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>> Ann Ruden: Good afternoon and welcome. My name is Ann Ruden, and I'm here to introduce and welcome Greg Bear, who is visiting us as part of the Microsoft Research
Visiting Speakers Series. The Los Angeles Times calls Greg Bear one of the masters of speculative fiction. A member of the elite think tank, Sigma, Bear has lent his insight to the Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Air Force, U.S. Army, NATO, and other agencies to provide decision makers with alternative scenarios for critical future developments and events.
As a writer of speculative fiction, Bear helps these institutions forecast new developments, brainstorm new technologies and predict disruptive events.
More importantly, he inspires government agencies to consider how these profound changes will affect societies in good ways, bad and unexpected. Greg Bear is here to discuss his new novel "Mariposa", a Quantico novel. Bear places the U.S. status as a troubled economic and strategic super power at the center.
The country's apparent savior, the Tallas Corporation, delivers training for soldiers and runs security forces around the world. But there is a sinister hidden cost. Greg Bear is the author of more than 30 books, including "Quantico," "Blood Music," "The Forage of
God" and "Darwin's Radio." Bear has been awarded two Hugos and five Nebulas for his fiction, one of two authors to win a Nebula in every category. Bear has served on political and scientific action committees and has advised Microsoft Corporation, the U.S. Army, the CIA, Sandia National Laboratories, Kalasan Architecture and other groups and agencies.
Please join me today in welcoming Greg Bear.
>> Greg Bear: Thank you.
[applause]
>> Greg Bear: It's a pleasure to be here again. I think the last time I was here was I gave a very abstruse talk on information theory and everything, and I confused the folks here and at Google. And now I'm back to security and thrillers and the difference between science fiction and thrillers and all that sort of thing.
I was thinking this morning, after reading the news of yesterday, that this isn't the future I signed up for. You know, they just shut down the return to the moon, which was a dicy proposition. Maybe we'll hear more. Maybe they'll focus on Mars or something. On the

other hand, they're handing things over to private enterprise, which is always interesting, especially if there are people ready to build the spaceships to go out and do it. They're shutting down the shuttle program which changes nearly an entire set of futures that I imagined back in the 1980s.
And we're dealing with a major recession, which I did kind of predict back in 2004, 2005 in "Mariposa", I said we're at very hard times umpteen years down the road. And here we are inside Quantico. In "Mariposa", I pitched that perhaps we were coming out of a bad time economically, but we were going to face other challenges. The next novel in the series I'm hoping to call "Esperanza." And I think "Emerging out of the Gloom" is interesting, because nearly all of my books for the last 30 years I've been fighting against this trend in American psychology and history toward rugged individualism versus community effort.
And you know my friend David Brinn has waxed enthusiastic and elegant about all of these different currents. But somehow back in the 1980s it became more and more this notion that we had to destroy community in order to preserve individual freedom. And we still see that today.
You know, community action. That's a nasty, naughty word. You shouldn't even say that. You shouldn't be building cathedrals, you should be building home theaters in your
BMW studded home basement. You should have a billion dollars and get away from the world and just do nothing but your own thing.
You shouldn't be coordinated by society. You shouldn't do this. You shouldn't do that.
And along the way the political version of this kind of ran off with a lot of science fiction readers and fans and they back rugged individualists, libertarians, to a great extent. I've always admired libertarians. My father-in-law, one of my favorite people, was a hard core libertarian. Jerry Pernell, an another, almost unclassifiable conservative, is an old time friend of mine.
And I watched Jerry Pernell be get kicked out of the conservative movement a few years ago. I wondered what the heck is going on. If Jerry isn't rugged individualistic enough for these guys, then what are we dealing with? What we're dealing with is America going through yet another a paroxysm of the rebirth of old evils. That's what I put into
"Mariposa". It's encoded language, because a lot of people are still kind of sensitive about those issues. Mostly white guys.
Now, isn't that strange. But they really are. And as I go around looking for the coded language, I realize here's the coded language. If you're a libertarian and you believe that

