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Robert J. Sawyer: Planet of the Apes (and much, much more!)
112 Plays1 year ago
"If you could write – and consume – only one of these genres of science fiction, what would you pick? Space opera. Post-Apocalyptic. Or Cyberpunk?" This is the diabolical question that Mark poses to Joe and their guest, renowned Canadian science fiction writer, Robert J. Sawyer.
Everyone has an answer and it connects with the piece of art that Rob has chosen to talk about – the 1968 science fiction classic, Planet of the Apes.
For Rob, the film (and book it was based upon) shows how science fiction can tackle the most pressing and important issues of the day. In the case of Planet of the Apes: race relations and nuclear war.
Mark, Joe and Rob have an engaged and engaging conversation about Planet of the Apes, science fiction in general, and Rob's career in particular.
Fans won't want to miss this conversation!
For more information, check out the show notes for this episode.
Re-Creative is produced by Donovan Street Press Inc. in association with MonkeyJoy Press.
Contact us at joemahoney@donovanstreetpress.com
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Transcript
Choosing a Science Fiction Sub-Genre
00:00:09
Speaker
Hello, Mark. Hello, Joe. What the heck is that? Because I know the question I'm going to ask you and our guest, and it is diabolical.
00:00:22
Speaker
This is your most diabolical question. Yeah, we're going deep here. We're going diabolical, total nerdy. My question is about science fiction, which seems appropriate for our guests today. And I'm going to present you with the choice of
00:00:40
Speaker
only writing in one of three sub-genres of science fiction. But there's a twist to this. Not only can you only write in the one sub-genre, you only can consume that sub-genre. So my favorite sub-genre to write in and consume. And I'm going to give you a list to choose from to make this easier.
00:01:04
Speaker
Okay. All right. So space opera is one choice. Okay. Post-apocalyptic.
00:01:13
Speaker
or cyberpunk, those are your choices. And the trick here is you can only watch, read or listen to one of these subjects as
Exploring Sub-Genre Preferences
00:01:27
Speaker
well. That's the only science fiction you get from now on till the end of your life. Yeah. Okay. I enjoy cyberpunk, but I can't write it. That's not my thing.
00:01:37
Speaker
The space opera, I enjoy it. I think I can write it. Not as well as our guest, mind you, I expect, but. Yeah, I think our guest could write us all these better than us. Yeah, he can write us under the table. So I'm going to have to go with Post-Apocalyptic. Ooh, okay. I did not see that one coming. All right. Yeah, because I love to read it. Got some favorite books and movies in that genre. And it's not going to depress you.
00:02:05
Speaker
If that's all you get to read or watch is. Well, I'll tell you. And I don't want to keep our guests waiting too long, but just to, you know, like my favorite movie of the, of the last few years is probably fury road.
00:02:19
Speaker
Mad Max. Oh, yeah, that's a great movie. Isn't that amazing? One of my favorite books is, well, we talked about it with Mr. Brinn. David Brinn's The Postman. Yeah, that is a great book. An old favorite. I believe it was George Stewart, Earth Abides. I mean, the list just goes on and on. My favorite game of the last probably 15 years is The Last of Us.
00:02:39
Speaker
Oh, they've turned into a TV series, but it's such a great game. Yeah. Yes. Okay. Now we'll ask you and then we'll, and then we'll ask her. Well, I'm just going to say space opera because I haven't done much space opera. So that's new ground for me in terms of a writer. And I think there's enough out there that I could, I could manage it and I would be worried about getting depressed if all I could watch was post-apocalyptic fiction or cyberpunk. They're both pretty depressing to me.
00:03:04
Speaker
Well, I'm just happy that we're not there yet. Yeah, I know. We're creeping in on it, though. Yeah, maybe, yeah. Okay, so nobody wants to hear us blather on. They want to hear our guest today. Robert J. Sawyer, welcome to Recreative. Welcome. Thank you. I'm delighted to be here. Please, I'm thrilled. Yeah, so what about you? Do you have an answer for Mark's question?
00:03:27
Speaker
Yes, I don't like the three categories. I love science fiction. None of those three are my habitual metier for writing or for reading. But that's not the game. The game is to pick from those three. I'm going to pick post-apocalyptic and here's why.
00:03:45
Speaker
I am a science fiction writer who is interested in characterization. Science fiction, I say, is a laboratory for thought experiments about the human condition that would be impossible, impractical,
00:04:01
Speaker
or unethical to conduct in real life. Space opera is not about real human psychology. Space opera, you know, Star Wars, when actually Empire Strikes Back, I guess it is, where Luke gets his cyborg hand.
00:04:18
Speaker
and looks at it for two seconds, and then goes running across the room. Now, cyborg hands may be common in his world, but it's the first time he's ever gotten one. And it's a hugely unbelievable moment. When James Earl Jones intones, no.
00:04:36
Speaker
I am your father. Have you ever had a shocking revelation made to you in your entire life where your response to it was to scream, no, that can't be true.
00:04:51
Speaker
You know, in space opera, it's about the adventure. It's about people who aren't humans, right? And the opera name applies to the fact that it's this histrionic, over-the-top, unbelievable characterization. That's why it's applied. It was originally applied, of course, to Western's horse opera and then moved over to space opera. But the opera part is that unbelievable, over-the-top, histrionic characterization.
00:05:18
Speaker
For the cyberpunk, the same thing you can have, certainly characterization in cyberpunk, but that second part of the name, the punk part, is a very specific narrow
00:05:33
Speaker
part of the human behavioral spectrum. And I like to say, you know, William Gibson, who I admire, consider him a friend, great fellow Canadian science fiction writer, you know, he got everything wrong about the internet. Most significantly that it would be controlled by a hacker underground of mirror shaded, you know, social malcontents. It's not, it's controlled by the most powerful and rich
00:06:03
Speaker
men, they're all men in the world, big corporations, and a spirit of generosity, which is not part of cyberpunk. You'll remember some years ago that Time Magazine
Writing Challenges and Preferences in Sci-Fi
00:06:16
Speaker
named its Person of the Year, you.
00:06:20
Speaker
the internet creators who freely give of themselves to make a Wikipedia, to post a joke on Facebook, to write an amusing blog post, to upload their content, right? This is not the cyberpunk milieu.
00:06:36
Speaker
And I would go crazy if the only people I could write about were disaffected, youth, dissolute individuals who were on the wrong side of the, you know, Bill uses this term, William Gibson uses this term, consensus reality. What cyberpunk has is a consensus morality, which is orthogonal to my own. So I couldn't do that. So by process of elimination,
00:07:03
Speaker
We end up with post-apocalyptic. Granted, and you raise a very valid point mark about a steady diet of either reading or writing about the downfall of our civilization is inherently
00:07:18
Speaker
depressing. But that said, within the context of the downfall, you can write about real human interaction. And as that happens, my most recent project is my own, I think, first, post-apocalyptic work. Yeah, I agree. You could stretch a couple of the others to make a case, but the download it is absolutely a post-apocalyptic novel and has some of the warmest, most human characters in it, ironically,
00:07:47
Speaker
They are from that wrong side of the law that's so characterized as cyberpunk that I've ever written. If I had to only read one of those three choices that you cruelly put on the table, Mark, your buffet is not one that I choose to dine at. I would have to choose the post-apocalyptic. It's a feast of the devil. That's all it is. It is. But I can imagine you bringing- A broccoli and kale, and you've got cauliflower.
