barbeque maybe that could be my legacy, hey mum and dad?

Michael & Sandy are more than a brother and sister. They’ve been my friends. We actually LIKE each other. Not too many kids make it to adulthood and can say that. OK sure, maybe we didn’t have to run Sandra into the wall *quite* so many times when she was learning to crawl, but it doesn’t seem to have left any permanent damage. And Michael? YOU dropped the orange juice all over the lounge in South Australia.

Speaking of which, this is the standard eulogy info: Robyn was born in Melbourne, Australia, on March 28th, 1961 — a good day by any standards. She moved to South Australia in Elizabeth Fields, when she was four. At 17, her family made the move to Calgary. While she never regretted the move — how could she, it’s where she met Bruce — she did regret the -40 weather.

She never went to University, other than to work there. She believed in and advocated life-long learning. Don’t be so foolish as to think the only way you can learn though is through someone telling you what to think. Think for yourself. Get out there. Just do it.

Robyn met Bruce pretty much right away upon arriving here in Canada. She met him at lunch one day after church. When no-one was available to drive her home, Bruce did. Robyn ran upstairs to her bedroom and scrawled Bruce’s number across her bedroom door.

Epic phone calls ensued. Two hours was average; six was the record. Six hours very nearly lead her father to remove the phone from Robyn’s room. In retrospect, six hours is kind of insane, but it *did* get her married off and out of the house — so you be the judge.

Robyn sincerely hopes that by this time she has NOT been pre-deceased by her older brother Noel. If so-that really sucks. If not — Ha Ha I win. I got sick first so it wouldn’t have been fair if you’d beaten me. (In fact he won — by a mere six weeks.)

Back to Bruce. I have said it on many occasions he is one of the most intelligent, thoughtful and deep thinking people I know. His family has had their own hard moments in 2003-2004 and they have proved that they are stronger than their grief.

Robyn loves Bruce deeply — and notice how I — Robyn — said that in third person so it doesn’t sound like I — Rob — is deeply in love with Bruce. Not the he isn’t worthy, but he’s mine.

What else do I want you to know?

Try surf-fishing, or fishing off a pier. It’s peaceful, exciting, a time to sit quietly or to talk — but either catch and release or make sure you have someone else to gut the fish.

Stop and smell the flowers. Honestly. DO IT! Take the time to look around you because it can all go too fast.

Learn two songs by heart & really well. You never know when you might be stuck in a karaoke situation.

Never, ever, ever eat Durian. Ever. Yuck.

Always try food that you have never have. What’s the worst that can happen? You might find something you like. But it won’t EVER be Durian, or thousand-year-old eggs. Yuck Phooey.

I want you to learn to not hold grudges. They are a waste of time, and no good can come of it for either party. Be the bigger person. Be nice. And in if all your attempts fail — then, unfortunately, you’re spending your time on someone who doesn’t deserve you. Move on, guilt-free, knowing you’ve done all you can.

Which brings me to friends. You’ve made me dance — at the Boogie Emporium. You’ve made me laugh too many times and *every* time we were together. Sing? Of course. How do Lottie, Chick and Babe pass those long trips to the cabin? My writing group — IFWA — too valuable to put a price on all of it; the good, the bad and the ugly — it was, and is all good. My smaller group, 7 of 40 — what a stunningly remarkable group. Astute, each of a different mind, each complimenting the strengths of the other.

My husband, my family, my friends — my golden trinity, and the reasons I loved life so much.

Finally, find your faith or hold on to your faith.

Why did this happen? I don’t know — I could say it was for the sole purpose of getting to meet me — but I’m kind of hoping it’s for more than that. For whatever reason, it has happened. It’s sad, horrible, devastating … or maybe I’m just overstating my importance … You know I love you all. You know that I’ll be watching you all.

I once heard, on some TV movie, an old man say that his friends would remember he was alive as long as they could feel the wind on their faces. I kind of like that idea. So when you feel the wind in your face that’ll be me —

right there —

In your face.

See ya ’round.

Robert J. Sawyer online:
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On Saturday, January 26, 2019, I had the privilege of giving this year’s Paul Sykes Memorial Lecture to the Vancouver Centre of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada.

