The Page 69 Test: "The Downloaded 2: Ghosts in the Machine"

Robert J. Sawyer -- "the dean of Canadian science fiction," according to the CBC, and a Globe and Mail and Maclean's bestseller -- is

the only Canadian to have won all three of the world's top awards for best science-fiction novel of the year: the Hugo, the Nebula, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. A member of both The Order of Canada and The Order of Ontario, Sawyer has won more Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Awards ("Auroras") than anyone else in history.

He applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, The Downloaded 2: Ghosts in the Machine, and reported the following:

Here’s page 69 of The Downloaded 2: Ghosts in the Machine in its entirety. The first character speaking is cosmonaut Mikhail Sidorov. He’s talking to Roscoe Koudoulian, mayor of their small community of postapocalyptic survivors in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Roscoe has fractured his spine in an accident that also killed a woman named Marie. The other speaker, Chang, is the only medical doctor left alive on Earth.
The Russian looked at me, beaming. “So you can download!”

Download? That didn’t make any sense — I was already in the real world. “Pardon?” I said.

Mikhail was excited, even for him. “You can do same as I have done! Download into another body!”

What in hell was he proposing? Killing one of the Mennonite men — who I guess he figured would be dead soon anyway — so I could appropriate the corpse? “Jesus, Mikhail,” I said. “I can’t do that.”

“You can!” he insisted. “Marie’s body is right here!”

The idea stunned me. My wonderful Marie was dead, but apparently the Martian technology had indeed restarted her heart, so she was more or less now on the equivalent of life support.

“Would … would her legs heal?” I asked, very aware that my own ones would never work again.

Chang frowned, considering. “If someone downloaded into her body, you mean? It’d take time, but sure.”

“And internal injuries?” demanded Mikhail, moving back to scrutinize her bio-scanner.

Chang nodded slowly. “They’d heal, too.”

“So you see!” the Russian crowed.

My head was pounding. Yes, it was true that Mikhail had adapted to a different body, but … but it had been Valentina’s discarded male body. And, yes, I’d fallen in love with a trans woman once, but I had no desire to be trans myself. “No,” I said. “That’s not …” I trailed off, but then, after a moment, I simply said, “No” again.

Mikhail looked shocked, but eventually he nodded, accepting my decision. “Still,” he said softly, “body of Marie should not go to waste.”

“It won’t,” said Chang, almost gleefully. “I’ll harvest her organs and tissues. The ark has liquid nitrogen for cooling its reactor; I can siphon some off to cryopreserve the organs until they’re needed.”
The Downloaded, my twenty-fifth novel, came out as an Audible Original in 2023, followed by print and ebook editions in 2024. It ended up being a big hit for Audible, peaking at #1 on their science-fiction bestsellers list (and #5 for all fiction titles store-wide). The print edition did just fine, too, getting a starred review in Publishers Weekly (denoting a book of exceptional merit) in the US, being named one of the month’s best SF novels by New Scientist in the UK, and hitting several bestsellers lists in my native Canada, including #1 for both the Calgary Herald and the Hamilton Review of Books.

And so Audible commissioned a sequel from me. Only problem was, I’d done everything I could to wrap up almost all the storylines in the original, including tacking on an epilogue set centuries in the future. Not only had I never intended to write a follow-up, but I had to rack my brain for weeks to even come up with a notion for one. But in the end, I did, and I think this second volume, The Downloaded 2: Ghosts in the Machine, is even better than the first.

Academy Award-winner Brendan Fraser had narrated the original The Downloaded along with Dora Award-winning Broadway actress Vanessa Sears, and we got them both back into the recording studio for the sequel; it was pure joy sitting in on their sessions and hearing such talented performers bring my words to life. Brendan again read the part of Mayor Roscoe Koudoulian (named after my friend Greg Koudoulian, who chronicles genre history, including that of San Diego Comic-Con), and Vanessa, who is currently starring as Juliet in the Toronto production of the hit musical & Juliet, and who sang the Canadian and US national anthems at the 2026 Toronto Blue Jays opening baseball game, returned to voice starship captain Letitia Garvey.

In October 2025, two years after the original came out, The Downloaded 2: Ghosts in the Machine dropped on Audible, and the print and ebook editions were published on May 19, 2026. And, speaking of the print edition, how representative of the whole thing is its sixty-ninth page?

Actually, I couldn’t have asked for a better teaser for what’s to come! See, the original The Downloaded dealt with people who’d had their consciousnesses uploaded for centuries finally decanting back into physical bodies on Earth. One of them, an astronaut, had transitioned in cyberspace from male to female, and she was traumatized when she was forcibly downloaded back into her original male body. Nonetheless, she and Roscoe fell in love — and their story was the one thing left unresolved in the original. Readers and listeners had been clamoring for me to provide a suitable conclusion to their star-crossed romance, something I finally get to do here in The Downloaded 2.

When I conceived the original The Downloaded in 2020, the rights of trans people were finally being respected in much of the United States and the rest of the world. But by the time I was writing The Downloaded 2: Ghosts in the Machine, Donald Trump was once again president of the United States, and those rights are being heartlessly clawed back. And so what started as a simple love story has ended up being part of the resistance … and I’m very proud of that.