Science Fiction Writer
ROBERT J. SAWYER
Hugo and Nebula Winner

HOME • MENU • Search:

In a roundabout way, The Downloaded owes its existence to William Shatner.

Way back in 1999, I was approached by Nelvana, Canada's largest animation studio (best known for their Droids and Ewoks TV series set in the Star Wars universe). They were partnering with CORE Digital Imaging on making their first computer-animated TV series, and they wanted me to write the pilot episode and the series bible. CORE had done the effects for Shatner's 1994-1996 TekWar TV series, filmed in Toronto; Bill liked CORE's work so much, he bought the company and installed himself as CEO. He was going to be an executive producer on the proposed collaboration with Nelvana as well as voicing one of the characters.

I wrote the half-hour pilot script and the series bible for what I called Exodus: Mars, Nelvana loved it, and I flew to Los Angeles to pitch the show with Bill to various potential buyers.

Bill had studied my material in real depth; he could answer questions about the proposed show just as well as I could. My favorite pitch session was the one where Bill sat down as soon as we got into the room with the executives, swung his feet up on the coffee table, and declared, "Okay, you've got Shatner, you've got Sawyer, you've got Nelvana. Any questions?"

Sadly, though, Exodus: Mars didn't sell; one potential customer told me they would have bought it if it had been traditional cel animation, but the uncanny-valley effect of the CGI of that era left them cold.

(By the way, I asked a Nelvana vice-president if they'd ever worked with any of the other original Star Trek actors. "Yes," he said, "we've worked with all of them, but Bill is the only one we keep coming back to." I asked why and he replied, "Because he's the only one who's always on time, never drunk, and knows his lines.")

Even though Exodus: Mars didn't go any further, I'd favorably impressed everyone at Nelvana. One of the founders of that studio was Michael Hirsh, and after he sold his interest in Nelvana (for over half a billion Canadian dollars!), he created a new company also in Toronto called Floating Island Media. In 2015, he reached out to me with a one-line high concept for a live-action TV show he wanted me to develop: "The science-fiction Untouchables."

Michael's partner in this project was Fred Fuchs, the former Executive Director of Arts and Entertainment at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and Fred also remembered me warmly for work I'd done for him years decades before. The secret to the success of a long writing career? Always make your engagers happy; either they will come back to you with more work later, or they'll recommend you to someone who will do so.

The series bible I created for Michael and Fred was one of the best things I've ever written. It was called Dark Cloud, the "cloud" in question being the distributed computing cloud. The story centered around three very different artificial intelligences vying for control of the world, with humanity caught in the crossfire and a team of incorruptible humans trying to bring the AIs down.

But after we pitched the show to broadcasters a few times, Michael realized he really wasn't all that interested in live- action TV after all; he decided to go back to solely doing animation, his first love.

I'd always avoided doing creative projects as "work made for hire," in which the engager, rather than the writer, owns the copyright, but since the one-line high-concept for Dark Cloud was Michael's, he had insisted on contracting me on that basis, and I'd agreed. So, when he lost interest in live-action TV, Dark Cloud was dead in the water ... or so I thought.

Then, out of the blue, on April 26, 2019, Anna Gecan, then the Head of Original Content for Audible Canada, called me ... from New Jersey, where both Audible USA and Audible Canada are based. Like Netflix before it, Audible had come to dominate its market space simply by being a distributor of content created by others. And, like Netflix, they'd later realized that it was even better to be content creators, rather than just distributors. And so, Anna wanted to know, would I like to write an original for the fledgling Audible Canada service, building, as she said, on my "cachet in Canada as a bestselling science-fiction writer"?

Audible's intention was to do "old-time serialized radio drama," and Anna envisioned me writing ten half-hour scripts for her. She wanted a pitch, and so I gave her one: the series bible for Dark Cloud.

The problem was that I didn't own that property; Michael Hirsh's company did. As it happened, I'd already asked Michael earlier that year if I could still try to sell it, and he'd said that'd be fine, but if it did sell, he'd like to see "a little money" come back to him, adding "we won't be difficult" and "we won't stand in your way." And so it had seemed like a good idea to present Dark Cloud to Anna, and she and her team at Audible loved it.

But then I started having second thoughts. For one thing, as much as I like him, I didn't enjoy the idea of handing over a portion of whatever Audible might pay me to Michael. More than that, though, the humans-versus-artificial-intelligence theme was beginning to seem overused in pop culture. Just in the preceding twelve months, we'd had all of these take a whack at that idea:

• the third season of Westworld (as well as its earlier seasons)
• the second season of Star Trek: Discovery
• the second season of The Orville
• the first season of Star Trek: Picard
• and the movie Terminator: Dark Fate.

