Science Fiction Writer
ROBERT J. SAWYER
Hugo and Nebula Winner

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Behind the Scenes:

The Downloaded

An Interview with Robert J. Sawyer

On August 28, 2023, I recorded a video interview for Audible to help promote the launch of my The Downloaded as an Audible Original. That morning, I woke up to find they'd sent me 23 questions for the video interview that was scheduled to begin in just four hours.

In those four hours, I had to shower, eat, and spend most of an hour getting to the studio. But in the little bit of time left over, I wrote up 3,000 words of answers to the questions, just to prepare myself for the interview.

I spoke off-the-cuff in the interview, for a more natural effect — I did not simply read these answers on camera. And only a fraction of the points I'd prepared made it into the final short videos such as this one they put out.

But here, for the first time anywhere, are those full written answers: a detailed behind-the-scenes look at the making of The Downloaded and what my intentions were when I created it:

Tell us about how you developed The Downloaded. Where did your inspiration come from?

Ironically, it came from mystery fiction, not science fiction. I've always been fascinated by courtroom drama: the one setting in which people are forced to lay their souls bare, to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. The idea of a diverse group of people — convicted criminals and interstellar astronauts — being interrogated as we, the listener, try to solve a great futuristic mystery really appealed to me.

Why do you think this story is good for audio?

When we were brainstorming ideas, the good folks at Audible said, look, the world is in lockdown for the COVID pandemic. We're not sure if we'll be able to get more than one actor into a studio at a time. And the producer, Greg Sinclair, said, hey, what about doing it like Kurosowa's film Rashomon — as a series of first-person accounts. Greg's comment was what made it all gel for me; I knew we'd found both the solution to the COVID problem and the template that would make the whole thing work as compelling audio.

Is there one character in particular whose journey resonated most with you?

You know, you'd think it would be one of the astronauts, but it isn't. It's convicted killer Roscoe Koudoulian — the character played by Brendan Fraser — who I most identify with. Like me, he was bullied as a child and still carries scars from that. And, like me, he looked around and saw a job that needed doing, and so, despite the personal cost, he simply did it. For Roscoe, that was trying to organize the survivors into a community; for me, twenty-five years ago, that was stepping up when no one else had decided to run, to be president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

How did you feel when you heard Brendan Fraser was going to voice Roscoe?

I was thrilled. First, because Brendan is a fabulous actor. Second, because, y'know, I've dealt with lots of producers who say things like, "Rob, baby, this is gonna be big!" — and then they do nothing to ensure that success. But Audible has said from day one that they had big plans for The Downloaded, and they've delivered on that every step of the way. You can't get better than landing the most-recent best-actor Academy Award-winner as your lead!

Back when we were developing the scripts, the producer — Greg Sinclair, who is the former head of Radio Drama at the CBC — and I were just blue-skying about our dream casting, and Greg was the first to suggest Brendan for Roscoe, an idea I immediately loved. But when Brendan won the Oscar, Greg and I both thought, oh, well, no chance of getting him now — but Audible was like, "Just watch us!" A first-class operation all the way.

What do you think Brendan brings to the table to bring Roscoe to life?

There's an echo in The Downloaded of Brendan's first starring role, back in 1992. Remember, he played "Encino Man," in the film of that name, a frozen caveman thawed out in the present day.

Second, like me, he's a dual US-Canadian citizen, and in The Downloaded, with its two very different groups of reanimated individuals, I'm having a sly wink at the differing approaches to life, contrasting the United States promise of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," and Canada's counterpart, which is "peace, order, and good government." Dual US-Canadian citizens are a bit like Mr. Spock, with two contrasting heritages warring within them; that made Brendan perfect.

The story explores re-establishing physical connections after spending so much time in the digital world. How much of this story evolved from the pandemic?

It was totally inspired by COVID-19. I started creating The Downloaded nineteen days after the World Health Organization declared COVID a global pandemic, and so it was at the forefront of my consciousness. We've all spent the last few years living largely online: working remotely from home, shopping on the internet, having food delivered instead of dining out, and interacting with friends only through social media and Zoom calls. It's almost as if we'd uploaded into a virtual realm! But, of course, I knew that pandemic would eventually end, and we'd be forced back into the real world, dealing face-to-face with masses of human beings again — and that was the story, with science fiction's usual tools of metaphor, that I wanted to tell.

What would you say is The Downloaded's message about how we treat each other?

The inciting incident for Roscoe's arc in The Downloaded is him tracking down and confronting his childhood bully, who has reappeared in his life as an anonymous online troll. The Downloaded is a metaphor for online vs. offline life, and I wanted to point out just how poorly most people treat other human beings in the social-media arena.

