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The Terminal Experiment Q2: Setting
Toronto is the setting, and Sawyer lives in the area so he knows it well. Did you find this well-drawn? Did it give you any sense of place, or did it just seem like a generic city? Did if feel like a North American city, or a European city?
Comments
The Canadiana in it felt familiar, but it definitely could have been plunked in almost any other North American city without a lot of changes to the way the book read. It definitely didn't feel like the setting mattered a whole lot.
It was refreshing to have a non-US city setting (somewhat like Hiero's Journey being a refreshing non-USA post-apocalyptic tale). It was clear that Sawyer knew the place well himself and so could toss in random details - so avoiding ,for me at least, the sense that it was just any old city. The mix of people and cultural background felt quite European to me, but that's probably because that's what I am more familiar with, and (sadly) I haven't visited any Canadian cities other than Vancouver and Victoria, both many years ago now.
Well it was definitely Toronto! I like Toronto a lot! There is a satisfying energy in Toronto which appeals to me, and I found myself often thinking "I could live here", which I may end up doing if I require asylum, as looks increasingly likely... In any case, I definitely got a strong feeling of being specifically in Toronto. Canadian, but not Montreal or Quebec, and not Ottowa, and by no means generic.
So, on this matter, there were a lot of refences to parts of the city - like he tried to include a scene in every part. But there were also a lot of references to specific things and people and I had a chuckle coming across these. Some of there were a bit Easter-eggy. Some specifics:
The business called Food Food in the story, Sawyer tells us, used to be a pizza delivery company that changed its name when it expanded to more than just pizza. The original company isn't mentioned, but it's obviously Pizza Pizza, which was a chain then and it still is. We're told the headquarters is at the corner of Parliament and Wellesley streets, and indeed this is where Pizza Pizza's original location is located (and it still is). I used to work just a block down the street from this location - and it wasn't the closest Pizza Pizza to my office!
The Sleuth of Baker Street is Toronto's mystery fiction bookstore. It still exists but is no longer on the street mentioned - it's now on Millwood.
The East York General Hospital, where Peter worked for a time, is my local hospital, but it now goes by a different name.
Sonny Gotlieb's restaurant - this is made up, but I suspect it's a reference to Canadian SF writer and poet Phyllis Gotlieb: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phyllis_Gotlieb
Rick Green is mentioned in the text. He's a well known Canadian comedian who was on shows like Four On The Floor and The Red Green Show, among others. He also used to host a show on TVO (Ontario's public broadcaster) in the late 80's and early 90's called Prisoners of Gravity. He played a Commander Green, a regular human who escaped earth to space and finds himself in a big communications satellite. From there, he broadcasts episodes about comic books and SF, including interviews.
It's campy and now pretty dated, but some of this is on Youtube. This episode even has a Robert Sawyer interview on the subject of time travel at the 6 minute mark:
Oh that's excellent, thanks for filling in detail
nothing like local references to round out a book
Ahh, see that's some fun Toronto specific stuff I never would have known about!
Food Food I got! It's like the Jack Reacher series last year was set in New England, and everybody got coffee at 'Dink's'. That's a coded reference to Dunkin Donuts, or 'Dunk's', for all you heathens... The others I didn't, but I could see the wealth of specific detail and recognize it.
I suppose this is the moment for me to engage in the long-standing Montreal vs TO feud, (TO is the generic city, it has everything but a soul - now we know why, etc.) but I'll be bigger than that. Anyway, I was born in TO - Weston actually, which was folded into the Toronto Metropolitan area so I can't bring myself to actually be too down on it. I certainly recognised the neighbourhoods and locales. It certainly seemed like TO.
Whereas I was born in Montreal and now live in Toronto. I somewhat agree with Barner - I find Montreal much more interesting. But this isn't really a question about whether the city itself has character, so much as whether the city in the novel had a distinct character - which it seems for some it did.