Factoring Humanity

There were uncountable other humans plugged into Heather’s mind, enjoying it all from her perspective. And, no doubt, all that the aliens were seeing was propagating back through their overmind, across the light-years to Alpha Centauri, where it would be experienced by everyone there.

Doubtless humans would soon be trying to do the Necker transformation into a Centaur’s mind — indeed, some of those riding within Heather might be trying it right now.

She wondered if it would work.

But then again, it didn’t really matter.

Even without that capability, Heather was sure that her species, which at last now deserved its name of humanity, was going to have no trouble seeing the other person’s point of view.

About the Author

Robert J. Sawyer is Canada’s only native-born full-time science-fiction writer. He is the author of nine previous novels, including The Terminal Experiment, which won the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America’s Nebula Award for Best Novel of the Year, and Starplex, which was a Nebula and Hugo Award finalist.

Rob’s books are published in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Holland, Italy, Japan, Poland, Russia, and Spain. He has won an Arthur Ellis Award from the Crime Writers of Canada, five Aurora Awards (Canada’s top honor in SF), five Best Novel HOMer Awards voted on by the 30,000 members of the SF F Literature Forums on CompuServe, the Seiun Award (Japan’s principal SF award), Le Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire (France’s top honor in SF), and the Premio UPC de Ciencia Ficción, Spain’s top SF award, and the world’s largest cash prize for SF writing (which was awarded to Rob for a portion of this novel, Factoring Humanity).

Rob’s other novels include the popular Quintaglio Ascension trilogy (Far-Seer, Fossil Hunter, and Foreigner), plus Golden Fleece, End of an Era, Frameshift, and Illegal Alien.

Rob lives in Thornhill, Ontario (just north of Toronto), with Carolyn Clink, his wife of fourteen years. Together, they edited the acclaimed Canadian SF anthology Tesseracts 6.

To find out more about Rob and his fiction, visit his extensive World Wide Web site at www.sfwriter.com.