So on April 24, 2020, I said to Anna Gecan at Audible, "Do you have a particular commitment to Dark Cloud, or do you simply want to be in business with me?" Anna replied absolutely 100% the latter, and so I withdrew Dark Cloud (and have done nothing with that property since) and told her I'd come up with something new.

This was exactly forty-six days after the World Health Organization had declared COVID-19 to be a pandemic, though, so Anna said we had to deal with that new reality. Because of lockdown protocols, there was no guarantee we could get more than one actor into a recording studio at a time, so a full radio- drama-style presentation was out.

Also, Anna and I had been going back and forth between having me write ten half-hour standalone episodes or writing one continuous story to be serialized in ten half-hour chapters. At my request, Anna agreed we'd do the latter; it's frankly easier to write one long piece than many short ones.

All of a sudden, this project was sounding more like a novel than a radio play: one long story, told as single-voice narration (or, at least, only one voice per scene). I didn't yet have a contract with Audible (among other things, my agent Chris Lotts was trying to get them to up the fee they were offering, something he eventually succeeded at very nicely), and so I said to Chris that we should fully protect my rights to also sell this intellectual property in book form.

Negotiations took another ten weeks, but we finally ended up with a deal I was happy with: Audible would have an exclusive six-month window to release my next novel as an audiobook, with me retaining the film and TV rights, and, most importantly, me having the right after that six-month window ended to publish the novel in print and as an ebook.

Back in April, when I took Dark Cloud off the table, I'd immediately started thinking about a new storyline for what was now going to become my twenty-fifth novel. And that brings us to another project that never went anywhere. Back in 2008, Canada's national science-fiction TV channel was in trouble (it was called Space back then but has since been rebranded as CTV Sci-Fi). The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (the CRTC) was making noises about not renewing Space's broadcasting license.

See, Space had promised, as a condition of getting a license in the first place, to invest in original Canadian production, but they hadn't been doing that. And so, to appease the CRTC, Space decided to commission a pilot script from me for a potential hour-long Canadian dramatic science-fiction TV series.

I developed a project called Earthfall, writing a pilot episode entitled "Vanguard" and background notes outlining the mythology for the series. Space loved it. The storyline centered on an alien race that had uploaded into a virtual-reality heaven supposedly for good only to find that its members had to download back into physical reality because their sun had become unstable, requiring them to find a way to relocate to another planet — which was Earth. The main characters were a male alien named Jurteg and a female one named Lorsal.

All was looking good — until the worldwide financial crisis of 2008 hit. Space went pleading to the CRTC that, given the current situation, they simply couldn't afford to make Canadian TV shows now (preferring to endlessly, and profitably, rerun all the different Star Trek TV series; no Canadian broadcaster ever wants to make anything if they don't have to). The CRTC caved, and Earthfall was dead.

Actually, it could have been worse than dead. Under the Writers Guild of Canada contract, CTV (Space's parent company) could have held onto the rights for seven years before reverting them to me, but in an extraordinary act of generosity, Fraser Robinson, the head then of Original Content for Space, released all rights immediately. I did try a few times to sell Earthfall to other broadcasters, but that ultimately went nowhere.

And yet that notion stuck with me: beings who had uploaded their consciousnesses suddenly being forced to download into physical reality again.

I've often said that all science fiction is not about whatever future year it might be putatively set in but is actually about the year in which it was written, and, as I took hold of that nub of an idea in 2020, I realized that, in fact, we had all begun living uploaded lives, thanks to COVID-19: many of us were now telecommuting to work instead of going into an actual office; we were ordering in food instead of dining out; and Zoom and other video-chatting services had become our way to see friends and family we couldn't safely visit in person.

Of course, the pandemic had to end at some point, and then we would suddenly all be forced to download again, having to deal with actual physical people in the real world. What would that be like? I threw out the aliens Jurteg and Lorsal from Earthfall and decided to focus on human astronauts Jürgen and Letitia instead. The Downloaded now had a template ... but I wasn't quite sure how to structure the story, especially with the restriction that we could only have one actor per scene because of COVID.

By this point, Audible had contracted with Gregory J. Sinclair (on the right with me in the photo taken at the 2022 Giller Awards banquet in Toronto), formerly a major player in the Radio Drama department at the CBC, to be the producer and director of many of their Canadian Audible Originals. Greg was yet another person with whom I'd worked in the past, and he remembered me as fondly as I remembered him; I knew we'd make a great team for this — and, indeed, Greg immediately came up with the solution to the structural issue, saying "Why not do it like Rashomon?"

Well, I'd heard of the Akira Kurosowa film of that name and knew that it was a series of conflicting narratives about the same story, but I'd never seen it. I immediately ordered a Blu-ray copy of the movie, and read (and very much enjoyed) translations of the two short stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa that it's based on: "In a Grove" and "Rashomon."

