Last night, I was upstairs grabbing a book to read, and stumbled across a Robert J. Sawyer book I'd never read before, Factoring Humanity. I grabbed it and started it while cooking dinner. By the time I went to bed, I was more than halfway through with it. I finished it this morning before leaving for work.

If there is anyone out there who has not yet read anything by Sawyer, go out and do so. Now.

Although I'd been a SF fan for years, I hadn't read anything of his until the summer before my senior year of high school. My school had a reading list over the summer, where you had one book assigned and one book you could choose, and you discussed them in small groups when the school year started. My physics teacher, mabfan, had put a SF novel on the list, so I chose it without really knowing anything about it.

The novel was The Terminal Experiment by Sawyer. I fell completely in love with it. What I love about Sawyer is the way he thinks about things. Without giving away much more than the cover of The Terminal Experiment, I will summarize it: Science has proven the existence of something that may be a soul at the same time as it has achieved practical immortality for people. The story's protagonist, Peter Hobson, is curious about the possibilities of both: what would the afterlife be like? What would it be like to be immortal? So he decides to test it. He creates three AI simulations, one to represent an immortal, one to represent the afterlife, and a control. They escape into the internet. And one of them starts killing.

What fascinated me about the book wasn't just the mystery, although an awful lot of Sawyer's books are structured like that, a combination of SF and mystery, with the science necessary to the mystery storyline. What I found most fascinating were the scientfic ideas that powered it. He sees things and writes thing that I never, ever, if I thought about them for 100 years, would have come up with, but when I finish the book, I can't stop thinking about them. Dozens, hundreds of possible stories flare up in my mind, inspired by the ideas he's put there.

After reading Factoring Humanity last night and this morning, I can't stop thinking about quantum computing, about 4-dimensional space and the hypercube. I think about the implications of quantum computing on individuals, on science, on daily life. I think about what other breakthroughs could totally alter life and the way we think. I have been incessantly trying to mentally fold a bloody tesseract -- I keep feeling like I almost have it.

When I was at Readercon this year, I attended a discussion group he moderated about using SF for social change in which he said he was afraid that the SF community was too insular to allow real change. He thought the messages writers sent out would never reach outside of the people who think of themselves as "SF fans". I wanted to tell him that it is his books I have always used to show people that SF is not what they have been told it is, what they think they will not like. I wanted to tell him that his books, more than any other modern SF writer I know, reach across genre lines while still remaining firmly ensconced in the genre. I didn't, and I still wish that I had.

Invariably, reading his books makes me feel intelligent, scientifically curious, and a part of the world in a way very few books do. His books have, more than anyone else's, shaped the way science fiction feels to me. He has elevated it for our generation.

Read him.