I love the fact that Robert J. Sawyer is smarter than me. There is a breadth to his concepts and ideas in his latest novel, Wake, that is exhilarating, if not exhausting. In the hands of a less skilled and less focused author, it would be like tab-surfing Wikipedia. Wake, however, is an engrossing, fascinating and, yes, challenging novel to read.

Wake is Sawyer’s 18th novel and is meant for people who enjoy playing with ideas, and who are not afraid of science. It is the first in a trilogy that includes upcoming titles Watch and Wonder (WWW… clever), that details the dawning of consciousness in the World Wide Web. Pause for a second… humanities’ entire history and culture shared online, part of an intelligent being’s personality…. It makes you just a little uncomfortable about your own Internet surfing habits.

The central idea of the book, the awakening of an artificial intelligence, is not a new one; it is the fodder of many books and films. From Harlan Ellison’s I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, to William Gibson’s Neuromancer, and the films 2001: A Space Odyssey and the Terminator series. With rare exception, this inhuman consciousness is portrayed as something to be feared, as something so alien to human thought that we cannot relate to it without common experiences. Yet, to Sawyer, this is something that should be embraced and even anticipated.

“I admit I am an optimist as a writer,” says Sawyer. “Which is something I think we share as Canadians, common-sense optimism, this is our gift to the world and we all need more of it.” “My heroes in science fiction are [Isaac] Asimov and [Arthur C.] Clarke, people who believed that there is hope in the future,” says Sawyer. “The idea that a non-human consciousness would be a threat to us is not based in cost-benefit reality, the greatest threat to AI is still us. Yet by its nature, it is not shackled to self-centredness, our consciousness is evolutionary and geared toward survival, whereas an artificial consciousness does not have that drive.”

The dawning awareness of the web in Wake is shepherded and given form through interaction with a brilliant, blind 16-year-old girl, who perceives the Internet through an accidental result of the technology used to try to cure her blindness. The metaphor of the teacher and the student, with the web entity as the student, is based on a real event.

Inspired by the story of Helen Keller and her teacher Annie Sullivan, Sawyer extends their story into an analogous situation for his characters in Wake. The touching and heroic struggle, undertaken by Sullivan, was to introduce the concept of words and communication to someone who was blind and deaf... a young girl completely cut off from a common shared reality. In Wake, the web consciousness meets the teacher, Kaitlin, who brings it into the “light.” Keller wrote of this breakthrough as her “soul birth.”

Sawyer wants to share that moment of sublime illumination through the guiding presence of Caitlin Decter as the teacher, and the nascent but sentient consciousness of the web. “I see the metaphor,” says Sawyer, “as a way that the web mind is in a state of sensory deprivation, it thinks, but has at first no concept of ‘the other’ because it is alone, until Caitlin starts to access the web directly.”

Wake has more great and intriguing ideas, philosophies and concepts interwoven throughout the plot than should be allowed in a single novel. Within the context of the story, Sawyer introduces us to Chinese dissidents trying to expose genocide committed by the Chinese government in order to stop the spread of a terrifying, fatal bird-flu epidemic. The repressive regime seals off the outside world from the web-savvy citizens within China’s borders, blinding them metaphorically as well as technologically.

Sawyer’s Wake is a realistic vision of the futility of trying to isolate an entire nation. To him, information cannot be suppressed forever. “Totalitarian regimes cannot hold back the tide of history,” he says. “China is one nation that will fundamentally change as the Internet and its technologies continue to evolve.”

“They are just re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.”

Wake is founded on theories that communication, in any form, is not just a way of sharing information, but is the central construct for all education, for true emancipation as well as the vehicle of all empathy and understanding. This is why Sawyer’s Wake succeeds; his unabashed optimism and hope for a shared future that is no longer bound and tethered by tyranny, petty opportunism and fear. “Communication,” says Sawyer, “is about breaking down barriers.” “(Nobel Peace Prize Winner, and former prime minister) Lester Pearson was my hero and we Canadians have a great history of mediating, of reaching across to grant greater understanding.”

Robert J. Sawyer will be at the Hades Publications launch event on June 13.