I also got a DVD of the little-known 1964 American remake of Rashomon called The Outrage, starring Paul Newman, Edward G. Robinson, Howard da Silva, and — him again! — William Shatner; I confess to enjoying Outrage more than the Japanese original, although it's not as technically inventive. I also rewatched the Rashomon-esque "Not Prince Hamlet," by far the best of the post-first-season episodes of The Paper Chase, a law-school drama that I love in all its incarnations (novel, film, and TV series), and the similarly structured "A Matter of Perspective," a mediocre third-season episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. All of that convinced me Greg was right (as he usually is!): the format of multiple individual narrators each telling a part of, or a version of, the whole story, would work wonderfully for The Downloaded.

Other elements fell quickly into place: Waterloo, Ontario — Canada's "Quantum Valley" — was the logical setting for my advanced quantum-computing facility; I'd given a keynote address in 2012 at the tenth-anniversary celebration of the real-life Institute for Quantum Computing there. That institute was founded by my friend and BlackBerry co-inventor Mike Lazaridis, and the line from him I quote in The Downloaded is what he really said to me years ago when I'd asked him whether he thought it ironic that his firm, based in Waterloo, was surrounded by folk who would never use its products. He'd responded, "I love the Mennonites. They're the backup plan for humanity." And they became precisely that in The Downloaded.

From that point on, even though I hadn't started actually writing it yet, this should have been a straightforward project, and so Audible went ahead and publicly announced that The Downloaded would be out in 2021.

But I got very sick in September 2020 and lost a whole year of work dealing with that. Audible was completely supportive of me needing a deadline extension, and, when I finished the manuscript to everyone's satisfaction in May 2022, we assumed we'd get the audiobook version out before the end of that year. And then it was Greg's turn to get very sick, and so we postponed production for several months until he was well enough for us to proceed.

It was up to Audible to choose and hire the actors who would do the narration, but they'd asked Greg and me for suggestions, with one proviso that we completely agreed with: they wanted Canadian actors; they were positioning The Downloaded as a big project for Audible Canada (and they also did a French-language version entitled Le voyage immobile, which dropped the same day as the English one).

To read the part of Roscoe Koudoulian — whom both Greg and I think of as the main character — Greg suggested Brendan Fraser, and I immediately agreed that he'd be perfect. Our hopes were dashed — or so I thought — on March 12, 2023, when Brendan won the Academy Award for Best Lead Actor for his astonishing work in The Whale. But Audible, who had been fully committed to this project from day one, said, if that's who you want, that's who we'll get, whatever it takes.

We already had most of the other parts recorded by this point, with a Who's Who of Canadian actors, including Broadway performer and Dora Mavor Moore Award-winner Vanessa Sears as Captain Letitia Garvey; Kim's Convenience co-star Andrew Phung (a four-time winner of the Canadian Screen Award) as the robot Penolong, and Colm Feore, a mainstay of Canada's Stratford Festival and a winner of both the Gemini and Canadian Screen Awards, as the mysterious Reywan, but Audible kept pursuing Brendan, as well as their (terrific) choice of Luke Kirby, who had won an Emmy for playing Lenny Bruce on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, for the role of Dr. Jürgen Haas.

It took months of negotiation, and then there were further delays trying to fit our recording sessions into Brendan's and Luke's busy schedules, but finally, in July 2023, all the narration was at last in the can.

By this time, Audible had decided that the whole story hung together so well as a single piece, it made no sense to serialize the content, and so what I'd written as ten episodes (the ten chapters of the novel) were combined into one six-hour audio drama, which turned out magnificently: a dream team of narrators, brilliant direction by Greg, and what I think of as one of the best things I've ever written as the story.

Audible likes to launch big titles in the fall, and so the finished program dropped on October 26, 2023. Audible supported the release of The Downloaded with a major TV and radio ad campaign across Canada, which was more promotion than any of my previous books had ever gotten (although I did love the subway-car ads Penguin Canada had done for several of my earlier novels).

As it happened, I was in China the day The Downloaded debuted on Audible. The 2023 World Science Fiction Convention ("the Worldcon") was held in Chengdu in October 2023, and Cixin Liu and I were its guests of honor. Following the convention, my Chinese publisher Science Fiction World, in conjunction with the Canadian consulates in Chongqing and Shanghai and the Canadian embassy in Beijing, sent me on a cross-country book and cultural-event tour. I didn't get to hear The Downloaded myself until four days after its debut, during my long flight home from China to Canada. That meant, as I flew from west to east, the clock was moving backward as I listened — which seemed quite appropriate, given the time-displacement plot of The Downloaded.

That trip home was a long journey, and so was the one bringing The Downloaded to fruition, but I thoroughly enjoyed writing it — and I sincerely hope you enjoy reading it.

More Good Reading

More about The Downloaded
Reviews of The Downloaded
Rob’s favorite bit of The Downloaded

What’s a Rob Sawyer novel like?

My Very Occasional Newsletter