00:08:16
Speaker
Have all you can eat buffet. Thank you. I'm going to go hungry today. I will pass. Thank you very much. Yes. So why, Mark, did you limit it to those three? Well, because I knew that Rob didn't really write too much in any of those. And yeah, I answered what did I answer? I said space opera just because I've never written it. So that that appeals to me because there must be a way to do that with your kind of aesthetic, Rob. There's got to be a way that you can
00:08:46
Speaker
take that form and get more out of it and make the characters. We talked about this last week with our guest last week, The Expanse. That's basically space opera, but it is really good, good space opera.
00:09:03
Speaker
I think you could do it, Rob. I believe you. I believe you do. I mean, part of the problem is that it comes with a de facto milieu of outer space. Yes, outer space. It has to be there. And if you look at my oeuvre, I'm getting a lot of French words in here. I hope the Quebec language police are listening. Consider my oeuvre.
00:09:24
Speaker
very little of my work is actually off Earth. Most of it is near future or the present day on Earth, usually Canada, very often Ontario, Canada. And so the fact that, you know, in the public's consciousness,
00:09:40
Speaker
You say science fiction, they sink space, right? Absolutely. There's a large swath of the genre that is that. It's a hard sell to get me to buy in to most space-based science fiction.
00:09:56
Speaker
And because I'm a rationalist and I believe in science, I have a particularly hard time when you're saying, OK, we're zipping around the galaxy, or I've got multiple galaxies that are faster than the speed of light, by hand-wavium, as we say in the game. Use this magical substance, hand-wavium, or unobtanium, or dilithium that allows us to do this. Or even worse, a mycelium network.
00:10:24
Speaker
My studio network of
Science Fiction Elements: Fantasy vs. Realism
00:10:26
Speaker
mushroom madness
00:10:29
Speaker
Yeah, well, yeah, no, it's true what he's saying. And the funny thing is I just started rewatching Star Trek, the original series, which I've, you know, loved my whole life. But I'm watching it with a with a critical eye. And I just watched that Where No Man Has Gone Before. And I've always thought of Star Trek as being classic science fiction, you know, with more of a nod to reality, certainly than Star Wars. But Where No Man Has Gone Before is basically sorcery. You know, there's
00:10:57
Speaker
It's interesting because, of course, it's the one where it's the first one with Kirk. The Enterprise tries to do the first ever or the second ever extra galactic expedition. The first one had been done 20 years previously by a starship called Valiant. And everybody on board had ended up killing themselves. But there were frantic requests of the library computer aboard their ship for information about ESP. Somehow the magical powers of passing through the barrier
00:11:27
Speaker
Gave people on board ESP and the lesson of the story is, with great power goes megalomania. And, you know, it's interesting you mentioned that one. I have great fondness for that one. This is called with Sally Kellerman, right? Sally Kellerman and Gary Lockwood, right? Who got the funds of that role.
00:11:47
Speaker
cast in 2001, his Space Odyssey. He had seen it. He was looking for, you know, the handsome, rugged American astronaut guy. So, yeah, that directly led to that. In fact, I saw Gary Lockwood on a panel at a San Diego Comic Con or Dragon Con, I can't remember which a few years ago, Dragon Con. And he goes, Hi, I'm Gary Lockwood. You may remember me from guest starring in the pilot that sold Star Trek.
00:12:16
Speaker
Now, some of you penance out there is saying, no, you were in the second pilot. Listen to my words. The first pilot was a failure. My pilot sold Star Trek. Absolutely true. And you know, although I'm not a big consumer of media tie in fiction, and I've never written any.
00:12:38
Speaker
except for, I wrote the series finale for the fan film series, Star Trek Continues, two parts concluding Kirk's five-year voyage. And there were multiple writers, including others who were, like me, WGA, WGC members, submitting proposals, including Judy Burns, who had written the Tholian Web for the third season of original Star Trek. They took my proposal over Judy's proposal, yay me,
00:13:05
Speaker
which was a direct sequel to where No Man Has Gone Before, brings an old symbol. So I have great fondness for that. But as soon as it's interesting, because Star Trek was coming off in 1964, when the first pilot was made 65, the second, then on air in 66, they were on the tail end of John W. Campbell's reign as editor of Astounding Stories, later renamed Analog.
00:13:33
Speaker
And fundamentally, analog or astounding as previously was called, was the definer of what qualified as hard science fiction. Still to this day, it's the only science fiction magazine that only publishes hard, that is rigorously research plausible science fiction. Campbell got enormously interested in extrasensory perception.
00:13:57
Speaker
And he allowed into science fiction, telepathy, ESP, all this sort of thing, which we've deprecated since. He was enamored of the research being done at Duke University at the time that purported to show that there were statistically significant effects in terms of being able to read the banks of playing cards, the exact things.
00:14:21
Speaker
that Elizabeth Dainer, the character played by Sally Cullerman, cites that it's a well-known fact that certain people have precognition to read back to the playing cards and so forth. Reading the back of the playing card is easy. It's actually reading the front when the back is facing you. That's hard. The back, it's a bicycle. Everybody can read those, right? But Campbell bought into this. And so for a time,
00:14:44
Speaker
television. I mean, he was still the editor when Star Trek went on the air. For a time, this magic, you're absolutely right to call it wizardry or sorcery or whatever the word was you used.
00:14:57
Speaker
We would not allow it in science fiction today, but we did on the tail end of Campbell's reign. He had given it the imprimatur. You could publish it in analog and therefore it was science fiction. That was good enough for Roddenberry. So we didn't see very much except for the Vulcan telepathy, which remember had to be done by touch.
00:15:17
Speaker
You could almost argue that, you know, something, neurotransmitters are passing through the blood, right, or something, except when he, of course, mind melts with veg or mind melts with nomad, but or the horda. But generally speaking, there were very... Or through the plexiglass when he gives bones, his katra. Well, that's right. Yes, that's right. Remember. Yeah.
00:15:41
Speaker
Yeah. But the other thing I've noted is that there's several episodes in the beginning of Star Trek that deal with telepathy and telekinesis and that sort of thing, Charlie X and the original pilot. That's right. And the problem is, as every science fiction writer will tell you, if you allow these sort of superpowers in and your guys only have plausible technology, they got a phaser communicator and a tricorder against God,
00:16:08
Speaker
Yeah. What happened is in the subs, you know, Charlie X, Charlie Evans kind of was godlike. He'd been given godlike powers by the Thasians in that episode. Q absolutely even says to Picard in the final season of Picard, even gods have their favorites, Jean-Luc, referring to their relationship. Tremaine, the squire of Gotham, although he was a bratty kid, used some technology. Godlike, you have to reign this back.
00:16:34
Speaker
Or your characters simply become ineffectual bystanders in a fantasy universe. I think we're being a little bit unfair to the editors of the time because at the time this hadn't been disproven yet, right? This was still like the Russians were doing research on this. The Russians absolutely were that friendly.
00:16:56
Speaker
We had MKUltra here in Montreal. I mean, this was active research into the 80s. So it's a little bit unfair to go back and say, Oh, well, you know, yeah, absolutely. As I say, Amble gave it its imprimatur. Yeah, his imprimatur. It's only subsequently it has been deprecated. You know, you're absolutely
Sawyer's Career and Inspirations
00:17:19
Speaker
Yeah. And Eric Von Daniken became rich Von Daniken who said when he was finally cornered, the Swiss Hotelier, he said, you never actually visited them. Well, I visited them by astral projection. That was good enough to do this research. Right. You know, we found that the people who were claiming these powers
00:17:37
Speaker
who were claiming they were real, were frauds. Now, I happen to have friends who are professional magicians. They're not frauds at all. They are illusionists. They use that term very advisedly. They're entertainers who know how to fool you. And, of course, part of their act is pretending they have psychic powers. But they are the first in the world, the most skeptical people, besides science fiction writers. We're an enormously skeptical lot.
