Apocalypse is old news. Apocalypses aplenty have been predicted for millennia, and apocalyptic fiction is at least as old as Mary Shelley’s The Last Man and Richard Jeffries’ After London[1].
In more recent years, post-apocalyptic fiction has become both popular and ubiquitous, needing no introduction. Robert Sawyer’s new novel, The Downloaded[2], takes a new spin on these old themes, with intriguing results.
Sawyer himself is an interesting man. Billed as “Canada’s Only Native-Born Sci-Fi Writer”, or variations thereon, he came to public attention with his Quintaglio Ascension books, about a group of sentient descendants of Earth’s Nanotyrannus living on an alien world. What followed were an assortment of novels dealing with classic SF themes, along with a constant promotion of Canada’s SF industry. One novel, Flashforward, was even the basis for a TV show[3].
Downloaded is a series of “interviews” with an initially unnamed interlocutor. We meet one person, a murderer, and two more, astronauts, who are scanned into computers as their bodies are frozen (in this setting, life returns after freezing/thawing, but not consciousness, so a scanned personality enables the person to live again). The convict, together with other criminals and the astronaut crew are all together in a building where a quantum computer had housed their minds, while their corpses were frozen.
They wake five hundred years after an apocalypse. The astronauts speculate that a coronal mass ejection shut down electronics on Earth[4]. They meet the convicts, who are mostly reasonable people, save for one creep. They also meet Mennonites, who survived by having no modern technology. The survivors find that Earth’s civilization, apart from the Mennonites, is extinct.
They set up a government and elect the murderer as their leader. They travel to the ruins of Toronto, and learn that an asteroid is going to hit the Earth. It is also revealed that a nuclear war, not a coronal mass ejection, killed the people of Earth.
At some point during all of this, we become aware that the interviews are with Reywan, a genderless blue-skinned descendent of Martian colonists, who orbits above these groups and communicates via hologram. Reywan takes some refugees to Mars, and the astronauts find an Earthlike world and travel there.
So what can we make of this addition to the history of postapocalyptic novels? Well, compared to Sawyer’s Quintaglio books or to his excellent Calculating God and Red Planet Blues, it is a minor work. Its characters, compared to Don and Sarah Halifax in Rollback or Thomas Jericho in Calculating God, are less richly developed, but they do include one sensitively portrayed trans person.
The ideas in the novel are fun, but not new. Regardless, Sawyer’s narrative authority makes this a good read. I enjoyed the story, and recommend it.
[1] Richard Jeffries, After London. London: Cassell & Company, Ltd., 1885. This novel was possibly the first to depict a medieval society existing after a collapse.
[2] Sawyer provided a PDF copy of the novel to this reviewer.
[3] Sawyer also wrote the series bible for the excellent Charlie Jade.
[4] Numerous books such as William R. Forstchen’s 48 Hours use this idea.
Cirsova 