In Rollback, Robert J. Sawyer takes two
science fiction themes, first contact and immortality, and combines them
into a story. While the first contact aspect of the story is
important, the real issue Sawyer tackles is immortality, in this case
caused by the titular process. A rollback reverts a person’s body
to a period when they were young and increases their expected lifespan by
a similar number of years.
The book focuses on Don Halifax, an octogenarian
living with his wife of sixty years. There is nothing particularly
notable about the couple at first glance, but his wife, Sarah, is credited
for deciphering the first message received from an alien race thirty-eight
years earlier. As the couple celebrates their anniversary, word
arrives that the aliens have responded to the reply message the Sarah
coordinated. Cody McGavin, a billionaire with an interest in
extraterrestrial intelligence, is convinced that the aliens are
specifically trying to carry out a conversation with Sarah and offers to
pay for Sarah and Don to have the rollback process, so she’ll be around
in another 40 years when another response is received.
Things don’t go entirely right and Don finds
himself dealing with a wife his own chronological age who is much older
than he is physically. Sawyer does a good job showing the maturity
and commitment of their relationship even as Don and Sarah realizes that
his physical age (and mental acuity) are those of a man more than fifty
years younger. Most of the book deals with this dichotomy and the
manner in which Don comes to deal with it, not just in his relationship to
Sarah, but to everything in the world around him.
Although Sarah and Don’s relationship is of primary
concern, Sawyer also shows Don interacting with the world around him, and
discovering new joy in his regained youth. Don’s realization that
he can return to work, or his reuniting with long lost friends proves as
problematic as his relationship with his wife. Similarly, new
relationships with people who appear his own age present Don with a
completely different set of problems, but ones which he is going to have
to learn to cope with.
In fact, Sawyer spends so much time on the age
reversal part of the novel, the first contact part of the novel falls into
a distant second place. This in and of itself is not a bad thing, after
all, there a myriad novels which look at first contact. However,
Sawyer does introduce ideas about first contact which would certainly be
interesting to see fleshed out. In fact, he could write another novel
looking at Don and Sarah’s ties to the first contact side of the story
with the aging issue in the background for an interesting diptych.
Sawyer, like Asimov or Card, has a clean style which,
for the most part, obscures the authorial voice. While some authors
feel the need to impress the reader with fancy stylistic devices, Sawyer
would rather the reader be able to fully enjoy the story being told. The
only place the author’s voice really intrudes is in pointing out small
details which demonstrate Rollback was written by a Canadian rather
than an American, but even there its use is understated.