My topic was “Astronomy and Science Fiction” and during the talk I mentioned the following SF novels (listed in italics) and short stories (listed in quotation marks):

• H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds
  
• Arthur C. Clarke, “The Nine Billion Names of God”
  
• Arthur C. Clarke, “The Star”
  
• Hal Clement, Mission of Gravity
  
• Larry Niven, “Neutron Star”
  
• Robert L. Forward, Dragon’s Egg
  
• James Gunn, The Listeners
  
• Robert J. Sawyer, Starplex
  
• Robert J. Sawyer, Rollback

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My father, John A. Sawyer, Ph.D., passed away at the age of 94 on Monday, December 17, 2018, at his retirement residence in North York, Ontario, Canada. The following death notice / obituary appeared in The Globe and Mail and The Toronto Star:

Sawyer, John A. (Jack)

Died December 17, 2018

Professor Emeritus (Economics), University of Toronto.

Born in Toronto (August 24, 1924), the son of Arthur J. and Bessie (Livingstone) Sawyer.

Married to Virginia (Peterson) Sawyer and father of Peter D. Sawyer (Jacquie), Robert J. Sawyer (Carolyn), and Alan B. Sawyer (Kim).

Graduate of Oakwood Collegiate Institute, the University of Toronto (Victoria College, Commerce & Finance, 4T7), and the University of Chicago.

John was an Economist at the Dominion Bureau of Statistics (1953-60). He taught Economics at the University of Alberta (1949-50), the Royal Military College of Canada (1951-53), and the University of Toronto (1960-90). He was Director of the Institute for Policy Analysis (1975-80) and Acting Dean of the Faculty of Management (1985-86) at the University of Toronto.

At the Dominion Bureau of Statistics he directed the construction of the first inter-industry input-output table of the Canadian economy. At the University of Toronto he led the team that built the TRACE econometric model of the Canadian economy. He wrote two textbooks on macroeconomic theory and a number of articles, including a history of business education at the University of Toronto.

In lieu of flowers, a donation to your favourite health science charity would be appreciated.

Always a teacher, at his request his body has been donated to the U of T medical school; also at his request, there will be no funeral.

Robert J. Sawyer online:
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The times they are a-changin’ in publishing, and so I’ve set up a Patreon page at patreon.com/robertjsawyer, where my readers can support my work directly. Please check it out! Many thanks!

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Woohoo!

First, I’m thrilled that my Quantum Night just won the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Award (“the Aurora“) for Best Novel of the Year this evening; the award (pictured above) was presented at Hal-Con in Halifax. The nominees were:

• Children of Earth and Sky by Guy Gavriel Kay, Viking Canada
• Company Town by Madeline Ashby, Tor
• The Courier by Gerald Brandt, DAW
• The Nature of a Pirate by A.M. Dellamonica, Tor
• Quantum Night by Robert J. Sawyer, Penguin Canada
• Stars Like Cold Fire by Brent Nichols, Bundoran Press

Hayden Trenholm graciously accepted the gorgeous trophy above on my behalf and read these remarks from me:

I’m sorry I can’t be with you in Halifax today; I’m a presenter at the Word on the Street festival in Toronto this weekend. But I’m thrilled to have won, and I thank my editors, Adrienne Kerr and Helen Smith in Toronto and Ginjer Buchanan and Jessica Wade in New York.

I’d also like to thank the voters for the Aurora Awards for this honour — while at the same time decrying those voters south of the border who turned what was supposed to be a cautionary science-fiction tale into a dystopian reality. I had good luck today; let us hope we all have better luck in the next U.S. presidential election.

And, for the first time ever, the Auroras had a “Best of the Decade” category this year, honouring works published from 2001-2010. To my absolute delight, my Neanderthal Parallax trilogy won; the trilogy consists of Hugo Award-winner Hominids, Hugo Award-finalist Humans, and Spectrum Award-finalist Hybrids.

The Best-of-the-Decade nominees were:

• Blind Lake by Robert Charles Wilson, Tor
• The Blue Ant Trilogy by William Gibson, Berkley
• Malazan Book of the Fallen by Steven Erikson, Tor
• The Neanderthal Parallax by Robert J. Sawyer, Tor
• The Onion Girl by Charles de Lint, Tor
• Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay, Viking Canada

(Bill Gibson’s Blue Ant trilogy consists of Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, and Zero History.)

