Identity Theft and other stories (collection)

For

Kirstin Morrell

Sincere thanks to the editors who originally published these stories: Lou Anders, Gregory Benford, Kristen Pederson Chew, Douglas Cudmore, Julie E. Czerneda, Martin H. Greenberg, John Heifers, Janis Ian, Mike Resnick, Stanley Schmidt, Larry Segriff, Mark Tier, Carol Toller, and Edo van Belkom. Thanks, too, to Bob Hilderley and Dennis Johnson for introducing me to the wonders of working with Canadian publishers; to Fitzhenry & Whiteside for buying this collection; and to Amy Hingston and Karen Petherick Thomas for shepherding it through production and publication.

Many thanks, also, to my agent, Ralph Vicinanza; to Robert Charles Wilson for the wonderful introduction; and to the friends who stood by me while I was writing these pieces, especially Carolyn Clink, David Livingstone Clink, Marcel Gagne, Terence M. Green, Kirstin Morrell, Sally Tomasevic, and Andrew Weiner.

Finally, thanks to the 1,200 members of my online discussion group. Feel free to join us at:

www.groups.yahoo.com/group/robertjsawyer/

Let me explain.

I was asked to introduce Robert J. Sawyer to readers of this collection of his stories—but biographical information about Rob is easy to come by. See, for instance, the About the Author at the end of this book (but don’t skip the intervening stuff: you won’t be disappointed). Or check out his website, sfwriter.com. Rob has even been the subject of an hour-long Canadian TV profile, Inside the Mind of Robert J. Sawyer. You can fairly readily discover that he’s won any number of awards—the Hugo, the Nebula, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the Science Fiction Chronicle Reader Award, Canada’s Aurora, Japans Seiun, Chinas Galaxy Award, Frances Le Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire, Spain’s Premio UPC de Ciencia Fictión, some of these more than once. All this is well-known.

And his literary career is easy enough to chart, from his first novel in 1990, Golden Fleece, through the Neanderthal Parallax trilogy (Hominids, Humans, and Hybrids), to his latest, Rollback, with stops for short fiction and nonfiction along the way.

But I want you to ignore all that.

Ignore it, because the avalanche of honors and achievements can begin to seem intimidating. And that is precisely what Rob is not: intimidating. In fact he’s one of the most approachable SF writers around.

Like many readers who came to SF at an impressionable age, I once believed that a published author must be an Olympian being—a wise or at least worldly philosopher-god who rises at noon, feeds his muse a diet of scotch/rocks, and debauches his soul into the keys of a rusty Underwood Noiseless while the rest of the world sleeps. Great, but how would you actually talk to such a creature?

Rob exists to defy these misconceptions. Wise he may be; but he’s more earthy than Olympian, prefers chocolate milk to scotch, and writes from the comfort of a La-Z-Boy recliner. (I don’t know what time he gets out of bed.) He’ll talk to you about paleoanthropology, if you like, but he’s equally at home reminiscing about Thunderbirds or Josie and the Pussycats. (He probably has a favorite Pussycat.) He possesses a well-developed sense of humor, but it’s more generous than cutting. He enjoys meeting people and will usually give you the benefit of the doubt in a conflict; you can get on the wrong side of Robert J. Sawyer, but it takes work.

He’s also conspicuously Canadian, in a way those of us who wander the tenebrous nightland between nationalities (I’m an expat American, myself) can never be. I think this makes some Americans uneasy—the unspoken belief that Canada really is, as the beer ads say, the best part of North America. It’s hard to miss it in his work. But Rob also practices that most Canadian of virtues, Looking at Both Sides of the Question, which means that his love for his native country never comes off as jingoistic or anti-American. And for those of us who do know Canada there’s a pleasing resonance in Rob’s writing—he’s privy to the secret handshakes; he can tell the difference between Wendy Mesley and Peter Mansbridge, Uncle Bobby and Jerome the Giraffe, Jean Chretien and the Honourable Member from Kicking Horse Pass.