Review
ITERATIONS
by Robert Sawyer
Red Deer Press, 303 pp.
Ideas. Inspirations. Robert Sawyer’s stories are embodiments of IBM’s philosophy: think. He’s Canada’s top science-fiction writer; the first anthology of his short stories trumpets the fact with blaring clarity.
Every damn story simmers with originality, with outrageous ideas that Sawyer gives plausibility. To read him is to take a breathless run. He twists urban legends of alligators in sewers; delves into a paleontological discovery of vampires; regards the possibility of a man murdering himself in parallel universes; examines God and the Devil betting on humanity. But I haven’t even mentioned the two best: "Just Like Old Times" has history’s most prolific serial killer hunt the very origin of humanity as a Tyrannosaurus Rex, and "You See But You Do Not Observe" has Sherlock Holmes jump to the end of the 21st century to solve a case of galactic proportions – he has to find trillions of missing humans. Way cool.
These are stories to make you drunk on imagination; they’re narcotics of science and philosophy. Yet they carry a resonance of Sawyer’s deeper visions. He’s concerned with man as man, with woman as woman, how we find ourselves in the universe, how as an individual and member of a race a man’s fate is a product of his choices. He speculates, as James Gardner writes in the book’s introduction, on "what would have happened if you made a different decision at some crucial moment, if you turned left instead of right?"
These stories turn left and right, and then go down, twist up, unfold themselves inside out, make you peer beyond the looking-glass. This is Sawyer’s Wonderland; those who normally disregard sci-fi (I used to be one of them) may be converted, gain an affinity for sheer speculation. And that’s an idea that touches Sawyer’s purpose: to remake ourselves simply by thinking differently.
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