>> Kim Ricketts: Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome. My name is Kim
Ricketts, and I manage along with Kirsten Wiley, the Microsoft Research visiting speaker series. Today we get a late summer gift, an hour and a bit with one of the most awarded and most interesting people writing in the field of science fiction and other areas today, and he is here with his latest work, a novel in the vein of the classic science fiction novels of [inaudible], novels of end times and loops of galactic cities, of what the worlds might look like post nuclear times and of a time or times when three young people must fate shift time travel into and across many dimensions to find a place where they can perhaps rescue the future.
City at the End of Time has the coolest slide show on Boing Boing. I think we're going to get parts of it from the Website today. And I invite you all to check that out after Greg's talk. Greg Bear's the author of more than 30 books of science fiction and fantasy and has been awarded two Hugo awards, five Nebula awards and one of only two authors who have been awarded a Nebula in nearly every category.
Greg has also served on political and scientific action committees and has advised with his imagination, and thank goodness everyone from Microsoft
Corporation to the US Army, the CIA, Sandia National Laboratories and even
Homeland Security among many others. Please join me in welcoming Greg
Back to Microsoft Research.
>> Greg Bear: Thank you.
[applause].
>> Greg Bear: Thank you all for coming out today. Well, this is an example of extreme sports. You know, when I was at Google one of the people there said why do science fiction writers always like to write about like a million years in the future and I said no, no, no not a million years, this is a hundred trillion years in the future, which is much more rational. You know a million years is nothing, it's a drop in a very large bucket.
Well, it is extreme sport. It's like, you know, suddenly you have the freedom to go and do almost anything you want within a certain area of discipline. Now, that sometimes leads people to think that they need to have degrees in physics to read a book like this, but you don't need to have a degree in mathematics to read
Alice in Wonderland, do you, and I think that's actually one of the progenitors for
City at the End of Time is when you take a look at this book, it's really about satire against current theories of physics, but you don't need to know that, it's really about taking extreme notions of biology and statistics and numerology and having and running them all together and having fun with them, but you don't need to know that either. And it's about asking questions of people who really are capable of answering, which we probably will at some point today.
It's about books, text and reading. This is a celebration of everyone who has ever loved reading. By the time you're done with this book, you'll go yeah, I knew

it all along, we're in charge here, and you recall are. As observers, you really are in charge and the conclusion of the book is the text is the is the DNA of the universe, it's not just some little ephemeral thing. Of you know, ultimately at the end of time text is what's going to save all our asses.
It's a metaphysical statement more of an adventurous metaphysical statement, which is what we're used to in science fiction. So where did I get all this stuff?
Well, I got it by channelling all the great United Kingdom, Great Britain, we'll just say United Kingdom for now, science fiction and fantasy writers. The British visionaries are the ones who really lead to this book, and that would include from the beginning, it would include George MacDonald, who wrote the Phantastes and Lillith; it would include Lewis Carroll, who we're all familiar with; it would include HG Wells, who really lit the whole field on fire and wrote a book called the
Time Machine that just was a huge best seller, sold so very, very well that everyone had to kind of take a crack at it.
So a young Irish gentleman named William Hope Hodgson, we think he was young when we wrote this book, penned this huge epic volume called The Night
Land, which is set in the very, very far future, and the last city on earth with the last remnants of humanity surrounded monstrosities. But this was what he conceived of as an evolutionary change. These were naturally evolved monstrosities. However, being Irish when you read the book, it's more like a horror novel. It's very spooky and mythological and you have a hard time putting all of this together. So when I read the book, I says, you know, I'm not so sure this is natural evolution, I think this is corruption. I think this is devilish doings, I think this is metaphysical misbehavior going on here. And take his step.
When you get to Olaf Stapledon in the 1930s, Olaf Stapledon was a British philosopher in his -- I think he was in his late 20s or early 30s, he went down with his wife to the beach, the shingle beach, and they were on a cliff top overlooking the shingle beach. Didn't actually get down to the beach. And as they were lying in the sun there they heard these almost human cries from the beach. And they couldn't figure out what it was. Sounded like babies or children playing or complaining. So they walked over to the edge and looked down and there are all these sea lions sunning themselves on the shingle and they were all golden hued and everything, except for the cold water was splashing them and that's why they were bitching, as they were complaining mightily running, humping along and everything.