Robert E. Lee was a better general than Ulysses S. Grant, you've got problems, practical problems, psychological problems.
If you believe the Confederate battle flag is not a racist symbol but a sign of family honor and everything else, you've got problems. And in "Mariposa" I lay it out, flat out, if you're a conservative that believes in the honor of slaver culture from 150 years ago, you've got problems.
You're dealing not with libertarian philosophy, you're dealing not with actual conservative philosophy, you're dealing with confederatism. You're dealing with the slaver culture.
The slaver culture rose up and trained people to be counter to their own best interests.
It's really interesting. You see it in ant cultures, too, believe it or not. Look it up in E.O.
Wilson. Ants that take slaves tend to slack off into nothing but becoming military. They become larger warriors and let the work be done by the slaves, and how is this not VMI?
The Virginia Military Institute, and all that sort of thing. Remember, some of the finest generals and some of the finest fighting forces came out of the south.
And so in the Union, you basically had a bunch of preachers coming down to become generals. But the military class has always tended to be with a slight southern accent.
How is E.O. Wilson inform us about that.
At the risk of offending everybody here, I have to say that in "Mariposa" what we have is
America returning to its senses by basically getting itself straightened out, throwing away the nightmares of the past, sometimes violently, and becoming really American again.
And what is American? It's where community effort and individualism work hand in hand.
It is where you are free, we hope, to do what you want to do, for your own good and not for the demands of history of the past. Where you are not blinkered by the propaganda that ran this country for 400 years.
Now, how is that a thriller? Because in a situation like this, you can really devise a
James Bond villain of immense proportion. It's terrific. We've been set up for this in the
United States over the last 10 years, such that in my basic principle is that we have met the enemy and he is us.
Our James Bond villains are our own. They're not Smirch, they're not anything like that.
Tallus Corporation, how is that not a James Bond name? Of course anybody who is a
Ray Harryhausen fan knows Tallus was the giant bronze figure that lords it over Jason and the Argonauts. In fact, I worked with some groups that had similar names back in the 1980s advising groups that were basically government service organizations.

And I've been paid by government service organizations. And I kind of understand some of the psychology around the beltway of all these things. But the whole notion of outsourcing everything in government to private industry was really intriguing. And then it went badly wrong. And it's still going badly wrong.
The fact is that you don't give civilians authority over the basic principles of judicial life and liberty. You just don't. And you don't give them situations where they're going to be put in wartime without accountability. You just don't. How did we end up that way?
Well, seemed like a smart thing to do at the time. Now we're still pulling out of it. That's where we get our James Bond villains nowadays. Home grown, with our own nastinesses built in. That's the kind of book I'm getting tired of writing. I really want to move back into the science fiction of 2010.
We're off to the stars. We're doing this sort of thing. Why are we mired in spending a trillion dollars on a war and killing thousands of people that we didn't really need to do.
I've had conservatives tell me: We got rid of Saddam Hussein. Absolutely. That was totally satisfying. I thoroughly approve. We could have done it back in the 1990s if we really committed to that. But we didn't. Perhaps wisely I think now. Why didn't we?
Because we spent a trillion dollars and so far 4,000 lives. And what could we have done with that trillion dollars? We could have removed our allegiance to Middle East oil. We could have saved -- we could have improved our security situation. We could have basically spent it on the sort of things we needed to spend it on. Instead, we've worked ourselves into debt and now we're cutting all the visionary programs we wanted to do back in the '60s, '70s, '80s, starting to be winnowed out because we didn't focus.
Why didn't we focus? Because we were told by other people lies to work against our own best interest, even our best interest as visionaries. We were told lies. Why did they tell us those lies? Because they wanted to justify actions and emotions and historical consequences hundreds of years old.
Now, how is that not strange? How are we not still mired in that kind of thinking? How are we not persuaded by aristocratic slaver culture to work against our best interests.
The prime metaphor of this whole irrational rambling that I'm going through here is that most of the guys on the Confederate side who died at Pickett's charge did not own slaves. They did it for honor and state and family, supposedly.
Why did they fight in that war in the first place? Because of states rights. And yet we're told over and over again by people who sympathize, it was all about states rights. It was the right, that whole history was rewritten in the 1900s with financing from major