Hayden Trenholm — who won the Aurora for best short story himself tonight — accepted the beautiful trophy shown below on my behalf in Halifax, and read these remarks from me:

A best-of-the-decade award is about looking back, and although I’m thrilled with this honour, the sad truth is that both the agent who sold this trilogy for me, Ralph Vicinanza, and the editor responsible for it, David G. Hartwell, have passed away in the interim. Also no longer with us is one of my most insightful and helpful beta readers, my younger brother Alan Sawyer.

When I wrote this trilogy, the Neanderthal genome hadn’t yet been sequenced, but we know now that most of us carry a little Neanderthal within ourselves — and so, on behalf of myself and the Neanderthals, I thank you all and wish you, as Ponter Boddit would say, “Healthy day.”

What a night!

Robert J. Sawyer online:
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One thing I like about the Star Wars franchise: it is coherent; it doesn’t keep trying to reimagine or reinvent or reinterpret itself. The latest film, Rogue One, goes to great lengths to look like and fit in with the very first film, the original Star Wars, from 40 years ago.

Star Trek made a mistake, starting with Star Trek: The Motion Picture (as much as I love it), in constantly changing things — the uniforms, the ships (we’ve seen seven Enterprises now), the details, and even the characterization. Do Andorians have thick antennae from the back of their heads (TOS) thin ones sprouting from their foreheads (TMP), or mobile finger-like ones that come from in between (ENT)? Do Klingons have smooth foreheads (TOS), spinal cords that move up over their skulls (TMP), or cow-patties on their foreheads (ST III and beyond)? Do Gorns have no tails (TOS) or tails (ENT)? Do the TOS Enterprise‘s impulse engines show as dark rectangles when running or as brightly glowing red ones (TOS original vs. TOS remastered)? Do shields go up by slowly encircling the ship (ST II), or growing outward in waves from the ship (ST V)? And on and on and on.

Alien races come and go in Star Trek (remember all the new aliens from TMP, never seen again?), but in Star Wars we constantly see old races we know well depicted as they’ve always been depicted.

Star Wars knows that its fans remember tiny little details from decades gone by; Star Trek has Kirk make remarks such as, in Star Trek V, “I lost a brother once” — and have it not refer to his late brother Sam, cuz, y’know, who the heck would remember that Sam had been horribly killed? Or they can have the deck numbers run in the wrong direction (and there be way too many of them) in Star Trek V, because no one would know, right?

Don’t get me wrong: I love Star Trek, but the Star Wars people know way more about how to manage a franchise and build fannish loyalty. When you’re entrusted with a classic, it’s your job to continue the tradition, not try to make it your own.

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A piece I finished five years ago today, on April 15, 2012, for the blog of Gollancz, my UK publisher:

Triggers, FlashForward, and Me

by Robert J. Sawyer

Thanks to the good people at Gollancz, I was recently interviewed in SFX, the world’s top-selling English-language magazine devoted to science fiction. I spoke in that interview about how my new novel Triggers was the first new writing project I’d started since
FlashForward — the TV series based on my novel of the same name — went off the air, and so I’d set out to create a novel that would appeal to fans of that TV series.

Working on the FlashForward TV adaptation — I consulted on every episode and wrote the nineteenth episode, “Course Correction” — was one of the best experiences of my life. But whenever I think about it, the memory is bittersweet, because instead of still being on the air — we’d be finishing our third year right about now — we were cancelled by the originating American broadcaster after twenty-two episodes.

That a science-fiction show got the plug pulled on it too soon is hardly a new story: there was an implicit promise in the opening credits of the original Star Trek that the series would run at least five years but it only survived for three. More often than not, it seems, ambitious science-fiction TV shows get cancelled prematurely.

By the time FlashForward‘s sixth episode first aired, I was predicting we wouldn’t be renewed for a second series. The ratings were dropping steadily week by week, not, I hasten to add, because of any deficiency in the program, but rather because, in the United States, we were stupidly scheduled at 8:00 p.m. on the east and west coasts and 7:00 p.m. in the interior; the show was simply too adult, too violent, and too raunchy, for what was perceived of as family-viewing time.