And Stapledon looked at this, he went oh, my gosh, they sound human. What if they are human. How long would it take humans to become like this. Will they still be intelligent? What if you had, you know, many species of human being evolving into the future, ut-oh, and he has a book and he puts approximate it out in 1930, it's called Last and First Men, takes us through two billion years of human history and 18 different human species and ends up on the planet
Neptune because the sun has grown large and red and is eating all the inner planets. But to live on Neptune, he's a pretty scientifically savvy guy, he asks himself, well, how could any organic being survive on a high gravity planet like
Neptune?

Well, they must be made of artificial matter. It's 1930. 1929 is when he's writing it. Artificial matter. What did he mean by that? We don't know. But when Mill
MacCarthy and I argue about, you know, he's got programmable matter and I've got fake matter and we argue about who invented what first and then I find out by going back to Last and First Men Olaf was there.
About the same time a man named JD Bernal wrote a book called the World, the
Flesh, and the Devil. And you all have to go back and read that, because he was like 27 years old, just a young dude getting a career going as a very prominent scientist and he writes this prospectus on the future which is utterly amazing to this day because it gives us the idea of generation starships, the bit of dice and sphere technology, of artificial intelligences, almost anything any science fiction writer is going to be handling through the 1930s, '40s and '50s pops up in this book. And to this day it's not really dated. It's still pretty cool.
So you add Wells, Bernal, Stapledon, if you add in William Hope Hodson, then you throw in other people like Tolkien, another British visionary, and go afield a little bit and add in let's say Jorge Luis Borges who was very fond of British and
James Branch Cabell who was a southern gentleman with just one offshoot off of a -- I think they call them a round head in England.
But at any rate, all these people put together are what got me going for this book.
Because they all right about not just the future but about books. They're all in books, of course, they all write books, but all of this stuff from the fantasy side to
Lewis Carroll playing with words to all of that, it's extreme sport. So strip away your boundaries, take it all away, let's go on a tour, I think we've got this set up here so it will play. We want large screen or small screen? Is our tech guy still here? Henry? Small sign. Okay. [laughter]. He'll really in control.
So Astrid and I went around Seattle, since Seattle is really the setting of this story and Seattle is about to become a City at the End of Time, let's run this and show you what we did with Seattle.
[music playing]
So okay. You can see we had great fun doing this, and I have always wanted to be a special affects artist, so suddenly realizing that I could be with Photo Shop and then website person did the flash animation because I haven't quite gotten into that yet, but Astrid and I took the photos and she got the Seattle public library historical photos for us. So it's a whole family. And then if you go on there, you find out that my daughter is blogging as a character who is not in the book has done a very good job kind of stretching the paranoia level.
My son has added his Flickr page photographs to the whole thing. We put them out as moo cards and viral promotion, which of course could backfire and then we get a cold. But we're doing pretty well with that, and we're having a good time.
So the whole idea is to go back to the time of City in the Stars and even before that, the Time Machine and to the night land and do an update on it with a little

bit of a tweak of strain theory. Because strain theory has gotten kind of interesting in the last decade or so, it's gotten kind of arrogant and it says that the mathematics is so beautiful it must be true. And you know, us novelists have always thought that was the case when you write a book, so beautiful it must be true.
But in fact, mathematics is nothing particularly special in the universe. And this really irks people who are programmers when I say that. Because we spend so much time and it gives us so much power to use mathematics. But as a metaphysical entity, mathematics is just a branch of language. An equation is really no different than an instruction said in a sentence. It runs you through things in a formal way to be sure, but it also makes sure that you have to have good information in to get anything useful out. Sometimes very precise information. So it's a very particular subset of regular language.
That means that if strain theory can't solve our problems, if it creates two to the
500th different models of a universe, pick one and you can't decide between it because the experiment involves God like powers, then we're kind of at an impasse, aren't we in and I think in biology mathematically we've already hit an impasse. We can't even describe the behavior of a relatively complex protein molecule, much less an entire organic system. We just can't do it. We can't do it with mathematics, we can't do it with computers, because as we all know now, computers never boot up the same way twice, right.
