hi welcome to watchmojo.com i’m your
host leila joining us Robert J Sawyer a
winner of all of the world’s top awards
for best science fiction novel let’s
just start with perhaps your plans in
20-30 I read somewhere to go back and
start rereading your work yeah when I
turned 70 I think it’d be an interesting
thing as a way not just of enjoying the
books but reminding myself of who I was
when I was 30 years old when I wrote the
one in 1990 you want to enlighten us a
bit about the difference between fantasy
and science fiction writing science
fiction is about things that might
realistically happen fantasy is about
things that never could happen there’s
always a way to get from our here and
now to the venue of a science fiction
story usually it’s just by time passing
into the future and reasonable changes
in science in society how much risk
taking is involved in being a futurist
because your predictions might reflect
either your accuracy or inaccuracies
well absolutely a science fiction writer
is in part a futurist somebody who’s
trying to predict what’s coming down the
pike so you are gutsy you put your name
to a prediction you say here’s what I
think it’s going to be like in this
particular year sometimes you get it
right sometimes you get it wrong but
sometimes when you get it wrong it
actually is a good thing because you’ve
said hey if we continue down this road
it’s going to be bad we need to not go
to this future so sometimes it’s a
warning and we’re very happy when the
thing we predicted because we predicted
it doesn’t come to pass and how has your
interest in quantum physics and quantum
computing and human consciousness been
important to your success in late 70s
early 80s we never once mentioned in
psychology class the word consciousness
and so it was just a black box things
happen in your head and we couldn’t
understand what they were in the decade
since we’ve started to really learn what
it is that causes us to be self-aware
and a lot of interesting speculative
science suggests that there’s a quantum
mechanical part to human consciousness
which is a really mind-blowing idea and
I’m fascinated by that so I’ve used it
in a number of novels I book about
copying human consciousness the way we
might rip a song off of a CD and
transferring it into some artificial
body and
I think we’re going to be able to do
that in the next couple of decades
you’ve won a lot of very prestigious
award so I’m curious as to what the
challenges remain perhaps within the
publishing realm of science fiction sure
the mean I have won a lot of words I’ve
143 awards for my work internationally
nationally the biggest awards in my
field which is wonderful but they’re in
my field the biggest challenge for
somebody who writes science fiction is
to try and convince that ninety-eight
percent of the population that doesn’t
read science fiction that there’s
something of value in science fiction
between now and your 70th birthday are
you planning on writing more books I’ve
been doing a novel a year I’ll slow down
a bit as i get older but i still would
like to see the overall Robert J Sawyer
/ abhi 30-odd novels by the time I’m
done
host leila joining us Robert J Sawyer a
winner of all of the world’s top awards
for best science fiction novel let’s
just start with perhaps your plans in
20-30 I read somewhere to go back and
start rereading your work yeah when I
turned 70 I think it’d be an interesting
thing as a way not just of enjoying the
books but reminding myself of who I was
when I was 30 years old when I wrote the
one in 1990 you want to enlighten us a
bit about the difference between fantasy
and science fiction writing science
fiction is about things that might
realistically happen fantasy is about
things that never could happen there’s
always a way to get from our here and
now to the venue of a science fiction
story usually it’s just by time passing
into the future and reasonable changes
in science in society how much risk
taking is involved in being a futurist
because your predictions might reflect
either your accuracy or inaccuracies
well absolutely a science fiction writer
is in part a futurist somebody who’s
trying to predict what’s coming down the
pike so you are gutsy you put your name
to a prediction you say here’s what I
think it’s going to be like in this
particular year sometimes you get it
right sometimes you get it wrong but
sometimes when you get it wrong it
actually is a good thing because you’ve
said hey if we continue down this road
it’s going to be bad we need to not go
to this future so sometimes it’s a
warning and we’re very happy when the
thing we predicted because we predicted
it doesn’t come to pass and how has your
interest in quantum physics and quantum
computing and human consciousness been
important to your success in late 70s
early 80s we never once mentioned in
psychology class the word consciousness
and so it was just a black box things
happen in your head and we couldn’t
understand what they were in the decade
since we’ve started to really learn what
it is that causes us to be self-aware
and a lot of interesting speculative
science suggests that there’s a quantum
mechanical part to human consciousness
which is a really mind-blowing idea and
I’m fascinated by that so I’ve used it
in a number of novels I book about
copying human consciousness the way we
might rip a song off of a CD and
transferring it into some artificial
body and
I think we’re going to be able to do
that in the next couple of decades
you’ve won a lot of very prestigious
award so I’m curious as to what the
challenges remain perhaps within the
publishing realm of science fiction sure
the mean I have won a lot of words I’ve
143 awards for my work internationally
nationally the biggest awards in my
field which is wonderful but they’re in
my field the biggest challenge for
somebody who writes science fiction is
to try and convince that ninety-eight
percent of the population that doesn’t
read science fiction that there’s
something of value in science fiction
between now and your 70th birthday are
you planning on writing more books I’ve
been doing a novel a year I’ll slow down
a bit as i get older but i still would
like to see the overall Robert J Sawyer
/ abhi 30-odd novels by the time I’m
done
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