00:18:04
Speaker
you'll ever meet are magicians. There's no doubt that Penn and Teller had their BS TV series, you know, was all about the fact that come on, you know, we're in the business of fakery. We know when you're pulling our leg.
00:18:21
Speaker
So let's stop for a second. And so we know who you are and probably most of the people listening know who you are as well. But one of the sticks of this podcast is we like to let the guests introduce themselves in their own words. So can you tell us who you are? Sure.
00:18:36
Speaker
My name is Robert J. Sawyer. I'm a Canadian science fiction writer. My first novel came out in 1990. I've published 25 since then, or 25 in total, so 24 since then, working on my 26th. My most famous novel, it's an outlier, was flash forward, and it's an outlier because it was made into the ABC TV series of the same name starring Josephine and John Cho.
00:19:03
Speaker
by other novels include Calculating God, which was my first national bestseller in Canada. And I'd like to, although I have various things I say, I'm a hard science fiction writer, but I also like to be a writer where my greatest goal is for somebody to read my latest book and say, I can't believe the guy who wrote
00:19:25
Speaker
whichever one of my previous books, also wrote this. So I can't believe the guy who wrote Rollback, which is a heart-rending story about a long married couple in their 80s, they try to get rejuvenation, only works for one of them, very tender,
00:19:41
Speaker
Emotionally fraught story, also wrote Red Planet Blues, a hard-boiled detective novel and not Mars. Also wrote The Talking Dinosaurs of Farseer, Fossil Hunter and Foreigner. Also wrote Starplex, which is the closest thing I've ever done to space opera. Also wrote courtroom drama, science fiction, A Legal Alien. I like to be a chameleon.
00:20:01
Speaker
within the confines of, I believe, science fiction has to be plausible extrapolation from what we already know to what reasonably might be. That's the only commonality my work has. I have a question about that. Is that for yourself or is that showmanship?
00:20:23
Speaker
You know, I mean, I'm in the entertainment biz. I have chosen this particular way to feed myself and my family and my, you know, have my lovely home and all of that. And you have to have a certain panache in what you're doing.
00:20:39
Speaker
So absolutely, I mean, I've been very lucky. I have won more awards than just about anybody in the history of the science fiction and fantasy field. I mean, according to the Locus database, I have indeed won more and been nominated for more. I've lost way more than I've won than anybody else in the history of the field going right back to Mary Shelley and H.G. Wells and including George R. Martin and Stephen King. So, you know, that comes from dazzling.
00:21:08
Speaker
And an individual book dazzles more when it is a break. I was just reading commentary on Sofia Vergara, who is now starring in the new limited series Griselda about the Colombian female drug lord. Right. And people are saying, you know, she never never won an Emmy for her terrific portrayal of Gloria on Modern Family. Other cast members did not hurt. Right. Because it was so easy.
00:21:38
Speaker
for her to be that character with the extravagant, as she says herself, accent, the gorgeous good look. This is her. She's playing her or, you know, as Larry David does on Curb Your Enthusiasm, her to the 10th degree, but her in real life.
00:21:55
Speaker
So now, as she's reached a certain middle-aged point, she wants serious respect as an actor. She's playing a not physically attractive, not likeable, despicable human being, right? That's going after the awards. She wants to dazzle. Well, there are writers who I think are every bit as good and as ambitious as I am, if not better, maybe even better, whose career doesn't show the variety.
00:22:23
Speaker
And I think if there's been anything that's propelled all those award wins, 67 or eight at this point for my science fiction writing. And, you know, the only person in history to be named to the order of Canada specifically for work in science fiction, the most recent guest of honour to World Science Fiction Finch of me and my friend Xi Xinlu, we were a co-guest of honour in the most recent Worldcon.
00:22:47
Speaker
This is because of that showmanship reality. Whereas other writers who have been enormously good at what they do, if it's also got an enormous sameness, how does any one of those books stand out? He's passed away now. That's the only reason why it's in the past sense. He used to be very good friends with Peter Robinson, who is often called Canada's top mystery writer.
00:23:12
Speaker
And I'm lucky enough to be periodically termed Canada's top science fiction writer. But the difference was that my career was all these bizarrely different properties. And Peter's career was by and large chronicling the cases of Detective Inspector Alan Banks of the Yorkshire Constabulary.
00:23:35
Speaker
So any one of those books is a fine book, but not one of those books stands out as, oh wow, Gator really stretched here. This one is really totally different than the last one. It is producing a reliable product that will sell in very high numbers to an audience that is going to be consistently there for it. Whereas I have sales figures
00:23:56
Speaker
which to the regret of my publisher will go up and down depending on what it happens to be that has struck my fancy. It may not be the best for a consistent audience building, but it is absolutely the best for dazzling people. I didn't know he could do that. I didn't know he could do this. And no doubt very satisfying. Enormously, enormously artistically satisfying. Yeah.
00:24:18
Speaker
So a funny story, well, funny to me anyway, I'm not sure I ever told you this. Maybe I did. You might recall we met working on the show Ideas at CBC Radio. I certainly recall. You had written a couple of books, but they hadn't been published at that point. And you were doing a couple of episodes for Ideas on science fiction. This was 1985. I was doing them and you're absolutely right. My first novel didn't come out until 1990.
00:24:43
Speaker
Yeah. And so I met you, I was like, relatively new at the CBC. And you're relatively new as a human being at that point. 1985. Come on. Don't call it Mother CBC for nothing, you know.
00:24:59
Speaker
That's true. And my plan was never to make a career at the CBC. It was to be a writer. And when I met you, I remember thinking to myself, oh, this guy, he thinks he's going to be the next big Canadian science fiction writer. No, no, I'm going to be the next big. And then I watched in shock and amazement as no, you actually became, yeah, the big Canadian science fiction writer.
00:25:23
Speaker
But it's been a pleasure to know you all those years and watch your meteoric ascent and you stay there, the staying power. I've been extraordinarily lucky and there are a couple of factors that are utterly extraneous to me. One of the most fortunate things in my entire life was being born in Canada because all of us in Canada benefited from this and Americans simply don't understand this.
00:25:50
Speaker
They talk about, oh, you in Canada, you have the Canada Council, you have Arts Councils, you have this. We have socialized medicine.
00:25:57
Speaker
I could go full-time as a writer and I did at 23 years of age. That was the last time I got a paycheck from an employer. That happened to be what is now called Toronto Metropolitan University and was at that time Ryerson Polytechnical Institute, where I had spent a year after graduation from the radio and television arts program working as what they called a studio lab assistant. You're a lobby.
00:26:25
Speaker
Absolutely. That last time I ever got a check, never had to worry once about medical expenses. I'm not going to go into my personal life here, but I would say that I know for a fact that in the last decade, the book value of things that I've received, courtesy of the Ontario Healthcare System, is well over a million dollars. And I never had to worry.
00:26:51
Speaker
And I could worry about not being able to eat, worry about, you know, maybe not being able to make rent, but I never had to be shackled to a nine to five. And, you know, speaking of Canadians, of course, Malcolm Gladwell is the author of the book Outliers, right? And in Outliers, he talks about the magic number of hours you have to put in. I think it's 20,000 hours. You have to put in 10,000. He's absolutely right.