They're a little unpredictable. They're getting very complicated. They're starting to kind of act like people and they need to be psychoanalyzed. This is the only way I can prepare my computer is to psychoanalyze the damn thing. And I'd hate to work with some very, very large system where you have to move, you know, one result over to the next part of the very large system which does kind of involve breaking the touring machine strain.
So all of this it occurs to me now is the time for text to rise up and to take over again. And I say that because I flunked calculus. So I can handle English language pretty well. But mathematics, you know, I'm a genius level at that, but I don't do the homework. I can't show you the work.
So take a warning with that, that you've got this from a guy who is in fact an
English major, not a physics major but likes to hang around with physicists and talk and compare notes and over the years I've started to know when people were capable of, you know, looking for grant money and not admitting that they were then asking, you know, they were then writing science fiction as they make their grant proposals. A lot of high level physics is science fiction. It really is, always has been. Physicists are allowed to theorize in incredibly diverse ways, which up until maybe modern times like two or three months ago biologists weren't, biologists were discouraged from positing new theories. No biologist could ever get a Ph.D. if his advisor said go and prove Darwin wrong.
But how many physicists have been told by their advisors go and prove Einstein wrong? It's an exercise. You do it, you know. But biologists -- so I had fun with

Darwin in all these books kind of tweaking biology and pointing out some of the weird things they didn't have time to read.
In this book, it's entirely more on discipline than that. This is a romp. This is an adventure story. Okay. I've got some questions for you. One of the main topics in this book is a thing called what I'm now calling a complete library but it's also been called either a universal library or the Library of Babel. In the book it's referred to as the Library of Babel, and homage to an essay by Jorge Luis
Borges by the same name.
The Library of Babel in Borges' conception is every single possible permutation of 24 -- an alphabet of 24 symbols spread through a text, a book sized text of 425 pages or so. And how long, you know, how big would that entire subset be? It's in Wikipedia. We would probably look it up here. It's like, you know, some huge, huge, out of the universe ballpark number.
And that's a really fascinating idea to me, because I think you can ask a lot of questions about this danken experiment and lead yourself into a lot of quandaries, which is always good for thinking.
The Library of Babel is not infinite, but it is literally huge, unimaginably huge, and sometimes we are frightened by very large numbers but we love infinities.
Infinities are great because they're mathematically tractable, and you know, we don't need to imagine ourselves getting to the end because we'll never get there, so we feel happy with them 89 but very large numbers daunt us, because then it becomes like, you know, an office project. You're going to have to take a look at every single one of these volumes spread across this vast universe of book shelves that Borges postulates.
And his essay examined the futility of trying to find meaning in a random universe. Okay. That's good. But this is not an infinite library. In biology, we've actually had this concept that the string of three billion base pairs in the human geno could only evolve randomly. So in a sense, as Daniel Dennett has pointed out, it, too, is a Library of Babel. But the mathematics involved in trying to get something coherent out of that string set in that method of doing so is astonishing, it's much, much larger than the Library of Babel. So what are our challenges here? We've got this notion of randomness, which has never really been defined in a formal way, we've got the notion of creativity and learning and so on and looking for texts that are meaningful. This idea of the Library of Babel is -- can be very evocative. So I can ask some questions like you know of course that in the Library of Babel every single possible story would be told in that makes perfect sense. Now, you could concatenate certain volumes and put longer books together but they're not necessarily going to be created to the.
But when I threw this idea at Gregory Benford, he said that's just like noise, it's no different from noise. So my first question, class, is how is the Library of Babel different from noise?
>>: [inaudible].

>> Greg Bear: It's complete, right. What's that mean?
>>: Organized.
>> Greg Bear: Well, we would hope. I mean, there's going to be a card catalog in there somewhere. But it's going to be -- there's also going to be a huge number of false card cat logs. So?
>>: That means it's not random.
>> Greg Bear: Why?
>>: Because there's a structure to however the characters were arranged in those [inaudible] pages.
>> Greg Bear: Occasionally. Spaced out between huge incomprehensible, you know, things that could fill your entire God's lifetime trying to read.
>>: Incomprehensible itself.
>> Greg Bear: Good point. See, you're asking all the questions but you haven't answered, you're getting on my later questions but you haven't answered this one yet. Yes?