Tying into that, The Downloaded has a recurring motif about the two most famous laws or sets of laws in science-fiction history: Isaac Asimov's famous Three Laws of Robotics and Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law, which is "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." But I give my robot character Penolong, played for us by Kim's Convenience co-star Andrew Phung, the chance to put the message of The Downloaded into words. After dismissing Asimov's laws, he says, "After all, there really was only a single rule anybody ever needed, and it was pure gold: do unto others as you'd have them do unto you."

What is it about science fiction that you think draws in fans?

Hope. In our world, the simple assertion that there will be a future carries great power; it's something we need to hear. Beyond all the cool science, and the exploration of philosophical questions, and the ability to examine human beings in conditions that would be impossible, impracticable, or unethical to do in real life, it's that simple, basic need that draws people to science fiction: hope.

What are your top three sci-fi stories of all time?

Gateway by Frederik Pohl. I was so thrilled when Audible asked me to write and record a new introduction to their audiobook edition of that novel back in 2009. I've been lucky enough 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, but each one was for a different book. But Fred Pohl won all three of them for this one single masterpiece; I don't think anyone has ever written a finer science-fiction novel than Gateway.

Then there's The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, which is one of the few science-fiction novels by a mainstream author that really holds up as science fiction; she examines her premise of a man unstuck in time in rigorous detail, and pays real attention to the science behind his predicament. As it happens, I didn't read this book in print; rather, I listened to it in audio. The audiobook came out in 2006, and, unusually for that time, they used not one but two narrators for the two point-of-view characters, Fred Berman reading Henry's parts, and Phoebe Strole reading Clare's. The alternation of voices really worked well, and that definitely set the template for the multiple first-person narrators I decided to use for The Downloaded, knowing Audible would cast a different actor for each one.

And, finally, there's another, very different time-travel story: H.G. Wells's The Time Machine. It does what I've always tried to do in my own science fiction: tell a story, with metaphors and disguises, about real social issues, in Wells's case, about the British class system. If a reviewer were to point out that both Wells's The Time Machine and my The Downloaded deal with two very different groups of humanity coming into conflict, one brutish, as in his Morlocks and my unruly group of ex-convicts, and the other seemingly privileged, as in his Eloi and my astronauts, well, I wouldn't quibble with the comparison.

Thinking about H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds as a radio play, are you finding more people are returning to the genre of audio dramas?

Absolutely! Orson Welles's Mercury Theatre version of The War of the Worlds, so famously first broadcast October 30, 1938, really showed that science fiction makes great audio drama. I'm thrilled to have previously won the Audio Publishers Association's Audie Award for Best Science Fiction or Fantasy Audiobook of the Year, for my Calculating God, but that was just straight narration, albeit expertly done, by Jonathan Davis. The Downloaded is just so much richer and audio experience, thanks to our wonderful cast and Greg Sinclair's superb direction, and there's no doubt that this kind of immersive audio is what listeners want today.

With the advancement of AI, do you think that computers will begin to become sentient at some point?

Probably, although I don't think it'll necessarily be a linear progression from our current AI. Still, there's nothing magical about consciousness — even if, as I say in The Downloaded, that it turns out to be quantum-mechanical in nature. If it could spontaneously arise in formerly dumb apes like us, it probably can arise on any sufficiently advanced substrate. Indeed, that sort of emergent consciousness underpins the three volumes of my WWW trilogy of Wake, Watch, and Wonder, about the World Wide Web waking up, which Audible Studios produced back in 2009 and 2010.

If you had to survive the end of humanity with one character from science fiction, who would it be?

I've got to go with the great James T. Kirk. He doesn't believe in the no-win scenario; he always turns death into a fighting chance for life; and, at heart, he was a pacifist and, if you'll forgive the pun, a bridge-builder. He said this of the leaders of a peace mission he got to be part of as a cadet: "They were humanitarians and statesmen, and they had a dream — a dream that became a reality and spread throughout the stars, a dream that made Mister Spock and me brothers." You couldn't ask for a better companion.

What do you think about the idea of cryonic suspension? Would you want to do it?

Since the dawn of time, humans have tried to cheat death. One of my great friends, the science-fiction writer Gregory Benford, has indeed signed up for cryonic suspension and hopes to be revived at some point in the future following his death. But — to come back to Brendan Fraser's first starring role, in Encino Man — I wouldn't want to be the primitive curiosity for people to gawk at in some future. I'm content to live a natural life, and, even if it were to come to an end tomorrow, I'd still say, quite sincerely, that I lived in the best time in all of history, in the best place in the entire world, and longer than 95% of all the human beings who ever came before me. Besides, as a Canadian, I get quite enough cold in my life; the idea of being on ice for decades or centuries hasn't got much appeal!

Name one person you'd want to survive all of humanity with.