00:27:20
Speaker
There's also what's called in the science fiction field, Bester's limit after Alfred Bester, who ironically wrote one of the most important novels about ESP in science fiction history. To go back to where we were earlier, his limit was a million words and amounts to the same thing. Gladwell said you got to be 10,000 hours before you're going to be any good at an expert at something. And Bester said you got to write a million words of garbage before you write your first good word.
00:27:50
Speaker
And the only way to do that quickly is to do it full time. So by being in Canada and being able to be self-employed for now 41 years as a professional writer in this country,
00:28:06
Speaker
and never having to worry about health insurance. That's what let me get that million words written out for me. When you met me, you're absolutely right. In 1985, I'd sold a couple of little tiny short stories, but hadn't sold my novels.
00:28:21
Speaker
And I was making my living doing nonfiction writing. I did my million words of garbage, mostly for newspaper and magazine articles, press releases, brochures for all three levels, federal, provincial, municipal governments, and also writing radio documentary for the CBC and things like that. So I was able to do it quickly. And I look at my American colleagues who took 10, 15 years
00:28:48
Speaker
to get their million words or get their 10,000 hours in. And I owe it so much of that to Tommy Douglas, the father of socialized medicine in Canada. This is deep CAD card. I love this.
00:29:02
Speaker
I'm willing to bet that many of those words were not in fact garbage. Well, you know, I have always been good, right? Because you can't make a living if you're not at least good as a writer, right? So I was always good at what I did. And but, you know, that is, it sounds like braggadocio, but it is what
00:29:24
Speaker
pushes you in a direction, right? You know, people say to me all the time, Oh, you have a nice voice isn't you know, why don't you work in radio? Well, I did actually have a degree in broadcasting, right? You get pushed in that direction because of whatever, you know, the good Lord of completely random
00:29:45
Speaker
evolutionary chance and the DNA crapshoot between your two parents gave you, you know, you become an athlete because you were born with a certain prowess, which you have to develop. You become a writer, a creative person, because you're born with these things that you may work on to develop. But, you know, the fact that I became a writer because I was good at being a writing, good at being a writing, because I thought smart and write good stuff. Real good, real good.
00:30:15
Speaker
You know, I gravitate or you're streamed by external forces. That's true. Yeah. I would love to make a, I'm being facetious. I never would have, but I would have loved to make a living, you know, playing professional hockey. I can't even skate. I'm not going to, I got to have a prayer of doing that. You have to, uh, you know, they say of diplomacy very much in the news these days, diplomacy of politics is the art of the possible. So it was just making any kind of living.
00:30:42
Speaker
It's not what you want to do. It's what you can do. Now, I have to get this out of the way. I tried desperately to put you on the radio. Yes, we tried repeatedly. Multiple pilots. The listeners haven't read Joe's book. They really should because you feature prominently in it, Rob, and it's a great story. I know. I knew a blurb and I was delighted. What's great about the story is actually just like it just shows how often it takes to try something before you finally break through.
00:31:12
Speaker
Absolutely. It is one of my greatest disappointments that we did. Me too. We did three great pilots for CBC Radio. For what we're talking about here, for the listeners benefit is a show about science fiction that would have some dramatization, radio dramacompose, but it was a show about science fiction. It wasn't like we were trying to sell, you know, they'd had, you had Johnny Chase, Siege Crud Agent of Space on CBC and other
00:31:38
Speaker
than brilliant science fiction shows over the years. But yeah, we thought it was a natural. It didn't sell. And what you just said, Mark, is absolutely true. People say, oh, man, why aren't they making movies and TV shows for your books? I said, actually, they made one. They made it in 2009. I made a ton of money off of it, and it disappeared. I mean, I think it's streaming on Disney. And that still puts you in the top percentile, right?
00:32:05
Speaker
Oh, absolutely. But that's my point. But I won the lottery once. You people are saying, how come you haven't won the lottery five, six, 10, 20 times? The answer is because the Ontario Lottery Corporation has their goons come out and investigate you if you win. They look for insider dealing, right? That's hilarious. I've had, I've delighted my friend, Adel van Bellicombe. In the last year, I've seen, you know, Adel, Joe, in the last year, I've seen him go from
00:32:34
Speaker
bitter disgruntled former writer, working as a police officer in Peel Region, a police services employee, to, on the top of the world, because Paramount Plus made a TV series adapting his decade-old Wolfpack series of novels to just this past week, well now it's Sunday, so just last week, having his series canceled.
00:32:56
Speaker
You know, you got the highs and lows, but it is delightful when it happens. But for so many writers, it never does. And, you know, people say, why are your things being made to movies or TV shows? If I wanted to be working in film and television, that's what my degree is in.
00:33:16
Speaker
I'd be doing that. I'm working in books because that's what I want to work in. And only a fool writes books thinking that that is not the terminal form of their art. No painter says, I made a great painting here, but you know what? I'm hoping they're going to make an animated screensaver out of it. You know, no concessions. I got a great song here. I just can't wait until somebody makes a movie of my song or whatever, you know, your art.
00:33:46
Speaker
has a terminal form. If you're a potter, it's a pot. If you're a novelist, it's a novel. If you're a screenplay writer, it's a screenplay. The difference is you can't make a living as a novelist unless your novels get published. You in fact can make a living as a screenwriter or a television writer without ever having a single thing produced. That's the beauty of your unionized profession.
00:34:09
Speaker
I was on strike with my brothers and sisters of the Writers Guild of America and we may very well also Writers Guild of Canada go on strike as we face down the producers who want to replace us.
00:34:24
Speaker
with AI, or even if they don't replace us with AI, I say, oh yeah, send in your script and it'll be evaluated by an AI before we even decide whether a human being will look at it. We're fighting against that. But in the, you know, I've made hundreds of thousands of dollars as a scriptwriter for things that have never been produced and never will be produced. And that is economically advantageous, but was so destroying.
00:34:51
Speaker
I'm actually in a debate right now with people who are trying to develop red planet blues. My hardboiled detective novel set on Mars about, you know, they would really like me to write a screenplay.
00:35:03
Speaker
on spec, meaning without money upfront. And of course, A, the unions won't allow that unless I do it entirely separate from any option agreement and just own it as my own spec screenplay. But it's, you know, no, like the chances of this getting made are so slim. Why would I spend weeks or months doing this?
00:35:27
Speaker
you know, for no recompense up front. I wrote a great screenplay for a Canadian production company based on my novel Triggers. I thoroughly enjoyed doing that. Everybody was happy with the screenplay. Just never got made. And that's no failing on my part or on the producer's part. It's just the reality that, you know, you got a great, you got a script. Now you just need a hundred million dollars to make the film. And those hundred million dollar, you know,
00:35:53
Speaker
For Jeff Bezos, it's not much, but for most of the rest of the world, that's a hell of a lot of money that is not easy to come by. I think about Philip K. Dick, who had so many adaptations done of his work after his death. Yes. I have no children, but I have four nieces who are counting.
00:36:13
Speaker
Uncle Rob kicks off that he will be the new Philip K. Dick and they will live the high life for the, you know, 70 years after my death that copyright in Canada, we just recently, you know, joined the international standard of 70 years. It used to be 50 years in Canada quite recently, which is why James Bond fell out of copyright in Canada and was still in copyright in Great Britain and the United States. That's because of the mouse. It's kind of Disney.
