(If Mr. Sawyer happens to stumble across my humble little blog, and be outraged by what he reads here, and be thus tempted to flick out a tentacle of his mighty empire and crush me, which he could do, easily, I ask: please don’t. I’m not worth the trouble.)
I first heard of Robert Sawyer when reading a Writers of the Future anthology a few years ago - he had an article in it, giving advice to aspiring writers. One of the tips was to stay current in your genre - don’t say that your favorite writers are Asimov and Tolkien. You need to be up to date. Paraphrasing from memory: “Then I ask if they’ve read any Robert Sawyer. If not, I just walk away.” Something like that. It did not give me a favorable impression of Mr. Sawyer. If I were in that position, I would see an opportunity to make this stranger into a fan of my work, and tell him all about my books.
Not wanting to draw his scorn, if I ever met him, I picked up a copy of Flashforward, a random selection. But I didn’t read it for a while. I read another article by Sawyer on getting an agent. “Please don’t email me and ask if you can have my agent. I had to have a Hugo Award before he would take me. He’s one of the best goddamn agents in the whole goddamn world. [That is, too good for you.]” Again, paraphrased from memory. Again, it didn’t give me a favorable impression of him.
But talent can be separated from personality - I love Harlan Ellison’s works, but don’t know if I ever want to meet him. He’d probably make fun of me. And, some people are so separated from us in space and time that their character is irrelevant. Shakespeare. Tennyson. Et cetera.
(Sometimes, though, personality can suffuse talent, and you think, “This writer is wise, and it shows in his work. He understands and respects people.” Maugham, Pasternak, Gaiman, Haldeman. Conversely: “this guy is bitter and alienated, and it shows.” Latter-day Sinclair Lewis and Heinlein. They did not seem savory people. Their work suffered for it.)
And, of course, criticism demands that we consider works on their own merit. But I cracked open Flashforward and noted that there are two “About the Author” pages. Some of the information overlaps, so it must have been a printing slip-up. But still. Then I noted that Sawyer’s webpage is “sfwriter.com”, as if he is the only science-fiction writer, or perhaps the only worth caring about. The picture on the inside back cover shows him holding his chin with thumb and forefinger, as if his titanic thoughts are too heavy for him to support his head.
But how was the book?
Very good, it turns out. I’ll read more of his stuff.
And the picture on his website is much cheerier and less pretentious.
I see that Flashforward has been picked up for an ABC series, to follow “Lost”, to be written by David Goyer (wow!). Goyer wrote, of course, the - monumental - Batman Begins, though his post-Batman output (”Threshold” and some forgettable January-release horror film) hasn’t been so great. Still, it’s the direct continuation of scifi’s unimpeachable rampage through primetime television, ongoing since “Lost”. Here we have a direct adaptation of a science-fiction book, unapologetically scifi.
Bravo, Robert Sawyer! Bravo, Canada!
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