Robert J. Sawyer, known generally as the dean of Canadian science fiction and a publishing machine, should need no introduction. But we'll give him one anyway. Sawyer first caught our attention in 2000 with Calculating God, a novel about an alien who one day appears in a museum and, among other things, engages the scientist who discovers her in conversation about the existence of God. In 2002, Sawyer won the Hugo Award for Best Novel for Hominids, a novel about neanderthals on a parallel Earth.

Sawyer's novels tend to address directly contemporary issues, and though he never shies away from controversy, his approach is never less than evenhanded. Moreover -- as our interview proves -- he really is a mensch.

In the following wide-ranging interview, which was conducted via e-mail, Sawyer talks with the Science Fiction Quarterly blog about the state of the science fiction genre, his particular approach to writing, and what we really should be reading instead of those Star Trek tie-ins.

We have a sense that, by and large, science fiction fans are frustrated with the current state of the (literary) genre. Or maybe we're just projecting our own dissatisfactions. What's your sense -- are the golden days past and gone, or are we just too smug regarding our genre classics?

It's ironic, given that science fiction is supposed to be a forward-looking genre, how nostalgic it is. More people today would rather read new books in the Dune universe than anything modern, and the hottest-selling new name to emerge so far in SF this millennium is John Scalzi, who very much is a writer in the Heinlein mold. That said, by modern literary standards, most so-called golden-age SF is pretty unreadable, whereas the best work ever being done in the history of the field is being done right now. It's like sitcoms: one can think back fondly to the sitcoms of one's youth -- but to actually try to watch Three's Company or The Brady Bunch today is a painful experience. Yes, the makers of Curb Your Enthusiasm and Arrested Development and the original UK version of The Office stand on the shoulders of all those who went before, but it's the current work that's most interesting, in sitcoms, and in SF.

What are the elements that, in your estimation, make for good science fiction?

My own recipe for science fiction is to combine the intimately human with the grandly cosmic. Far too often in its past the field gave us only the latter but not the former; books like Rendezvous with Rama are utterly devoid of characterization, and yet the Hugo and Nebula voters said it was the best book of 1973, and it probably was. What's best about the genre right now is that a goodly number of writers are striving to engage the heart as well as the mind, and are giving us books that actually live up to that hoary old cliche we've trotted out for decades about SF being a special lens for examining the human condition. It wasn't in 1970's Tau Zero by Poul Anderson; it is in 2005's Spin by Robert Charles Wilson. Both books explore the notion of humans seeing the universe age billions of years while they watch, but the human dimension is totally different. Of course, to give Anderson his due, he only had maybe 60,000 words to work with -- the length of a typical SF paperback back then; Wilson's book is 2.5 times as long.

One of the things that we're interested in exploring is what you might call the humanist strand within science fiction. How do you situate yourself amongst your contemporaries in this respect? Do you feel that there's a tendency among science fiction writers to move in one direction or the other?

There's a spectrum in SF, something for everybody. I'm at one end in terms of accessibility: I have a large mainstream audience in Canada because of it -- people who don't read any other SF but Rob Sawyer. At the other end, there are people like Charles Stross and Greg Egan, who are writing for the hard-core SF buff; their stuff is impenetrable if you don't have a solid grounding in science and in the previous literature of SF before going in. That said, I don't think I'm giving real sense-of-wonder SF short shrift. I'm very proud to say I've had more novels serialized in Analog in the 30-year editorship of Stanley Schmidt than anyone else, and you don't get into Analog without pressing the classic SF buttons. Of course, there's also a political spectrum in SF, with me and Kim Stanley Robinson off at the left and a lot of those who write military stuff on the right. On the left, we write about the human heart in conflict with itself; on the right, you hear more about defending honor -- as if honor were something someone else could take away from you!

We're living in a post-Potter world in which many people associate science fiction and fantasy with children's works by authors like J.K. Rowling and Philip Pullman. Moreover, there's always been a tendency to associate science fiction with a juvenile readership. Who or what do you perceive as the public face of science fiction, and who or what do you wish it were?

There is no public face to SF in the United States; that's part of the problem. Think about it: in the 1960s, Arthur C. Clarke could sit next to Walter Cronkite doing commentary on space missions. Now, no one in the field -- not even Clarke himself -- has that stature. The author who is out there, in the public eye and speaking to Congress, is Michael Crichton, and he's an anti-science-fiction writer. Fortunately for us, most people don't think of his work as being SF. As for who should be the public face, well, in Canada, it's me; just last week, the Canadian publishing trade journal Quill & Quire named me one of the 30 "most influential, innovative, and just plain powerful people in Canadian publishing" -- I was one of only three authors to make the thirty-person list. In their write-up about me, they called me the public face of the genre in my country. The message I try to bring, in lectures; in print, radio, and TV interviews; and through the example of my own books, is that SF has something to offer to a very wide audience; that it's well grounded in reality; that it is relevant to the here-and-now; and that it is quality writing.

We're looking to inject the genre with a bit of its old spirit while simultaneously looking towards the future. What should we do? How can we help?

Write good books. Many SF fans, myself included, became SF writers because they didn't see enough books on the shelves that they themselves wanted to read. And if you don't want to write, at least vote with your wallet: when something good and new comes along -- a Paolo Bacigalupi or a Tobias Buckell -- buy those books instead of some Star Trek: The Next Generation tie-in.