From that point on, I was urging that we film two different endings to the last episode of the first series: one that would have opened the show up for a second series, and one that would have provided real closure — the sort of resounding conclusion my original novel had.

FlashForward had numerous behind-the-scenes staff changes, and by the time we were nearing the end of our first series, the powers-that-be had other ideas. They were convinced we were coming back, and wouldn’t countenance the notion of a wrap-up at this point. It’s too bad: I think FlashForward could have become a cult hit like The Prisoner on DVD or via download if there’d been some sense of closure at the end.

Ironically, I’ve just returned from three days of meetings in Hollywood, discussing the possibility of adapting my new novel Triggers into a TV series. The novel Triggers has a definitive — and I like to think, mind-blowing — ending. The creative exercise in adapting a tightly structured standalone book into what could be an on-going series that might postpone its ending for five years has been fascinating. But, from the outset, this time I am planning for a real ending for the TV version, and hope I’ll have sufficient say to get it actually done that way.

I often think of the TV shows I loved that never got the run they deserve. Planet of the Apes. Kolchak: The Night Stalker. UFO. And, of course, more recent shows, such as Firefly and Charlie Jade, a show seen on Syfy in the US that I wrote the series bible for, had much shorter runs than their creators had hoped for. All left with a whimper, not a bang.

Still, even when SF TV shows do get to film an ending, it’s often a disappointment. I loved the new Battlestar Galactica but the final hour was a disaster. And Lost — whose writing office was next door to ours for FlashForward on the Disney Studio lot in Los Angeles — ended in an underwhelming way. Even The Prisoner, which I mentioned above, left many people scratching their heads with its conclusion.

Which, I think, is ultimately why I like writing books. The author is in full control; no one ever publishes just the first six chapters of a planned twenty-two chapter novel: you get to tell the whole story you intended to tell, and in a standalone novel, the audience can trust that between the two covers they’ll find a beginning, a middle, and a satisfying end — which is precisely what I’ve set out to provide in Triggers.

And if the TV version ever does come to pass, hopefully we’ll get to provide the same thing there, too.

Robert J. Sawyer online:
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Eight of my backlist titles are now available worldwide for Kindle: Aurora Award-winner Golden Fleece, Seiun Award-winner End of an Era, Hugo Award-finalists Starplex, Frameshift, and Factoring Humanity, plus my full “Quintaglio Ascension” trilogy of Far-Seer, Fossil Hunter, and Foreigner.

Just put “SFWRITER.COM” into the Amazon to find them all, or use these links:

Amazon USA

Amazon Canada

Amazon UK

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Press Release: For Immediate Release

A year ago, science-fiction writer and futurist Robert J. Sawyer accurately predicted the rise of a far-right psychopath coming from out of nowhere to become the American president, propelled into office by large numbers of people manipulated to vote against their own best interests.

Sawyer’s predictions have often come true in the past, but none so quickly or with such far-reaching consequences. Now, with the paperback release of his bestselling Quantum Night, after its successful run in hardcover, readers can follow along with Sawyer’s characters — an experimental psychologist and an expert on the physics of consciousness — as they come to understand how authoritarians manipulate the masses to follow them … right to the brink of oblivion.

Building on the cutting-edge research — including Prof. Robert D. Hare’s world-famous studies of psychopathy done at the University of British Columbia and Prof. Bob Altemeyer’s research into authoritarian leaders conducted at the University of Manitoba (and quoted extensively by Nixon White House counsel John Dean in his nonfiction book Conservatives without Conscience), Sawyer has drawn together the latest in real-world scientific thought to explain exactly how we got to the political situation we find ourselves in today.

Sawyer was right in his prediction of a Trump-like president. Will Sawyer also turn out to be right in his prediction of the that president’s next move: an invasion of Canada?

In its starred review of Quantum Night — denoting a book of exceptional merit — Publishers Weekly says Sawyer’s “story is uncomfortably close to present day fears.”

And Oxford University’s Kevin Dutton, one of the world’s leading expert on psychopathy, says “Quantum Night is a fast-paced thinking-person’s thriller richly informed by modern science. Sawyer has certainly done his homework about psychopaths and he understands well that, far from being just the occasional headline-grabbing serial killer, they’re everywhere.”