00:36:40
Speaker
Yeah, but they've lost I mean now this year they now finally the 70 years has passed Yeah, but but that's right, but they were certainly you know Disney owns ABC Studios ABC Studios made flash forward So as I said, you know, we were made on the Disney Disney campus in Hollywood in Burbank and
00:37:02
Speaker
you know, literally supposedly the happiest place on Earth. I walked by the animation studio every day on the way to work and went to, you know, we had a lovely pavilion for our Raiders room. Beautiful climates. These are pavilions on the lawn. Disney, next door was the pavilion for Lost, by the way. Their last season overlapped the first season. The point of all this is people say, how was it working with ABC? I was conditioning. Everybody was wonderful.
00:37:30
Speaker
except the lawyers. Not only were they vicious, but they were mean-spiritedly vicious. And in fact, I'll tell you a little quick story about that, not to get too discursive here. But my contract said we had the rights to use the flash-forward logo from the TV series on the book. All they had to do was give us the files, the graphic files. And the lawyers said, no.
00:37:57
Speaker
It's in my contract. I'm entitled to this." And he said, no, you can't have it. He said, why not? He said, because I say so. And then he said, and don't even think about going over my head. This is definitive. And I thought, what a...
00:38:14
Speaker
none is Scrooge McDuck. I mean, I'm just going to call the vice president of Disney, who was in charge of ultimately the top guy. I called and his secretary, of course, answered the phone, said, Hello, my name is Robert J. Sawyer. I wrote the novel Flash Forward, based on the TV series. And she said, I'll put you right through Mr. Sawyer.
00:38:43
Speaker
Got the vice president and he said, we love you. We love your book. What can we do for you? How are you doing? Nice to meet you. You know? And I said, well, you got an A hole over in the legal building who won't let me have this. What? And he literally, you know, you could hear him calling to his assistant, get Mr. Sawyer, whatever he needs. Right. We were down to 12 hours before.
00:39:03
Speaker
The book, the tying edition was scheduled to go on the offset presses to come out at 12 hours. And the capricious nastiness of Disney lawyers should never be underestimated. That's how they were able to change copyright law and everything else to Disney's advantage, because Walt Disney may have been a very nice man, but he knew to hire really unpleasant people. Well, that's true. If you got to hire a lawyer, you got to hire a shark.
00:39:32
Speaker
So, okay, 43 minutes in, Mark. Is there any point? Okay. Yeah. The question is what piece of art inspired you at some point in your career?
00:39:42
Speaker
Now, this is ironic that you ask this, Mark, because it is a post-apocalyptic fiction. Awesome. God, it fits. Absolutely. So much of what my writing, my career has been about is riffing on or inspired at least by 1968's movie Planet of the Apes.
00:40:02
Speaker
There are a whole bunch of resonances there. First, I am, if you look for my literary antecedents, I say, you know, H.G. Wells is my spiritual father. He was the father of writing science fiction as social commentary.
00:40:18
Speaker
And that's what Planet of the Apes is. It's not a reasonable thing to think that, you know, the apes are going to take over. But as social commentary, it's absolutely brilliant. One of the aphorisms of my own that I cite repeatedly is that no science fiction work is about the year it's putatively set in, rather it is wholly and completely about the year in which it was composed.
00:40:42
Speaker
Planet of the Apes came out 1968 based on a 1963 novel by Pierre Boulle called Le Planet d'Aissange, a French novel. He also wrote Bridge on the River Kwai. But the 67 when the film was being made
00:40:58
Speaker
The front page stories in every newspaper everywhere in the world were only two topics on a daily basis. The fear of nuclear war and race relations. And that's 100% what Planet of the Apes is about. And it deals with them brilliantly. Sammy Davis Jr. went up to Frank Schaffner, who was the director of the film, went on to win an Oscar for directing Patton as his next feature was Patton.
00:41:24
Speaker
Franklin Shafter. After the film, Sammy Davis Jr. came up to the screen and said, you have made the most trenchant film about race relations ever in American cinema. And this was absolutely true. Those who only remember
00:41:40
Speaker
It from their childhood or only remembered the Simpsons parody of it or whatever need to go back and watch it as a clear-eyed adult It's a brilliant piece of social commentary, but also it was the first science fiction film to have as its lead actor
00:41:58
Speaker
and as its lead actress. People who had already won Academy Awards. Charlton Heston, who had won the Academy Award for Ben Hur, and Kim Hunter, who plays Dr. Zira, the female lead in the film, who had won the Academy Award for A Streetcar Named Desire. The cinematographer, Lalo Schifrin, it's like Ansel Adams made movies. The cinematography in that film is gorgeous, and of course, he was an Academy Award winner.
00:42:25
Speaker
Michael Wilson, who had been blacklisted and didn't get to get his Academy Awards until they were retroactively given in his name, actually had already won an Academy Award before he got blacklisted and then subsequently got given again. He was the one who actually wrote the screenplay for Bridge on the River Kwai, but wasn't able to take a credit for it. He was blacklisted and so forth.
00:42:46
Speaker
Rod Serling, you know, the principal, the most well-regarded scriptwriter in the science fiction genre. He and Wilson wrote the script. Just the whole team that came together for that was, you know, the first really across the board A-listers.
00:43:04
Speaker
It was the first Oscar nomination for Jerry Goldsmith, who wrote the brilliant score. John Chambers won a special Oscar for the creative makeup design. This was really the film, even more than 2001's Space Odyssey.
00:43:21
Speaker
that said to the world that across the board, science fiction can be first rate, because you can't say for the acting in 2001. And although the soundtrack is brilliant, it was also a public domain, right? You know, it's classic music, right? This was short. You could have brilliantly innovative score. You could have brilliant, the innovative script. You could have great acting.
00:43:47
Speaker
You get all of that. So the idea that science fiction aspirationally should be social comment should be high quality and should just knock your socks off and stick with you forever.
00:44:02
Speaker
You know, for the 50th anniversary, you know, I'm a well enough to do person, but even I had to think twice, but only twice before I said, hell yeah, I'm going to fly to Los Angeles just to watch a movie. And once you see the 50th anniversary screening at the USC film school, where of course the cast is mostly dead, but the surviving makeup effects people, Bill Kreber, who was the
00:44:28
Speaker
brilliant art director for the film was there to meet these people. It was absolutely worth flying to Los Angeles for 48 hours just to see the 50th anniversary screening of that film with those people.
00:44:43
Speaker
Yeah, the cinematography of that movie is amazing. As I say, if Ansel Adams was a motion picture photographer, it's so beautiful. Do you know where they filmed it? Well, they filmed at various places, Lake Powell. They filmed it in Grand Canyon, Arizona. But yeah, absolutely. The filming location. And of course, a lot of it was at the Fox Ranch, which is now part of Malibu State Park in suburban Los Angeles. But yeah, absolutely now.
00:45:09
Speaker
So given your answer at the beginning of this podcast, how would you say it informed your work? Did it inspire you to write science fiction? It did. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I'll tell you the truth. I don't often tell this story, but I was having dinner, just me and him, with Tom Doherty. We went to, I think, Shula's a really great steakhouse in the States. He was buying. He's a rich man. Why not? And it was just the two of us were at a convention. And he said, you know,
00:45:38
Speaker
Well, I've been looking at these other publishers like, you know, Bantam. Delray has the, at that time, I guess, their pocket had the Star Trek license. Delray has the Star Wars license. We tried with the Colombo license. They didn't really take off, but I've been looking around and thinking we got to get more into licensed fiction. So Rob, you know, you're one of our favorite authors here at Tor. Is there a property that I might acquire?