>>: So because it has every possible permutation you know there's something useful in the library, no answer, no guarantee no matter how long you listen that you'll find something that's useful.
>> Greg Bear: Right. So that's basically the answer to the question. Yes, sir?
>>: Just as exhaustive as [inaudible].
>> Greg Bear: There you go. Excellent. Boy, it took me months to figure that out and you guys get it in two minutes. That's perfect. That's just what I expected. It doesn't repeat. The Library of Babel is not allowed to repeat. That is not a trivial problem. How do you prevent the Library of Babel from repeating itself in how do you keep track of what you've already generated?
Now, some programmers talk to me in vague hand-waving terms of a program that actually allows you to prevent any repetitious results. I don't know if that's possible or not.
>>: [inaudible] program random or whether it's like just a bunch of nested loops?
>> Greg Bear: Well, that's when you can't allow it to be random it has to generate a new variant of a text or string of text every single time, and it cannot repeat that variant. Ever.
>>: [inaudible].

>> Greg Bear: So if you guys figure this out, we can patent it. Forget publishing, you know, we'll just produce random books and send them out there.
Okay. The next question is what is not in the Library of Babel in what could you not have in this finite -- yes?
>>: Microsoft intellectual property. [laughter].
>> Greg Bear: You have to prove it's in there first before you sue us, guys.
Good point though.
>>: It can't be represented the first time for [inaudible].
>> Greg Bear: But you can represent practically anything in an ASCII code set, you know, numbers, symbols, Chinese symbols, I mean how do we do Chinese symbols in so even that -- but what it cannot be in here are infinitely long things like pi, because pi is infinitely long. It's never been proven that pi is random, but I want you guys to take a trillion digits of pi and put it through a compression algorithm and see what you get. No compression. Just won't compress. So that's a pretty good indicator at the first level that pi is relatively random. Yes?
>>: Because there's so many things that is it groupable or not that you could take consecutive books and construct [inaudible].
>> Greg Bear: Well, you probably could, right? But that's a great question. That leads to the next question which we have ways of generating pi within the library, all the equations necessary there. True and false. I mean, you could have false ways of generating pi which don't work. You could have super science ways of generating varieties of pi that we never even think of. You know, 11 dimensional pi circles or hyper spheres or whatever. I'm sure that's doable.
But the next question leads us is if pi is random, which has never been proven, and is infinitely long, then are there subsets of pi which contain the universal library? First answer, anybody disagree?
It really becomes an interesting mathematical problem, doesn't it, because if pi is totally random and never produces anything sensible, which is kind of a definition of randomness, then you couldn't have a universal library within pi or any variation thereof because there are occasionally text within, in fact large numbers of text, every possible text in the universe would be contained within pi. Which means that the meaning of the universe could be contained within pi which is the paradox if it's random and unanalyzable. And also if it is totally unshrinkable. It can't be condensed using algorithms. JPEGs or whatever you want, you know, zipping. Can't to that.
So when Carl Sagan wrote Contact, he through this idea out that if you looked at pi in the right way you would get a message from God or some alien civilization leaving a message in our metaphysics and the mathematicians just jumped all over him back in the 1970s. They said this is impossible, pi is random and you know this is just nonsense.

Okay. Was Karl right? It will take you a very, be very long period of time to find anything in there, but as people who are numerate, you could actually I think begin to realize and win yourself a field prize by using this as an entry point in the question of whether or not pi is totally random and what the meaning of randomness is. Is pi noise? Well, yes, because it repeats. It could easily repeat. But we don't know that it repeats. So next question before we head off into, you know, talking about more about the story here because I'm sure you guys love this stuff when you're off work, brain bending tough, next question is at what point does pi denature and become like any other infinite string random number such that it loses the character that started it off as pi in the first place.
Is it 10 digits, three digits down, five, 20, 50, 10 million, a trillion? That means that at a certain point any mathematically precise system just goes off into the vagaries of noise. And that's an interesting mathematical result. So all of the comes out of my English major reading of Jorge Luis Borges and Hanns Heinz
Ewers who wrote the first essay on this, and George Gamov who talked about it in his book one, two, three, infinity. And that's probably where a lot of us got introduced to the concept.