The science fiction community is historically a tight-knit and somewhat insular group. This fact has, of course, both contributed to and detracted from the reception of genre works. Have you ever felt particularly bound by the constraints of the genre and its fans?

Oh, occasionally, sure. But I'm way better off than most of my colleagues, because of this double life I live as a genre writer in the US and a mainstream bestseller in Canada. I've never known the SF readership to shy away from anything I wanted to do, including discussing racism, evolution vs. creationism, the abortion debate, the biology of rape, and so on, but genre editors sometimes self-impose strictures that I do find frustrating. Me, I just ignore them and write what I want to write, trusting that there will be enough people who'll follow along.

What's your current project?

I've just finished the first volume of a new trilogy about the World Wide Web gaining consciousness, and the relationship humanity develops with it. The three books are called Wake, Watch, and Wonder, making this the "WWW" trilogy. I was getting really tired of SF works in which the emergence of artificial intelligence was taken as a given but the author either had it happen magically off-stage, or portrayed it in a totally unrealistic manner. I'm just at the point now were I'm getting feedback on the manuscript for the first volume from experts, and I'm very pleased that computer scientists and cognitive theorists are signing off on what I did. This has been the hardest thing I've ever written, but I think I actually pulled off what I intended to do. The first volume, Wake, will be out in the spring of 2009.

What are you reading now, in terms of both books and blogs?

I don't read a lot of blogs; I just don't have time. I do read a few friends' LiveJournals, but that's purely personal -- keeping up with people who are important to me but I don't get to see often enough. Websites I visit frequently, though, include SF Scope (http://sfscope.com) and New Scientist (http://newscientist.com). As for books, I'm on the last few pages of The Alienist by Caleb Carr, a novel about a Victorian serial killer and the psychiatrist, or alienist, who tracks him down. Next in the queue: the last "Sector General" SF novel by James White, just for the sheer joy of it. And in nonfiction, I'm reading oodles on game theory and the evolutionary origins of ethics and morality, and stuff like that, as research for the "WWW" trilogy. Oh, and a book called Cagney & Lacey & Me, by Barney Rosenzweig, the producer of that program; it's a fascinating and very candid inside look at how television production works.

It's a partisan world these days. Would you say that your personal politics influence your work?

Totally -- but remember, I'm a Canadian. It's often been said that the reason the US will never annex Canada is that it would be importing 35 million Democrats. Why on Earth would I have worked my ass off for almost 30 years now -- my first SF sale was in 1979 -- to earn a soapbox and then not use it? Michael Crichton makes no bones about his politics; Charles Dickens and H.G. Wells certainly didn't, nor did Heinlein. No matter where you are on the political spectrum, you have to recognize that the world is in trouble -- and science fiction is one of the very few places where we talk about actually changing the world; of course, the writer's politics are going to influence that.

After 17 novels, do you ever feel a compulsion to try something different? Maybe some realist fiction?

I try something different in every book. The main character in my last novel, Rollback, was an 87-year-old man; the main character in my current novel, Wake, is a blind 15-year-old girl. It's hard to think of two more-different characters. And I think that the character scenes involving both of them function very nicely as realist fiction. Science fiction lets me write romance, action-adventure, mystery, philosophy, and more -- why would I want to move into a field that is interested mostly in form rather than content when I've got a playground that allows, indeed celebrates, both.

Who are the young, bright stars of the genre that we don't know about?

I edit a line of science-fiction books for Canadian publisher Red Deer Press, part of Fitzhenry & Whiteside; the imprint is called Robert J. Sawyer Books, which was their idea, not mine. But in that role, I've been able to publish the people I think are the hot up-and-comers. I did Karl Schroeder's first short-story collection; he's clearly a new hard-SF superstar. I just did Matthew Hughes's latest novel, The Commons; he just landed on the Nebula ballot for an excerpt from that book. Marcos Donnelly and Nick DiChario, both from upstate New York, are two of the finest writers in the field, and I published Marcos's second novel, Letters from the Flesh, and Nick's first two novels, A Small and Remarkable Life and his upcoming Valley of Day-Glo; those guys are brilliant prose stylists and both really satiric.

Word has it that you're a real mensch. Have you ever treated a fan to a drink?

Sure, of course, although it's not something I'd normally talk about. But since you ask: Heinlein said you can't pay back; you can only pay forward, and so I do. I was at a smallish SF convention once where the con suite was charging for soft drinks; I handed the guy behind the counter a hundred dollars and said drinks are on me until that runs out -- and it took us all the way to Sunday afternoon. A few weeks ago, I threw one of my occasional open parties for Toronto science-fiction fandom at my home; we had over 100 people show up, and I spent $600 on food and drink feeding them all. And I just got back from the SF convention Arisia in Boston, and at every meal there, I treated someone and sometimes multiple people, picking up the check. And -- let's see -- okay, well, a few years ago I was at the night-before party for Ad Astra, Toronto's annual SF con, and I overheard someone say he was sorry he was going to miss the convention; he couldn't afford the $40, or whatever it was, for a membership. I'd never seen the guy before in my life, but I found the treasurer and bought the guy a membership on the spot. I've been very, very lucky in this profession, and I vividly remember what it was like not to have money. And, after all, where would science-fiction writers be without science-fiction readers?