Calculating God

Calculating God is a science fiction novel by the Canadian writer Robert J. Sawyer, published in 2000 and nominated for the Hugo and John W. Campbell Memorial awards in 2001.

The book begins when a spacecraft lands outside the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto and a six-legged visitor asks, in English, to be taken to a palaeontologist. He belongs to a network of civilisations that have been comparing notes about their own worlds, and what they have found is the reason for his visit: in each case, the pattern in the fossil record suggests that something has been intervening at the same points in the history of life. Thomas Jericho, the palaeontologist who becomes the human end of the conversation, spends much of the novel arguing with him, and the book is built out of those exchanges rather than out of action, with the argument running between evidence, belief and what either is worth.

Sawyer writes science fiction with philosophical questions attached to it, and this novel is a sustained dialogue about proof.