00:46:05
Speaker
the license to that you would be willing to write. And I said, you know, I've turned down doing all kinds of license work. But if you got the license to classic Planet of the Apes, I would do it. And he said, so depressing. And I said, well, that is the first film is depressing. And then the second is even worse. And let's start on the third. And then, of course, the parents and the child
00:46:26
Speaker
apparently get murdered at the end of the fourth. But the fifth, in the very final scene, has this little bit of twig of hoping for a better future. And that's where I take the jumping off point. And Tom said, nobody remembers the fifth, let alone the second. I remember the second. Unrelentingly bleak series. It's just, I don't know. And then he said, you know, but if you want to do something like that, that isn't actually trespassing on the license, well, we'd certainly be interested in that.
00:46:56
Speaker
I turned around and wrote hominids, humans, and hybrids of a parallel earth. You know what? That's my favorite series you wrote, hominids. I love that series so much. A parallel earth within the Neanderthals survived for the present day, and we did not in a portal it opens up between. So clearly, I was dealing with another, you know, humans in masks, which is what
00:47:18
Speaker
planet of the apes literally dealt with and i figuratively dealt with and all kinds of social commentary in hominids humans and hybrids and you know i'd had a bunch of hugo nominations under my belt at that point i'd lost track but terminal experiment was nominated frame shift was nominated factory humanity was nominated
00:47:36
Speaker
trying to think what, if anything else. And I'd already won the Nebula Award, but I hadn't won the Hugo yet. I got the Hugo. And then the next year got me a nomination for the next, for the Hugo for the second book. And the book still remain, you know, it's there 21 years since the first one came out now, amongst my most successful. And unlike in the Planet of the Apes franchise, where dogs are dead, as of the fourth film, and would never interrupt our recording with a background barking,
00:48:05
Speaker
In my series, Paunter Bodet has a dog, but one of the things you can do in a book that you can't do in a movie is he talks about his dog, plays with his dog, and then when the dog is first seen by regular homo sapiens,
00:48:23
Speaker
She stops dead in her tracks and says, oh my effing God, there's a wolf in the room. Yeah. Because the Neanderthals never did this ridiculous domestication we've done, which is actually something I'm writing about now in my current novel, domesticus. You know, I love dogs. I don't have a dog. I have a dog allergy. Unfortunately, my dad had a severe one. We couldn't have one. I love dogs. But what we've done to dogs is cruel, you know, that pugs.
00:48:49
Speaker
had all kinds of respiratory difficulties. Hip dysplasia is common in many breeds of dogs because of the way we've read them for body forms and structures that are simply maladaptive but look nice in dog shows. Almost all dog breeds are less than 150 years old. We've done this quite, quite recently.
00:49:11
Speaker
the chihuahua, the dachshund, all these things that we created. And now we want to do genetic engineering on human beings because we obviously have been so good and compassionate in what we did it to our best friends.
00:49:27
Speaker
I love how you've made it so I cannot edit my dog. I like to, you know, well, this is, you all remember this, Joe, from your training in radio and television arts. And I just saw a version of this, by the way, on a late show, Stephen Colbert. Martin Scorsese came out, and you could see that his index finger was in a splint. And so the first thing Colbert, and he was trying to hide it, Scorsese, first thing Colbert says, well,
00:49:52
Speaker
elephant in the room, let's talk about what happened to your finger, because you would dress the background noise. If you have a cold and you can't articulate properly, you say, Excuse me, listeners, I'm sorry, I know I sound rough today. Well, you address it rather than pretend it's not there, because that is dishonoring your listener, or your viewer, thinking, Oh, we can just, you know, razzle dazzle you and you know, and have you not notice that there's a cast on the finger.
00:50:22
Speaker
or that a dog barked in the background. You address it, make a joke of it, and you move on. Context is king, man. I mean, that's, it's important. Yeah. And this is a very open and honest podcast. And now I will just say that that was my Shelte Wendy. So Wendy, the dog, she gets her credit now. She can join WAG-AFTRA instead of SAG-AFTRA. WAG is an old tail joke. Thereby hangs a tail.
00:50:49
Speaker
Oh boy. You don't have kids because these are like quality dad jokes. They're quality dad jokes. Yeah. Okay, so Planet of the Apes. I want to go back to something you were talking about earlier actually, the beginning of your career that you had your last job was when you were 23 and then you became a full-time writer. Was there any point
00:51:10
Speaker
back then that you were afraid that you'd made the wrong choice? So this was the greatest epiphany I ever had in my life and I was lucky enough to have it when I was 19. Now you and I, Joe, went up through the school system here in Ontario. Back in the day we had
00:51:29
Speaker
pretty well unique in North America, a grade 13. So you were finishing your high school education, not at 18, but at 19. Yeah, me too. And you too. And I had intended to pursue an academic career, both my parents were academics, but I always at the back of my mind, I'd like to write.
00:51:48
Speaker
And I made an 11th hour decision that I was going to, even though I'd already been accepted to study paleontology, the academic area that interested me at the University of Toronto, and indeed had a room in residence there. And even though I'd also been accepted to study geology at University of Waterloo,
00:52:07
Speaker
I made a very 11th hour decision to go to Ryerson and study, I wanted to study, be a writer. And because it was an 11th hour decision or a grade 13 decision, I didn't have the prerequisite of grade 13 history to do journalism at Ryerson, which was the top journalism program certainly in Toronto and arguably in Canada. But the top broadcasting program in Canada then and now
00:52:33
Speaker
the School for Radio and Television Arts at Toronto Metropolitan University, go, I don't know what the, have you seen a new mascot of the university? I don't know what the hell that thing is. It's some kind of hideous foul, but we used to have a ram, as you may recall. Anyway, so go eggy, but he's gone. In any event, I made this decision because I'd had this thing
00:52:58
Speaker
an epiphany when I was 19 that I wanted to live my life by minimizing deathbed regrets. And I said to myself, I would regret
00:53:11
Speaker
going through a safe, comfortable career. Now, it's not really true anymore for academics, but it was at the time, the template that I'd seen, which is my father's template, which is, you know, you work hard, you get good marks, you get into a good school, you go to a better school, or a good school for graduate work. He was an economist, he went to the University of Chicago, which was the top economic school in the Western world at the time, arguably still is, did his master's there, PhD there,
00:53:39
Speaker
associate professor, assistant professor, full professor, dean, professor emeritus, you're set for life, 10 year along the way where you could not lose your job except for the most egregious of circumstances. You know, that was the safe path.
00:53:54
Speaker
And when I said to my dad, throwing it all out, dad, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to be a writer. And he said, Oh, now he was a statistician by proficient statistical economist by professional. So back in the day, he went to the mainframe at U of T and got a printout from a stats can of the average income for the last 20 years of writers in Canada. And he just left them track at my place at the breakfast table. And that's all he ever said about it.
00:54:24
Speaker
But I said, fully informed, dad, this is what I'm going to do. So was I scared? No, because I had realized, you know, your 20s as a gift, you can fail in your 20s. I look at, ironically, so many of my friends whose first marriages failed in their 20s, whose first choice of career turned out to be completely wrong. And they made a
00:54:49
Speaker
a course correction sometime in their 20s. So no, I was totally prepared. And by the time I was 30, I had sold my first novel. It came out when I was 30. I had sold it, I think, when I was 29. And I was making a decent living writing nonfiction. And so no, there was never any panic in the process except rejecting the notion that I was going to allow my life to be a safe life.