Sawyer, a member of the Order of Canada, and bestselling author of FlashForward, which was adapted as an ABC TV series, is one of only eight people in history — and the only Canadian — to win all three of the world’s top awards for best science fiction novel of the year: the Hugo, the Nebula, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. As a futurist, he’s consulted with NASA, spoken at Google’s headquarters, and advised Canada’s federal Department of Justice. Quantum Night, his 23rd novel, is his most prescient, and timely, work of prediction to date.

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Watched the 1989 movie FAT MAN AND LITTLE BOY on DVD this evening. Rarely is a film so poorly cast; ironically, the first opening credit after the star names is that of the casting director, Nancy Foy.

Paul Newman can be a fabulous actor — by coincidence, the night before, I was watching brilliant clips of him in THE VERDICT as part of a PBS documentary about Sidney Lumet — but he was terrible as Manhattan Project head General Leslie R. Groves, giving a flat one-note performance.

And, holy crap, Dwight Schultz is awful as J. Robert Oppenheimer. Neither actor is aided by a crappy script (by Bruce Robinson and Roland Joffé) and stiff direction (by Joffé), but Schultz is simply out of his depth; it’s no surprise that this film ended his career as a movie leading man.

And the cinematography! Vilmos Zsigmond has lensed some visually great films (including CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND), but his work here was pedestrian at best, and the fill lighting in the outdoor scenes (actually Mexico, standing in for Los Alamos) is so bright as to make everything outdoors look like a TV sitcom. Much of the film is also hampered by crappy ADR.

Groves and Oppenheimer are very difficult characters to play; for me, the gold standard is Brian Dennehy as the former and David Strathairn as the latter from the TV movie DAY ONE, which came out the same year as FAT MAN AND LITTLE BOY. Newman isn’t the worst Groves I’ve seen — that would be Manning Redwood from the BBC OPPENHEIMER miniseries — but Schultz IS the worst Oppenheimer.

The film adds a subplot that sadly doesn’t fit. In real life, AFTER the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Canadian physicist Louis Slotin was killed when criticality was accidentally triggered during a demonstration he was making at Los Alamos.

His quite horrible decline and death would have been a sobering thing for Groves, Oppenheimer, and others at Los Alamos to witness while the decision about whether to actually drop the bombs on civilian targets in Japan vs. conducting a demonstration with Japanese observers was still being debated.

To move this tragedy up to BEFORE the bombs were dropped required contriving that Groves COVERED UP the accident and HID IT from Oppenheimer — which simply isn’t true.

Anyway, it’s not an awful film. Roger Ebert gave it 1.5 stars; I think it’s more of a 2-star effort. But it does underscore just how difficult it is to capture the drama of the Manhattan Project on film or TV.

Robert J. Sawyer online:
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My on-and-off bathroom reading for some time has been David A. Goodman‘s The Autobiography of James T. Kirk. I just finished it, and I quite enjoyed it.

Goodman took on two very difficult tasks. The first, obvious one, is making a coherent whole out of the contradictory mess that was TOS; the creators, after all, were literally making it up as they went along, and inconsistencies such as whether Kirk has three nephews or only one abound.

On this score, Goodman succeeds in finding entertaining solutions that hold together and make sense.

The second difficult task is a more subtle one. The brilliance of Star Trek was that the main character’s inner life was externalized: Spock was Kirk’s rationalism; McCoy was Kirk’s humanism. The triumvirate comprised three bodies but only one complete mind.

To write an autobiography — a first-person narrative — Goodman had to give Kirk an internalized inner life, a monologue of his own thoughts. As “ghostwriter,” Goodman had to make a choice, and he did: he decided Kirk was not just a lonely man (a recurrent theme in TOS, best embodied in “Requiem for Methuselah”), but also a man plagued by regrets: for the lives he’d ruined, over the people who’d died because of him, for the careers of others that had stalled or ended because of his actions.

It’s an interesting choice: a much more fraught, hand-wringy Kirk than we’ve ever seen before. As a reader, you can only decide for yourself whether Goodman’s depiction of Kirk’s inner life rings true. For me, it didn’t quite seem the Jim we’d come to know and love, but it was artistically an interesting choice, and I admired the integrity with which Goodman pursued it.

Recommended.

Robert J. Sawyer online:
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