Robert J. Sawyer, the son of John Arthur Sawyer and Virginia Kivley Peterson Sawyer, both of whom worked in the fields of economics and statistics, was born in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. He has an older brother, Peter Douglas Sawyer, and a younger brother, Alan Bruce Sawyer. Rob Sawyer sold his first novel, Golden Fleece, in 1990, and after a few more novels was recognized as the most important Canadian writer in the field of science fiction. The Ottawa Citizen called him "the Dean of Science Fiction," and that title has remained attached to him, and is always used in introducing him at the lectures and readings he delivers dozens of times each year. At a young age, Sawyer was determined to become a professional paleontologist specializing in dinosaur fossils, but positions were hard to come by, and he was from the same early age a gifted child who excelled at writing and story-telling. Paleontology and its experts appear in many of his novels. Sawyer is also acclaimed for writing about several other scientific subjects, including first contact between humans and extraterrestrials, artificial intelligence, planetology (he has invented many fictional foreign planets with strict attention to their evolutionary geological, environmental, and biological developments), linguistics, quantum-theoretical hypotheses, and the psychologies of both aliens and "uploaded" human psychologies. Rob Sawyer earned a B.A. in Radio and Television Arts Broadcasting at Ryerson University (where he met his wife, the famous poet Carolyn Clink), and that background has served him both in the art of speaking with dramatic and much-acclaimed readings and lectures -- and as a subject in some of his novels, such as Rollback (2007). Sawyer continues to write novels (as of 2008, he is writing the second novel of a trilogy) and spends a great deal of time giving talks at fan conventions, writers' conferences, and corporate workshops. His title "The Dean of Canadian Science Fiction" still pursues him in both the fan and the scholarly fields of literary criticism, and he has become the subject of critical attention by many literary scholars.