Humans

About the Author

Robert J. Sawyer lives a double life: he’s a bestselling mainstream writer in his native Canada (his novels have appeared on the top-ten bestseller lists in Maclean’s: Canada’s Weekly News magazine and The Globe and Mail: Canada’s National Newspaper ) and a bestselling genre-fiction writer in the United States (his Hugo Award–nominated Calculating God hit number one on the bestseller list published by Locus: The Newspaper of the Science Fiction Field).

He has won twenty-eight national and international awards for his fiction, including the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America’s Nebula Award for Best Novel of the Year (for The Terminal Experiment); an Arthur Ellis Award from the Crime Writers of Canada; seven Aurora Awards (Canada’s top honor in science fiction); the Science Fiction Chronicle Reader Award for Best Short Story of the Year; and the top SF awards in France (Le Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire), Japan (Seiun, which he’s won twice), and Spain ( Premio UPC de Ciencia Ficción, which he’s also won twice). He’s also one of only thirty people ever to receive the Alumni Award of Distinction from his alma mater, Toronto’s Ryerson University.

In addition to trophies for the above, his office contains a cast of the original Archaeopteryx fossil; a selection of hominid skull reconstructions; plastic and blown-glass models of Burgess Shale life forms; a moon globe; amethyst geodes; a giant Fireball XL5 model; a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary; a shelf of Folio Society hardcovers; a stereo often loaded with Diana Ross and the Supremes, the Righteous Brothers, or the Mamas and the Papas; and a La-Z-Boy recliner, from which, with cordless keyboard in his lap, he does most of his writing.

He and his wife, poet Carolyn Clink, live in Mississauga, Ontario, just west of Toronto. For more about Robert Sawyer and his fiction—including a readers’ group discussion guide for this novel, and a preview of Hybrids, the final volume in this trilogy—visit his World Wide Web site (which The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature calls “the most elaborate and interesting of any created by a Canadian writer”) at www.sfwriter.com .