universities and major southern families and the whole structure of the end of the Civil
War was rewritten and reconstruction became this, that, the other thing.
We were then told in history classes the southern side of the story. And only in the '50s and '60s did we emerge out of it. Very strange. How did that happen? How did we lose that war? Because for some reason people who really value liberty get tired, get tired of having to fight the fight over and over and over again against people who lie and don't even know they're lying.
That's a James Bond villain going up there. So in "Mariposa", my James Bond villain is a major player. He's actually quite a charming, very intelligent fellow. He runs a major corporation in Texas. And in Texas, I wish that they had held off a little bit, the book was published last November. And suddenly, in September, or August or back around that time, in 2009, the governor of Texas says why don't we secede. And that's what my book is about, too. Of course we've forgotten now, the first state that wanted to secede was
Massachusetts, back around 1812. Massachusetts wanted to secede. And going that route was the end of a major political party, the Federalist party, because suddenly at the beginning of the war here's a state that's proving itself to be unpatriotic.
History is great. I love all this stuff. And I kind of throw this into the mix. And I kind of say this is not the future I wanted to be born into. I got some messages recently talking about the "Queen of Angels" "Universe," "Moving Mars," "Heads," a series of books I began writing back in mid-1980s to 1989 for "Queen of Angels."
And the structure of that is what we're heading into with "Mariposa." Turned out that the political situation I was pointing toward fit perfectly with what was going on in Quantico.
And so "Mariposa" introduces us to some of the characters who will show up in "Queen of
Angels" and other novels later.
That surprises me. And what's also surprising is that some people went and did the math. And I didn't do the math. And when I was writing "Mariposa" it turns out I'm way within the ballpark for all the character histories, the dates and everything, which I don't actually name in "Mariposa."
But it just fits perfectly. And the one thing that doesn't fit perfectly is the space program as speculated upon in "Heads." By 2019 we've got at least three families living on the moon in "Heads." I'm not sure we're going to make that deadline. I'm not sure we're going to have a star probe out there by 2044 or whatever. I don't think we're going to quite make that deadline.

And so back in 1969 I thought we'd actually be heading out to the stars by now. I was fully informed by the Arthur C. Clark vision of the future, why would this stop? Why would we pull back? Well, turns out there was in fact a fairly decent reason for not doing so.
The reason was we would have died.
We didn't understand the technology and the biology. Why? Because we had simplified everything. Science is still, and to this day a lot of science, especially in the biological area, is stuck in steam engine versions of reality where statistics and mathematics can describe these things quite well. Rather than end the notion of a social neural network type of structural, which is very tough to define mathematically. And it turns out that space medicine wasn't far enough along for us to get out to Mars even, much less to the stars. We don't understand how biological systems operate in weightless conditions. We haven't done that much research yet.
So quite literally the future that I envision back in 1969, as a growing nerd, was much more difficult. And so there's a good reason for why we haven't gone into space. But the lack of resolve is also interesting.
And I was just thinking this morning: We still haven't come up with an economic rationale for the future that we hoped for so desperately and so wishfully back in the 1960s. We still haven't figured out how to do it monetarily.
What's worse, we haven't maintained the vision thing. Look at what's going on right now in our culture. We've got lots of big space movies with spaceships and technology and everything and our space program is falling aspart. The big screen TV replaced vision.
True work in space.
The big screen TV gives you all the space you want. Starry fields and you're comfortable and you've got your potato chips and there you are, you're happy. Ray Bradbury told us that, for God's sake, back in the 1950s. Fahrenheit 451, I can get a third wall big screen
TV then I can be part of the family. Where do we head in that direction. Ray Bradbury, supposedly a non-fiction visionary, wrote about virtual reality where we'd walk into the room, there would be the vault and the lions would be all around you and you could smell them, total sensory. And we're heading in that direction and what's it going to get us?
What's it going to get us when we have a completely realistic virtual reality system where you can have sex with any fake female on the planet, what's it going to gain you when you've got all of the experience and none of the reality?
As a member of the entertainment industry, I've got to say I love this stuff. I bought a big screen TV last week to replace an older one. And how do I devise my visions of our

