Parallel worlds

People often ask me if I believe the stuff I write in my science-fiction novels. Faster-than-light travel? Nah. Time machines? Nuh-uh. Aliens? Not until we pick up their transmissions. But parallel worlds? Alternate realities? Yes, absolutely, because I’ve seen that they exist.

Tuesday, September 4, 1979 was my first day of classes in Radio and Television Arts at Ryerson. Only one problem: my dorm room was at the University of Toronto.

Ever since I was a kid, I’d dreamed of being a dinosaur hunter, and so I’d signed up to study paleontology at U of T.

Oh, sure, I’d always wanted to be a science-fiction writer, too, but no one in Canada made a living doing that back then.

I’d gotten my acceptance into U of T early on, but, at the eleventh hour, decided maybe I should give writing for a living a shot — and scriptwriting sounded like a fine way to make ends meet while I wrote novels on the side. And so I ended up simultaneously enrolled in two very different programs — and had to choose which future to pursue.

In this reality, I am indeed a novelist and scriptwriter, but in 1996, I got a peek into that other universe. I took a behind-the-scenes tour of the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology in Alberta conducted by Phil Currie, Canada’s leading dinosaur expert.

Phil and I hit it off at once not just because I was a dinosaur fan but because he was a science-fiction fan. More than that, when he was a kid growing up in the same Toronto as I had, Phil had wanted to become a science-fiction writer.

There we were in the Badlands, surrounded by fossils, looking not just at each other but at our own alternative realities: in another universe, I’m Phil — and he’s me.

Here, 38 years after I started at Ryerson, I’m convinced that the currents in time that drew me away from holding a geologist’s pick and toward writing about futuristic worlds were the correct ones, at least for this me. Phil’s where he should be, and I’m where I should be — and all is right with both worlds.

Robert J. Sawyer, Radio and Television Arts ’82, is a member of the Order of Canada and the only Canadian ever to win all three of the world’s top awards for best science-fiction novel of the year. His latest novel is Quantum Night. Rob’s office in Mississauga is filled with plastic dinosaurs.