One of my best friends is the comedian Emo Philips, who is an absolute genius, and he manages to see the humor in everything. As Emo once said, "I used to think that the human brain was the most fascinating part of the body. Then I realized, `Whoa, look what's telling me that.'" If you've got to face the end of the human race, you might as well go out laughing — and, in fact, despite the serious subject matter and dystopian setting, there's lots of humor in The Downloaded.

If the world had to end, which way would you prefer? An asteroid, an alien invasion, or a zombie outbreak and why?

As with so many science-fictional questions, this is a great example of taking something mundane — the end of life — and making it fantastic, the end of the world. And I think the best way to go in both cases is as quickly and cleanly as possible. When I was a kid, we didn't know what had killed the dinosaurs. Now, we know it was the impact of a 10-kilometer-wide asteroid on the shore of the Gulf of Mexico. I think that was a great way for Tyrannosaurus rex and company to go out, as I have the character of Jameela Chowdhury says in The Downloaded, inverting T.S. Eliot's famous phrase, "This is how the world will end — not with a whimper but with a great bloody bang."

What are some headlines you think we'd see in 2059?

We are at such a key point in history right now at this very moment: the planet is literally and figuratively on fire. But let's be optimists — as I usually am in my fiction! — and assume we're going to survive. I'd like to see headlines that reflect some of the themes of The Downloaded: "Permanent human city established on Mars," "All cancers cured," and "Humans and artificial intelligences sign new accords to co-exist in peace and with mutual respect."

If you hear there is a meteor that will destroy Earth, what would be the first thing you'd do?

First, and this lesson is one that's part of the subtext of The Downloaded: I'd check the sources, check the facts, make sure they're correct. There's a big plot twist I won't give away in The Downloaded where something the characters have assumed was correct turns out to be completely wrong.

Second, look for a way to get off the planet. The only reason the dinosaurs are extinct is they didn't have a space program.

If you were able to download your consciousness into an inanimate object, what would it be?

An inanimate object? Well, I've never liked my body anyway, and less so as the years go by. But I've always thought of myself as a philosopher as much as a writer; I think a better name for "science fiction" would be "philosophical fiction" — not sci-fi but phi-fi! — and so I'd be happy to be downloaded into a marble statue of Socrates, as long as some robot would keep shooing the pigeons off my head.

Would you want your consciousness uploaded somewhere?

Although I write a lot about transhumanism myself, I'm not a transhumanist. I think Letitia Garvey — played by the great Broadway actress Vanessa Sears in The Downloaded — has the right answer: upload if there's a specific reason why it beats the alternative; in her case, that was to make a voyage to another star possible. I disagree with J�rgen Haass, the character in The Downloaded played by Emmy Award-winner Luke Kirby, who thinks an uploaded existence would be better than physical reality. As my Russian roboticist Mikhail Sidorov says in the story, "Virtual reality is nothing but air guitar writ large."

If you did, would you even want to download back to your body?

I came up with, I thought, a nifty reason in The Downloaded why you might upload your consciousness only temporarily: to make space voyages go by quickly, or, conversely, to make prison terms pass without years elapsing in the outside world. But for regular people, if they upload, I expect it'll be a one-way journey. I mean, as much as I, and others, rail against the ills of social media and online information silos, how many of us actually just turn off our computers and "download" back into the real world?

Do you think we'll be able to set up colonies on other planets someday?

Absolutely! Humanity has always expanded outward. We may have gotten our start in Olduvai Gorge, but we went on to occupy the entire planet. As our technology improves, for sure we're going to build colonies on Mars, the Moon, possibly floating in the atmosphere of Venus, and other places. But they'll only be colonies for a while, of course. Just like Canada and the United States, they will eventually be independent members of the expanded United Nations of the Solar System.

Describe your perfect planet.

It's this one, Sol III, the planet Earth. It's the one we evolved on, and so we're perfectly adapted for it; no other planet anywhere in the galaxy will ever be as just-right for us as Earth. That said, we've done a great job of messing things up here — one of the things The Downloaded says is that we may be past the tipping point on global warming, so that even if we stopped pumping carbon into the atmosphere today, the climate might continue to grow ever hotter for many decades to come. So, actually, the perfect planet is Earth, but maybe 200,000 years ago — before our the latest ice age, and before we moderns messed everything up.

If you could upload your consciousness, but leave some parts of it behind, what would you leave behind?

That's one of the great appeals about digitizing consciousness: once it's digitized, it's also editable, and, sure there are memories that haunt me, or upset me, of things that went down in the past. A terrific line from the original Star Trek was, "One is finally grateful for a failing memory." And, again, this comes back to the social-media metaphor that underpins The Downloaded: what each of us uploads to Facebook or Instagram is an edited, curated version of our life, the version of reality we want, not the painful one we so often actually have to endure in the real world.

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