ROLLBACK
By Robert J. Sawyer
Tor Books, 320 pages, $29.95
Although he has built a career largely on the periphery of mainstream Canadian literary culture (the sad lot of the majority of this country's genre writers), Toronto's Robert J. Sawyer is one of Canada's bestselling writers. Having won all three major science-fiction awards for best novel -- the Hugo, the Nebula and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award -- he is in the front rank of SF writers worldwide.
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For his admirers, every new Sawyer book is highly anticipated. When dealing with an imagination as fertile as Sawyer's, readers never know what to expect. Case in point: His new novel Rollback, an exploration of love, relationships and human nature amid the sciences of rejuvenation and extraterrestrial contact.
In 2009, Earth receives a radio message from a distant planet orbiting the star Sigma Draconis. Immediately, scientists and amateurs alike try to decode the message. Dr. Sarah Halifax, a professor at the University of Toronto and a SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) researcher, manages to break the mathematically based code.
The message has two parts: The first defines the symbolic language used, while the second, the actual message, is a request of sorts. The aliens have sent a survey to the people of Earth. Sarah works as part of a team to help compose a reply, and it is sent off on the first anniversary of the receipt of the original message.
Jump to 2048. Sarah and her husband Don are both 87, celebrating their 60th wedding anniversary, when a call comes in from a University of Toronto masters student. A reply to the message sent in 2010 has finally arrived, but it is encrypted.
SETI's newest backer, wealthy industrialist Cody McGavin, approaches Sarah with a unique proposal. He wants her to work on the encrypted message, but cognizant of her age, offers her a rollback, a new rejuvenating procedure that will change her very cells, returning her to a physical age of about 25. Sarah counters by demanding the same billion-dollar treatment for Don, and both undergo the procedure. Unfortunately, while Don's rollback is successful, Sarah's fails. Both must adjust to their new realities.
Rollback is much more Don's story than Sarah's, as he must deal directly with the emotional and hormonal changes that come with the vigour of youth while still maintaining his relationship with Sarah, their family and everyone he's known over his lifetime. The realities of being young and fit (and attractive and sexually charged) while retaining the experiences and memories of an octogenarian must be faced.
Intertwined through the story of Don's second summer is Sarah's search for the key to decipher the new message, weighted with an awareness that, for her, time is fleeting.
Rollback is a curious blend of philosophical, ethical and moral musings, with mathematical codes, futuristic science and current-day technologies and politics. Its strengths are most apparent in the human relationships and emotions of the characters. Moving between the first and fourth decades of the 21st century, Sawyer's vision is that of a world where technology and medicine have made significant advances, while little has changed in human nature or Canadian society, both in terms of politics (Canada remains an independent nation which prides itself on free education and health care), and more intimate relations (while AIDS has been eradicated and there is more freedom in sexual relations, nuclear family units still appear to be the desired norm).
As Don comes to grips with the idea that he alone of his current friends and family will survive into the next century, that when he dies there will not be a single person at his funeral who remembers him as a child or during his "first life," Rollback's underlying themes really shine.
While Rollback is, on the surface, a book about reaching out to those across the universe, it is at its heart an investigation of our very humanity, and how relationships are a fundamental key to defining who we are. When the alien-contact storyline takes centre stage, later in the book, these questions of self-definition, the lessons hard-won over both Sarah and Don's lifetimes, reveal their true significance, and the book unifies in a surprising manner.
Sawyer's crisp and accessible writing style allows for this interweaving of the personal and the scientific. The characters feel real, and their emotions and responses genuine. Beyond the SF trappings, Rollback is a story about love and commitment, about humanity at its most basic.
As Sawyer writes in his blog (sfwriter.com/blog.htm): "I like to think of Rollback as a true scientific romance, in the modern sense of the word: It's a love story that, thanks to scientific developments that I'm sure we will see in the next few decades, tries to tell us something new about the human heart."
In this he succeeds, creating in Rollback a novel to be savoured by science-fiction and mainstream readers alike.
Cori Dusmann is an educator and writer living in Victoria, B.C.
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