00:55:17
Speaker
You know, nobody wants to die immediately, but were I to be told that today was my last day on earth, I could say in all honesty and sincerity that I lived in the best place in the entire world, the best time
00:55:35
Speaker
in all of history, and already at 63, longer than 90% of all the human beings who ever went before me. I hit the jackpot. I'm content with what my life was.
00:55:50
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. You hit the mega jackpot, I would say because we hit the jackpot in the same way, but you kind of ramped it up a little bit. Yeah, you ramped it up. It's your own work though too, so it's not just luck, it's effort.
AI's Impact on Creative Industries
00:56:06
Speaker
Plus, I'm a hard working guy. Yeah, you're a hard working guy. No, not a number of people have said, you know, the hardest working man in science fiction, the hardest working person, maybe, maybe not. But I absolutely I but I never, never, never discount the luck and a thoughtful guy just as hard as I do and are just as or more talented than I am who just never got some of those lucky breaks.
00:56:32
Speaker
Well, and Mark makes a good point, too, that you're that you're a thoughtful guy and, you know, and an affable guy. I mean, I've known you now for a long time. And one of the things that you've mentioned to me early, early on was the concept of paying it forward to other writers. Yes. Yes. Robert A. Heinlein really articulated that early on. But it was, you know, you said simply when he'd helped a younger writer,
00:56:56
Speaker
The younger writers said to him, how can I repay you? And he said, you can't. There's not a blessed thing you could possibly do for me. So turn around. And when you're where I am or part way here, help the next guy along in line. That's all I ask. And what a great field I went into. We have most writers in the field have taken that to heart. There are few people who are stupid enough
00:57:25
Speaker
including a couple here in Canada, sadly, who are stupid enough to believe that other writers are their competition instead of their colleagues and begrudge and take cheap shots at those who have been lucky this particular week or this particular year.
00:57:43
Speaker
But by and large, it's a field where I recognize that I can't write your books, Joe, or yours, Mark. You can't write mine. We're artists. We're not vying for, and it's an art that can expand or contract particularly.
00:57:59
Speaker
in today's environment of hybrid and or self-publisher to take as many talented practitioners as are committed to the craft. So it's not like, oh, he got a book contract, therefore I did not. He, you know, yes, it's true of the year I won the Hugo, Kim Stanley Robinson and David Brin, one of your previous guests, for example, did not. They were defeated. But that brings a point. You've had David on this show. Yes. Yeah.
00:58:25
Speaker
Okay, great friend of mine. As it happened, David and I were sitting in adjacent chairs at the Hugo Awards ceremony. Of course, they have the potential winners down front so that there's no, you know, delay of whoever's- No vaulting. So I get, you know, they're announcing, you know, the finalists are, and these kiln people by David Brin, the hominids by Robert J. Sawyer, those Kim Stanley Robinsons here, Rice and Salt, and so forth. And they called my name, and David was just,
00:58:55
Speaker
grinning from ear to ear, reached over, clasped my hands, let me be the first to congratulate you. Right? That's the spirit of this field. Yeah. You know, and I've encountered that generosity from so many writers who both are senior to me and now that I'm fairly much an eminent squeeze in the field myself, always pay forward, pay forward, pay forward. Yeah.
00:59:21
Speaker
Now I wanted to ask you as well about you've had great good fortune. Uh, obviously worked hard for it in your career.
00:59:29
Speaker
And you mentioned having lived at one of the best possible times, and perhaps that may apply to the publishing effect that you worked in as well. Because what do you think of the state of publishing now? You said worked in past tense, which is very interesting. This is January 2024, as we're talking. So in December of 2022, in other words, just over a year ago, Christmas time, I was talking to my great friend and colleague and one who had been enormously
00:59:59
Speaker
paying it forward and helpful to me early on spider robinson and spider said you know what pal to me.
01:00:07
Speaker
We got in at the right time. We made out like bandits and we're getting out at the right time because that period during which you could make comfortable upper middle-class living, just writing science fiction existed from sometime 1950 or so, pulp writers, very few of them. I mean, there were some incredibly prolific ones who made a living, but most were just scrambling to just make rent.
01:00:36
Speaker
But starting around 1950 with the advent of hardcover and then paperback publishing of science fiction things so that it wasn't just you would get your quarter cent award for the magazine publication. That was it. You could write a novel and actually get a decent amount of money through to five years ago or maybe even 10 years ago where it all started to fall apart. You could make a really decent living doing this.
01:01:05
Speaker
Every writer I know has either seen their advances drop. Larry Niven talks about this quite candidly, one of the great writers and again, a friend and a mentor of mine who
01:01:17
Speaker
as now, of course, a friend of mine, I always like to see Larry, or just the publishing industry, of course, is for the same advance that they paid 20 years ago in the same dollar figure, not adjusted for inflation, right? The advance hasn't changed. A friend of mine, a very good American writer, told me that he hadn't had an increase in his advances from, I'll say the name, a science fiction, big American publishing house, 15 years.
01:01:45
Speaker
15 which meant that in essence his advances a drop by more than half in that time and also in that time ace and the others ace being part of penguin random house the other big five said you know what we we've got your print rights in north america we want them worldwide
01:02:03
Speaker
in English at least and hopefully worldwide in all languages. We want your ebook rights. That's turning out to be lucrative. We're going to poison the market by overpricing your ebooks and make sure you never make a damn send off them. And if you do give you only 17 and a half percent of what the consumer pays for the ebook while we take three
01:02:22
Speaker
times that amount for having pressed the upload button. Oh, you know, audiobook rates, they used to be yours. No, now they're ours too. No increase in advances. So the state is horrific. And we haven't talked very much at all about one of the things I read a lot about my science which was artificial intelligence.
01:02:40
Speaker
I had a friend of mine, Lazarus Ternik, was just posting on my Facebook wall yesterday, the day before, ironically, in a comment aimed at David Brin, where David is participating in a conversation, that, David, you're out of touch. You don't understand that my whole reason to live as a creative individual has been destroyed these last 18 months.
01:03:01
Speaker
by generative AI art. I made my living to whatever degree I made a living as a science fiction artist. And now all you have to do is say a few prompts into Dali or one of the other generative engines and get work that is as good as, in the eyes of the public at least, that created by an artist who was bleeding his heart and soul onto the canvas. And we aren't quite there yet.
01:03:30
Speaker
where they can produce where generative AI, chat, GP, and so forth. Not yet, no. And produce a novel that's as good as mine. But they can certainly produce one that's an incredible imitation of my style. And within Moore's law, computing power doubles every 18 months. OK, when it was introduced 18 months ago, it was kind of a joke. And now it's pretty darn good. And 18 months from now, it's going to be better than me. And why would, you know,
01:03:58
Speaker
I have, I like to dazzle, as I say. You don't know what you're going to get with a Rob Sawyer novel. I like to say I'm the poorest gump box of chocolates of science fiction. That isn't everybody's taste.
01:04:12
Speaker
You can say to chat GPT today, you won't get a very good version, 18 months or 36 months from now, you've got a perfect version. I want a Rob Soar novel. That is, I like his politics. I really enjoy all the creative wordplay. I don't like it when he bashes the United States, even though he's a Canada US dual citizen and is just doing his civic duty.
01:04:32
Speaker
to be one of the unelected legislators that the poets, meaning writers in general, are in our cultural landscape. And I wish, though, that he had a lot more graphic sex. Write me that novel and have it. You know, he did this series about Neanderthals in a parallel world. I want it to be not Neanderthals. I want it to be instead that bears. Oh, dear.
