An interview with Robert J. Sawyer

Robert J. Sawyer, author of "Wake," was kind enough to spend some time answering a few of our questions. His in-depth, thoughtful answers offer a window onto the process of writing a novel and the ideas that power it.

TME - The Internet is both a setting and a character in this book. You were one of the first authors out there to really latch onto the Web. Was your first-hand experience witnessing the exponential evolution of the Internet an inspiration for the book?

RJS - Absolutely. I was the very first science-fiction writer to have a Web site - which helped me snag the URL sfwriter.com. In the 1980s, I made a large part of my living writing about the microcomputer revolution. My father is an econometrician at the University of Toronto, and was a pioneer in computer modeling of the economy - so computers have been a part of my life since my childhood in the 1960s, and in the 1970s I went to the only high school in my system that had a computer. It was so obvious to me that the growth wasn't just linear, but exponential - that these machines were going to change everything way faster than most people thought they would. I want to be ahead of the curve, not behind, in that revolution.

TME - The evolution of AI (artificial intelligence) is a concept that has been visited and revisited by many sci-fi authors. However, readers are usually only treated to the repercussions of that evolution. You start with what seems to be the actual birth of the entity. What inspired this take?

RJS - It was exactly that oversight that bothered me. Every work I'd ever seen about the emergence of AI either had the big event happen off-stage, as in William Gibson's "Neuromancer," or in a way that just didn't seem credible.

AI is a staple of science fiction, but my definition of SF requires there to be a reasonable path from our here-and-now to the milieu of the story, and if AI is just a rabbit pulled out of a hat, then it's magic, and therefore fantasy rather than science fiction.

"Wake" was the hardest book I've ever written. It took me four years, and most of that was because of my own BS-detector: I kept tackling the scenes in which the AI was emerging and throwing them out, because I didn't believe them myself. I finally, I think, nailed it, but it was hard, hard work. I've been gratified by the positive response from cognitive scientists and computer experts who have read the book.

TME - The nature of perception is a central theme in "Wake," the difference between what we "see" and what is. Are you responding to the rapid changes in how we as humans are processing and utilizing information?

RJS - That was certainly part of it, but the real template for the book is the story of Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan - a totally sensorially deprived genius being uplifted out of the void by someone who herself has had great sensory challenges: Helen's miracle worker had been nearly blind when she was young, and of course my Caitlin had been blind, too.

TME - Your protagonist is a teenaged girl. Was it difficult creating such a well-rounded character who is so different from yourself?

RJS - It was indeed difficult - but that's why it was worth doing. "Wake" is my 18th novel, and the only way I can keep myself interested in writing books is by tackling challenges. With each book, I set out to do something different. My previous book had an 87-year-old man as its main character, so turning around and writing a 15-year-old on the heels of that really caused me to stretch my muscles. Now, as it happens, I have four terrific nieces, who I spent a lot of time observing, and I read hundreds of thousands of words of blog postings by girls, trying to get the voice for Caitlin's blog entries right. I've written many challenging characters over the years - including intelligent dinosaurs, alien theologians and civil-rights attorneys - but I think Caitlin is my favorite of them all. She's just so much fun to spend time with.

TME - One of the most frustrating aspects of reading a series is the fact that oftentimes a book, especially the first in a series, sacrifices real closure in order to leave doors open for the sequels. "Wake" doesn't seem to have that problem; it closes strong while still offering plenty of potential directions for subsequent books to follow. How difficult is it to walk that fine line?

RJS - There are two approaches to writing a series. One is to end each book with a cliffhanger and hope people will be sufficiently curious to come back for the next volume. But I think that's a cheat - you paid for a story, and that's what you should get: a beginning, a middle and an end. Which brings us to the other approach: give the reader an experience so satisfying and memorable that they'll want to come back for a similar experience. As a reader, that's what I prefer; as a writer, that's what I try to write.

TME - With a trilogy like this, do you create as you go? Or do you already have a distinct plan for each of the next two installments?

RJS - I've now finished the second installment, which is called "Watch." It was enormously difficult to write, I have to say - middle books always are. And when I wrote the big finale, my wife said, "Wow, that's the perfect ending for the entire series. Too bad you have another book to write." I've always known how the trilogy is going to end - in fact, I wrote the final scene four years ago. So, I know what I'm working toward. But for me, so much of the joy in writing is discovering things as I go along; if I do too much outlining, I find I lose interest in actually converting the outline to a story.

TME - When will we be seeing Book Two? And can you give us any hints with regards to what to expect?

RJS - The three volumes of the trilogy are being published at one-year intervals: "Watch" will be out in April 2010 and "Wonder," the final volume, will be out in April 2011. If "Wake" was about the birth of Web mind - the consciousness that exists in the infrastructure of the Web - then "Watch" is about its coming-out party, where the world becomes aware of its existence. The same characters are featured: Caitlin, her father, Hobo the hybrid ape, Dr. Kuroda and so on. I was joking with somebody today that Hobo is turning out to be the Fonzie of this series - the breakout character: Everybody loves him and people keep asking for more of him. Well, he's got some great scenes in "Watch." To my delight, my editor in New York says "Watch" is even better than "Wake," and regarding the ending of "Watch," one of my beta-test readers said "You're screwed - you'll never be able to top that." Which is gratifying and challenging all at once - and I love a writerly challenge!