In this book it turns out that you need the universal library maybe to save the universe. Because what better guideline for creating an entire, huge, diverse universe than all possible stories and all possible randomness variation that can be used to like generate particle trails or alternate histories or whatever. You know, all this stuff. We look at the scale of the universe. Do you really believe that a simple theory of everything, a simple one equation can describe all of that?
I don't know. But this is all the stuff behind here which is kind of like you don't need to know any of it to enjoy the book. But when you do and you come across these concepts, you're going to be introduced to a fellow called the librarian, who has in fact at the end of time almost managed to create a thing in a mini cosom, a very small but very, very condensed universe that is the equivalent of the universal library. And that's a very powerful object. Especially when you bring in the fact that the muses are really.
But they don't just inspire artists and writers and dancers and so on, this muse is about memory. And her job is to take everything that's been observed in the universe and correct the bookkeeping. Okay? Now, I'm sure you've been hearing about these physics results that show that you can entrain photons and there's this thing in nature recently, you can entrain a photon and send it off in two different photons in two different directions and they still know all the gossip connected with the other photon. They still know everything. They know what's going on with the other photon. Apparently the instantaneous or near instantaneous transmission it's not explainable in any other way. It is like a bell continuum message going between them, and they can communicate at least at
100,000 times the speed of light. They can't measure beyond that.
Now, they're getting more and more interesting results which are not quantum mechanically reprehensible but do in fact kind of like knock our socks off with regard to things like special relatively. This really worried Mr. Einstein. I recall the dialogue when something like God doesn't play dice with the universe, and

then Neil Boris says, Albert don't tell God what had to do. So we don't know what God is up to.
In this novel he's sleeping, as any Hindu would tell us is the truth, you know, creation is there, God is bored, Brahma sleeps, when Brahma wakes up, then things will get interesting.
So we have a lot of fun here. And you can see that by metaphysically messing with Seattle and making it one of these cities that are at the end of time, we're squashing Seattle up against the future a hundred trillion years from now.
Wonderful fun.
So if you've read City and the Stars recently, I highly recommend you go back and reread it. It's a great book. It didn't have anybody in the present in it, but HG
Wells and William Hope Hodgson and Olaf Stapledon tended to have either people from the far future coming back to tell us the story or people living in the present going forward to the far future to see it and that's how I structured this book. It's a little easier to get across if you have a contemporary viewpoint character who is just as puzzled as you are about what the heck is going on.
It avoids a lot of narrative lumps. And I -- you know, there are enough narrative lumps in most of my books that the scientists are reasonably content. But in this one, the puzzles will never get solved just by reading this text. You're going to have to find the alternate text from the universal library that go on at much greater length that I never wrote.
So any questions on all of this? Sorry on your lunch break to throw all these questions at you. But I know you guys are like super athletes. You guys are extreme sports types, so I know that.
>>: Have you thought at all about like the mytology of the word itself like Tolkien did extensive research into creating how the world was completed, the beliefs, the whole system behind it, Lewis Carroll as well did some work into that is now being twisted into a new story like [inaudible] good job, so have you ever touched that point like to kind of establish the social [inaudible] that word and how you know the [inaudible] itself play the role on that.
>> Greg Bear: Oh, yeah. Whenever you write science fiction you have to do that. The whole culture determines the work. And we certainly learned that when we studied linguistics. So if you're writing an alien civilization, then you can do that, too, and to the extent that you have the time or the space to lay back their history, you know, and if you translate that word into English it must be evocative. So nearly all my books when you come across alien words they seem slightly strange to us. In Anvil of Stars, the species that the kids encounter in deep space is called the red tree runners. What's that mean? You know, what's that come from? So in a sense, we can play with just poetics because the universe is full of mystery and poetry. We may never understand it, but the talent of any imaginative writer is to give you the feeling that there is an explanation.
And in a sense, that's what religion does when you describe the Gods and then

you say what are they like? Well, they are not this and not that. I can't tell you what they are but I can only tell you what they aren't.
So, yeah, very good question. And this book we have the far future language is translated for us. And even the units are not metric, they're basic because you can just assume that they're not going to be metric that far in the future either, so might as well make it easy for us, right? Yes?
