“The Downloaded”
by Robert J. Sawyer
Published by Shadowpaw Press
$19.95 ISBN 9781989398999
Robert J. Sawyer is well-known in the science fiction realm. He’s written over two dozen novels and won the sci-fi world’s Big Three: the Hugo, the Nebula and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. His novel, FlashForward, inspired a same-named ABC TV series, and he also scripted the finale of the web series Star Trek Continues. Sawyer is also a member of the Order of Canada.
I don’t ordinarily read science fiction, but I am aware of Robert J. Sawyer. I heard him present at a Saskatchewan Writers Guild conference decades ago, and remember thinking that his brand of sci-fi was something this fan of realistic literary fiction just might enjoy. Fast-forward to the present: I recently read his 2024 novel, The Downloaded, and appreciated how this talented author has created a reality where humans are still basically the same as the ones who currently walk the Earth: they have complicated feelings, they make mistakes, they crack jokes. And, in the case of the 24 astronauts and 35 ex-cons who populate The Downloaded, they also make frequent movie references.
The story is relayed through a series of interviews with various characters, including Dr. Jürgen Haas and Captain Letitia Garvey, lead players among the team of astronauts (and robots) on an international mission to travel to the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri b on the starship H艒k奴le'a to “repopulate the Earth if a disaster happened.” The crew “uploaded” in 2058. Unbeknownst to them until 500 human years later (it’s four years for the astronauts in their simulated reality; their actual bodies have been frozen and their consciousnesses uploaded into a quantum computer while they remained stationary in the ships’ coffin-like “silos”), the ship never left Earth’s orbit. Something “ground civilization to a halt” after the bodies were frozen and before they could be transferred to the starship, and the astronauts and prisoners learn they’re still in Waterloo, Ontario at the Quantum Cryonics Institute, among “the twisted skeletons of buildings”.
What was this catastrophic event, why are criminals selected to spend their prison sentences in “cryosleep” alongside the astronauts, and who is the mysterious interviewer? Plus, what do Mennonites have to do with it all?
What Sawyer does well is take a serious situation like Earth’s demise and, with lighthearted banter, unusual scenarios, and characters with major attitude, make it all seem like a romp. Dr. Haas says he’s “looked at clouds from both sides now” — a Joni Mitchell reference. He “first realized that things had gone to ratshit” in 2548. There was a “great privacy revolt” in the 2040s. COVID-50 has come and gone. Mars has been colonized.
On top of all the other challenges the astronauts face in their strange new reality, they learn that a “whopping great mother of an asteroid will smack right into the Earth” in seven years. Combine a whole lot of science, a shipload of humanity and the chops of a veteran writer, and you’ve got a fun-filled futuristic novel for the here and now.
This book is available at your local bookstore or from saskbooks at www.skbooks.com
