The Hugo Finalists (novels), Part 2 - Rollback, by Robert J. Sawyer

Robert J Sawyer has captured my attention a few years ago with the books of the Neanderthal Parallax trilogy. Hominids (2002), Humans (2003), and Hybrids (2003). Sawyer´s forte, as we can attest from this trilogy, is the human factor - how humans (and, in the case of the Neanderthal Parallax, the neanderthals, which are simply the humans of an alternate earh) cope with change - not only in a technological level, as in the works of Asimov and Clarke, but in a more intimate level. The dillema of scientist Mary Vaughan, who is raped just in the beginning of Hominids and suffer in silence until she meets and, after a while, begins to trust her neanderthal colleague Ponter Boddit - with whom she eventually falls in love, and also perceives she also must change her entires point of view if she wants to know better not only the alternate race but her possible soon-to-be lover. More than a didactic story, The Neanderthal Parallax is a lesson in tolerance, respect, and love for humankind, whatever the forms it takes along the borders between alternate earths.

The human factor is also the keyword in Rollback. In 2048, an octogenarian couple, Sarah and Don Halifax, contemplates the end of their days upon the earth with relative ease - until a groundbreaking discovery alter their lives more than they could ever expect.

The now retired Sarah Halifax had formerly worked as an astronomer, and, in 2009, she was the only one able to translate the first alen message SETI received from space - a message coming from the Sigma Draconis system, distant 18,8 lightyears from Earth. She helps sending an answer to them - and the alien feedback arrives just in time for the couple´s 60th anniversary.

She is already too old to work again, and feeling every one of her years in her entire body, as much as her husband Don; but, to her amazement, she receives an outrageous but very tempting proposition from a tycoon who´s funding SETI those days - to undergo a rejuvenation process so she can have all the necessary time to translate the second message and even receive a third on, if need be.

The rejuvenation process - ou rollback, as it is called those days - is intitally offered just to Sarah, but she refuses to have it done without her husband. Much to the annoyance of the tycoon, he agrees.

And then everything goes wrong.

Due of a cancer treatment she had undergone decades back, her body rejects the treatment - but not her husband´s. In mere months, the 88 year-old Don Halifax returns to the appearance (and complete health) of a 25-year-old man. A man who worked all hs life as a sound technician and can´t help Sarah in no conceivable way.

Suddenly, we are caught, along with Don, in the middle of a terrible crisis: the unbearable guilt he has to carry because of the outrageous (but useless) luck he had, and because of the sudden hormonal urges he never thought he could feel again - but he´s feeling. And he falls in love with a girl much younger than him.

Rob Sawyer´s stories gives the readers thea much-needed (and much-welcome) balance between hard science fiction and the hardships of the people who have to cope with the consequences of that technology. Societal changes are as much important to Sawyer as scientific ones - and that´s why he is one of the essential SF writers of the early 21st century. Because he cares. Rollback is living proof of that.