>>: I noticed one of the quotes actually if Stephen Baxter, it's kind of creepy. It said that this is a book that you'll be remembered for, you know [inaudible] kind of creepy. So if you were ever just say to retire from writing, would you -- will you want this to be the book you're remembered for? And also I notice that you and two other authors wrote kind of prequels in a way to the [inaudible] foundation trilogy. Would you want somebody doing that to one of your works or would you want them to do that to this one?
>> Greg Bear: Well, I don't know [inaudible] I sort of channeled Isaac when I was writing the foundation book and that was fun to have him sitting on my shoulder.
He disagreed that he was still alive. He was a pretty much a secular agnostic, so he didn't believe in life after death and so we argued about that a little bit. But, yeah, it's hard to say. We're not in control. The fact is the ego is not important after a future trillion years. You know, and if this is my masterpiece, that's fine.
You know, as long as someone is reading something a trillion years from now I'll be happy. [laughter].
>> Greg Bear: If only a scattered fragment of ash left over from the supernova and the end of that particular corner of the universe, that would be cool.
Other than, you know, I think the gods tell us, you know, don't expect to hang around just because you want to, you know, there's no particular reason why we should keep all of you around. Or even the best parts. So humility is I think kind of in order after a hundred trillion years. I mean, entire history of the universe is buried under the city known as the Catalpa. It was just too bulky and so they broke it up into rubble and scattered it as the foundation of a new city about 10 trillion years ago. And ever since then they just don't know what the beginning ---y what they call the brightness, what that was like. Understand when Jeff says this is after the heap death of the universe, literally, the universe is going to die we hear in 15 billion years or something like that, we don't know.
But something in that range, and I figure okay, so it does, you know, the -- it goes on a little longer than that because our physics isn't quite right. It stretches out, it starts to get seedy, it starts to come apart like a bad veil, bad piece of lace and so you've got all these seams and openings particles start to decay and you know constants start to change. It's like a decay in the log in a forest.
Now, in the ecological system of universes and meta-universes, this is an opportunity for other entities to come in and seed themselves in this log. We are unfortunately about to be seeded by a malevolent failed God, and that's thing that challenges the City at the End of Time, the typhoon. And the typhoon has moved in and is not happy with anything that makes sense. So that's the metaphysical

disease that I postulated, you know, occurring in Hodgson's the Night Lantern, and this case I make it manifest. Yeah?
>>: So talk about decaying log in the forest and humility of creation. When you're writing, and a lot writers do this, you're building over [inaudible]. When do you know to stop? Because I think we as readers and some cases writers don't want to reveal everything because you tire everybody out. And I just -- a lot of us are familiar with series that really needed to stop 20 years ago. [laughter].
So how do you know when to stop?
>> Greg Bear: When people stop buying the books.
>>: Okay.
>> Greg Bear: I mean, there's a very good indication there that the story is over when no one's reading it, right? That's the unhumble version. I wanted to kind of do this as three volumes. The publisher said do it as one, that's a commercial decision so someone get squooze down a bit. But on the other hand I think it works fine as it is. You leave them wanting more is usually my conception. And
I've generally found that the really, really intelligent readers don't want to have everything explained to them in infinite detail.
On the other hand, you get something like Tolkien's world and it's marvelous.
You could go on for a long time and people have, they want to know more. It's a rich, rich world. So it depends on the originality and the organic quality of your creation. If it lives outside of what you're capable of doing, then it's good series.
So we're, you know, Robert Jordan is about to have his new book coming out and that's probably not a bad thing much and then you get VC Andrews who has been writing for 20 years now and she's been dead for 20 years. That's impressive. That's longevity.
Yeah?
>>: When [inaudible] information [inaudible] when your books are translated into other languages, do you get a chance to follow along and see what the changes are?
>> Greg Bear: Well, quite often the translators will come back to me and ask questions. So I just got a note from my Israeli Hebrew translator who is translating Quantico and wants to ask certain questions. That's fine. I try to help them in any way I can. I can only really do it explaining you know what this weird colloquial thing might mean. I can't turn it into something for them.
Also, a lot of words and science fiction books are in and of themselves supposed to be the words of the future. But they're evocative like we were talking about, so how do you translate that into something like Finnish or Russian in Russian is probably easier than Finnish. But Japanese, very hard.

So quite often what they do is they do a, you know, a literal translation of it. They just don't translate it all. And that can be difficult. Good question, though.