01:04:55
Speaker
Oh, boy. Oh, boy. I think you might have a bestseller on your hands. And you're the only person in the world who wants that book. So you talked earlier, you asked, do I do it to dazzle? The only way you can dazzle is if you have a large audience.
01:05:10
Speaker
And we're leaving the era of popular or mass market fiction and moving towards the era of bespoke, custom made art that is perfect for you, but is of no interest to anybody else. That's the death of the arts being the signature of civilization. Wow. You want to talk about fragmentation of market.
01:05:37
Speaker
and your post-apocalyptic scenario. There you are, Martin. Oh my God. It's so depressing. It's so depressing. It is. And as I said in the conversation that brought David Brennan to it, and then my friend Lazarus, is that, you know, science fiction writers, we've been warning the world for 70 plus years about AI. And then
01:06:01
Speaker
big business just said, we're going to do it anyways with no government oversight. Then when they did it, we all said, what are you going to do? I've done it. We're in a position now where ironically, there's a meme going around right now that maybe the Swifties that saved the world, the Taylor Swift fans who are so incensed about the deep fake,
01:06:20
Speaker
Hardcore fake images of her that emerged last week that there may finally be forcing the government to do some regulation but certainly the artists have been unable to say come on why did you have to let the genie out of the bottle.
01:06:37
Speaker
This is the only reason we live for. And you're saying, it's as replaceable as the elevator operator of 80 years ago was replaceable by just user generated content. The user presses the button. Yeah, I would argue that it's not just us as the creators that are
01:06:55
Speaker
impacted by this, but our readers, the consumers of all of this are also impacted by this because it's fundamentally empty. Because you don't learn something new if you just say, I would like to see this specific thing. You're never going to learn something from that.
01:07:13
Speaker
This is social media writ large, right? Everybody has found their silo. Everybody has found their echo chamber where their already existing beliefs are reinforced with constant dopamine hits of like, like, like, like, like. And we end up now with a world that is more polarized than ever.
01:07:31
Speaker
Nobody is changing their opinion the idea that this whole rigmarole they're going into the united states right now that is supposedly to convince swing voters to change their mind from trump to biden or vice versa there are no swing voters.
01:07:46
Speaker
almost to a person in the United States or here in Canada or everywhere else, people are already made up their minds and they're convinced they're right because the only information they receive reinforces their already entrenched opinions.
01:08:03
Speaker
The death of the traditional media, the CBC, the mother court, you know, Pierre Polivare talks about defunding it, but everybody recognizes that the impact, that there is no national voice, that there is no Knowlton Nash or Peter Mansbridge. There's no Peter Zowski anymore. There's no, who is that guy on cross-country checkup? Rex Murphy or? Rex Murphy for all his curmudgeonly
01:08:32
Speaker
There are no central voices anymore. They're just an arrangement of fringe voices.
01:08:42
Speaker
There's no nothing like Morningside that drives the country together anymore. Nothing even remotely like that. Nothing like we all listen to Uncle Knowlton or if you were a CTV guide to Uncle Lloyd. There's no Walter Cronkite in the United States. There's no trusted journalistic voice anywhere. You can't hold up the Globe and Mail.
01:09:04
Speaker
or the gray lady itself the new york times and say that these are unbiased sources of dispassionately collected facts presented without an agenda to better inform the electorate so they can choose who they want to vote for that is gone gone gone. All right well then that means i got something here though joe that means you have homework.
01:09:32
Speaker
I have too much homework. I never did my homework in high school. We have to, but this is the challenge, right? As science fiction writers, we're probably the best place people to think about what comes next, what replaces that old model. Right, but this was my point at the beginning of my screen.
01:09:52
Speaker
We tried to save you from AI. We tried to save you from book burning and censorship. We tried to save you from the limitation of rights based on gender orientation, sexual preference, gender rebirth. We tried to save you from environmental degradation. We tried to save you from the population explosion. We tried, we tried, we tried, and nobody listened.
01:10:18
Speaker
So to say to me, now here's your agenda, Rob. You go come up with the perfect solution and be ignored again. I say, nope. Been, as Spider said, we're getting out at the right time.
Role of Science Fiction in Society
01:10:30
Speaker
Been there, done that. Did my bit, quite literally.
01:10:34
Speaker
for Queen and country and got inducted into the Order of Canada for it. But it doesn't mean that I or anybody else, not George Orwell, not Aldous Huxley, not Ray Bradbury, not Margaret Atwood, not a one of the science fiction writers who devoted their career to sounding the warning bells and giving the possible remedies to the social ills was ever keyed. That is the epitaph, not just of science fiction,
01:11:04
Speaker
but of our culture and our species. So is there any hope? You know, when they opened Pandora's box, the last thing that came out in myth is hope. And you can't put that back in the box either. I have my fingers crossed.
01:11:23
Speaker
that I'm going to be political. The United States is not going to repeat the mistake of electing Donald Trump. It astonishes me. I say, okay, you made a big mistake once. Okay. I learned from your lesson. Nobody learned. He is the presumptive nominee and the front runner in polling to be the most powerful man in the world again. I was a huge fan of Greta Thunberg.
01:11:47
Speaker
but we got the most recent COP Summit in Dubai instead. I want to believe, you know, this was my problem with the X-Files is David Duchovny wanted to believe all that crap was true. All that exceptional perception and magical stuff that we discredited at the beginning of this interview. I am holding out hope, but every time something ridiculously bad happens,
01:12:15
Speaker
You know, the COVID crisis, great. We learned how to deal with pandemics. Uh, when we know how to, we've got vaccines, we've got masks, no problem. This'll be over lickety split. Oh, people won't take the vaccines. They think that a billionaire is putting a chip in their blood. Oh, we're not going to wear masks because it's inconvenient or uncomfortable. As somebody said, tell that to the surgeon who spent nine hours
01:12:42
Speaker
wearing a mask to put in my artificial hip for me, that it was an inconvenience and he really didn't need to wear that mask and he could just breathe his germs into my gaping flesh wound. You know, I mean, every time we do something ridiculous. And right now, as we talk, for the first time in human history, not one but two separate nuclear powers are engaged in shooting wars, Israel and Russia.
01:13:10
Speaker
Am I supposed to say, oh, where's the hope in that? We're hoping?
01:13:15
Speaker
that neither Putin or Netanyahu are going to decide, screw this, I'm going down with a bang. We're hoping that maybe they're saner than Kim Jong Un and just want more ICBMs today. We're hoping that despite the fact that SCOTUS was allowed the Supreme Court of the United States to install a Texas oil man instead of an environmentalist 24 years ago, that it's still not too late to prevent
01:13:45
Speaker
Catastrophic global environmental change even while Ontario and the British Columbia and Hawaii and and California are burning to the ground. Hope you know it's a diamond in the Smithsonian. I'm starting to regret my post apocalyptic choice at the beginning of the change my answer i wanna say post apocalypse.
01:14:13
Speaker
Oh my goodness. Well, gee, this has been a fantastic conversation. My pleasure. Always, Joe. Mark, my pleasure. Yeah. Love to see you again. Thank you very much. Live long, let us hope and prosper all of us. Yes.
01:14:53
Speaker
Recreative is produced by Mark Rainer and Joe Mahoney. Technical production of music by Joe Mahoney, web designed by Mark Rainer. Show notes in all episodes are available at recreative.ca. That's re-creative.ca. Drop us a line at joemahoney.donovanstreetpress.com. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks for listening.
01:15:25
Speaker
you