Bestselling Science Fiction author Robert J. Sawyer has written several award-winning fiction novels. Recently, he talked to Suite101 amongst other things about the new television drama Flashforward based on his novel with the same name.
What was the initial spark of inspiration that lead to you writing Flashforward?
My wife and I met in 1975 in our high-school science-fiction club in Toronto. Twenty years later, we hosted a twentieth-anniversary reunion party for that club, and, to a person, everyone there said some variation of, “If I’d only known then what I know now, things would have turned out better.” They were convinced they would have avoided bad marriages, bad investments, bad career choices, and so forth, if they had foreknowledge of what their futures held. Well, as a science-fiction writer, that immediately made me start constructing a thought experiment to see if that would really be true, and FlashForward was the result.
Has your creative process and habits changed much in the years since you first started writing?
Yes. For one thing, I’m calmer now than I was at the outset. Initially, I was daunted by the notion of writing a book—the sheer physical chore of typing that many words seemed impossible. Now, as I finish up my twentieth novel, I’m of course confident that I can complete it. More than that, though, in the twenty years I’ve been a novelist, the world has changed: I used to have files of interesting articles I’d torn out of newspapers and science magazines that I would use as research. Now, of course, everything is online, so research is both much easier to do and much more comprehensive.
If you could be any fictional character for a day, who would you choose?
If it were only for a single day, I’d choose Sherlock Holmes. I like to think I’m a bright guy, but it would be wonderful to experience true genius for twenty-four hours, to have those brilliant flashes of insight Holmes was capable of based on only a handful of clues. Of course, Holmes had lots of personal demons—so it would also be good to stop being him after a day!
How much true creativity and innovation do you think exists today in speculative writing?
Tons. Right now is the true renaissance of science fiction; the best work ever being done in the history of the field is being done today. The sophistication of speculation not just in science but in economics, philosophy, and psychology going on right now is astonishingly high. I’m very proud to be part of this genre; my only regret is that so many people judge it on works from its dim past, or, even worse, think they hold an informed opinion about SF based on cursory viewings of movies and TV shows without ever cracking open a modern book.
Read more with Robert J. Sawyer
 |