Translators really have a hard time. And you think of some of the best translations that have actually taken the work of literature and made it a new work of literature in another language, something like Remembrance of Things
Past which is revered which is a great translation, Samuel Butler's translation of
Cervantes, which is excellent. You know, these things are in themselves masterpieces. A lot, a lot of dedication there.
Anything else? Yeah?
>>: What process do you use to plot and [inaudible] something as complex --
>> Greg Bear: One damn thing after another. Basically the organic nature of it is clear, the themes are clear at a certain point about one third of the way through the book. I've set myself up goals along the way, kind of like, you know, road markers that I want to get to. Things I think will be fun to write. And then you have to integrate all those and the only way to do that is to have the subconscious do that. So I really am beholding to the muse here.
And to make her a character in the book I think is particularly catering, you know, to the gods. She's a pretty massive, impressive character in this book, very frightening in places. And that's just the way I look at her actually.
>>: [inaudible].
>> Greg Bear: I haven't heard much about that yet. You know, there's also book group club in here, women's book group club called the Witches of East Lake.
They call themselves that. There's four of them, and there are -- there's a -- they really are major characters in the book. And turn out to be slightly metaphysical, too. And this is another bit of catering. Put you in librarian, the women's book club's in there. Come on, guys, you should read more science fiction. [laughter].
Haven't heard from Nancy Pearl yet. We'll see.
People tell me this is not a -- I get two different things. From the United
Kingdom, one of the reviews in the U.K. said this book reads like an airport novel, reads very, very quickly. And for library journal they said this book is for heavy duty readers of science fiction. So I presume that in the United Kingdom their
IQs are vastly higher than they are here in the United States. I can only presume that. But the fact is I think this is a very easy book to read. You just have to kind of go with the flow, you know. Don't try to understand it all. It's a little easier to understand than Finnegan's Wake, but it reads a heck of a lot faster.
So one more question, then we sign books and let you guys run off, or how much time we got here? Okay.
>>: You talk a lot about like time travelling has been something [inaudible].
Some of them people don't even remember anymore [inaudible] but how you approach to the whole time travelling because, [inaudible] physics nowadays have [inaudible] a little bit like universe in a nutshell he talks about it, right? So

how you perceive the whole thing and how you approach the time travel? I feel a little bit that's like the mind [inaudible] not necessarily but [inaudible] so
[inaudible].
>> Greg Bear: Well, in this book, the universe doesn't -- when the universe comes to an end, it doesn't just end at the end it's a whole five or more dimensional construct, a unity that starts to decay from beginning to end. So once the decay begins what you have is what we could call -- well, it's the reverse of original sin. It's the sin of the end of time coming back to haunt us. So anything you want different in this universe is caused by corruption at the end of time. If you think things are going badly now, just wait a little bit, you know, fifth dimensional little bits. It's going to get worse. And when Seattle is cut loose and smeared up against the future, it's because literally the universe is being digested into little gobbits that float free in multi-dimensional space. And they have their own kind of cohesive metaphysical set of units which are slowly frittering away.
But also this universe is a multi dimensional universe and each one of these dimensions, you know, can fan off, supposedly, into an infinite number of dimensions. I pair that down a little bit. I make the metaphor more like Richard
Feynman sum over histories and particle trails and Feynman says that a particle can travel every possible route to get to where it is going to be then it sums itself down mathematically, the physicist does, be anyway, to the least energy course pathway.
Well, that's how universes work, too. Until things start to get corrupt. And then you can actually shut off into a path way that never should have been preserved.
And those places are nasty. So there are other parts of this, you know, like why do we dream in we dream because we shed the memories of those path ways we never took. It's a physics process. You got to get rid of these things, you don't need them. You never took those paths. And if you have really weird dreams, maybe that indicates that those path ways you should have avoided them to start with, they're pretty nightmarish or even lovecraftian. So if the actual laws of physics are changes because the universe is dying, then almost anything can happen. And that lead us to all the stuff that kind of separates science fiction from horror and supernatural literature and fantasy and all of that. It really is -- becomes part and parcel of the same thing. Maybe because we shed some of our stories when we dream. Is that good?
>> Kim Ricketts: Yes. Thank you.
>> Greg Bear: Well, thank you very much for coming.
[applause]