failure? I look inside myself. I look at my wishes and my needs, and I actually have to say I'm not that fond of virtual reality.
I've never actually immersed myself into a virtual reality environment. I'm sure it will happen eventually. 15 frames per second just doesn't do it for me.
Second Life doesn't do it for me either, and I think I have to say that Neil Stephenson agrees with me on that. He doesn't talk much about Second Life. So what are we aiming for here? Why have we separated ourselves out with fantasy visions of reality and yet we can't maintain this long-term notion of what humanity wants to do, what it wants to be.
Are we still mired in the nightmares and visions of 150 years ago? Are we still trying to fight those battles to resolve them? Why are we doing that? Did the propaganda wars that convinced America it was one sort of thing actually win?
Such that we keep dragging ourselves back like some sort of -- like some sort of ghost that's pulling us back into the past and we keep losing our track, losing our way, losing our understanding of what it means to be Americans. I'm tired of writing discouraging books. I'm tired of criticizing conservativism when in fact it should be the core of
America. Why? Why are we still doing that? I don't know really. Meanwhile, technology marches on. Entertainment industry is huge.
We have something approaching the virtual, the visual typewriter that I wrote about back in the 1990s. Here was my vision of what would happen with entertainment. I was realizing back then that publishing was going to be in trouble in a few years because I saw brain drain.
I saw it by talking to people at Microsoft. I saw it by going to dinners with major players at
Microsoft and other companies and realizing that New York came hat in hand to the West
Coast to be told what was going to be happening in the entertainment world.
And I actually saw that Microsoft hadn't a clue back then either. They started making liaisons with big guns down south and those liaisons were like watching rams butt heads with each other. And I had a vision, what we really needed we needed to find out what the West Coast had in terms of the West Coast assets and coordinate them in a interesting way and bring all that talent together and start involving a people who were already here confidently, in what the future would bring. Why was New York publishing going to be in trouble because electronic publishing was going to come down the road soon. To a speech back in 1994, thereabouts, I brought an HP calculator you could open up. And I says this is the future of the book.

This screen will open up for you and you can type on the bottom part on a virtual keyboard and you can look at two pages of a book, and you can open it out and watch a movie on it and everything. And this is going to provide competition for print books.
But also competition was going to come from, and is coming from, not just television, not just motion pictures, but the gaming industry, whose revenues even back then were exceeding virtually every other branch of entertainment.
I said this is going to cause a brain drain because publishing is typically poorly paid anyway, and New York is very snobbish. And New York will not recognize what's going on and will not change things and so people will gravitate away and the management, the most important people in determining how publishing goes, will get less and less capable.
Less and less business capable.
And more and more caught up in business trends which they did. So newspapers had to make 20 percent profit or increase 3 percent every year. Books had to do the same thing. The secret masters of publishing, the giant conglomerates that bought up all the publishing industry wanted these those work the way real estate did.
And look where we are now. In 2000, the publishing industry revenues dropped off 30 percent in one year. Sales dropped off. I don't know if revenues did. But sales dropped off 30 percent across the board. It was a huge shock. The shockwaves went through, pressure was put on the editors and the old joke suddenly became a reality: Where the accountant looks at the list of books on one side to sell and the list on the other side that don't sell and they say why don't you buy more of the books that sell and not buy these.
Of course, the joke is you never know which one it's going to be. You can't determine what the audience is going to do with a book. You can't do this. And the accountants ruled, the marketing departments ruled, and publishing is now continuing to drop off.
We see it with mass market paperbacks, who had their distribution chains shut down.
Now, I gotta say I was raised on paperbacks. Paperback books. I still love paperback books. But you can't find them anymore except the top 10 best sellers. You go into a lot of these stores and that's all you're going to see up front is the top 10 best sellers. And that's like a supermarket putting milk up. That's not good marketing. You've already read those books. There's no selection. As you reduce the selection in a lot of bookstores, you reduce independent book stores. The distribution chains shut down. Safeway only bought from one distributor regionally, rather than 10 or 15. All those distributors went

down almost overnight and were bought up and now are conglomerated and now those sales are dropping off.
The whole business was folding up and going away. And it's happening now in
Hollywood, too. Even though they're making billions of dollars, they're terrified, because revenue streams are going elsewhere. The challenge of the future in entertainment becomes as dicy as the challenge of the future in space flight and everything else.
Where did we lose our vision? What do we want to do? What we wanted to do was end up independent, rich, and isolated from society with no real responsibilities.
This was the goal of the '80s and the '90s. And to some extent we succeeded, except economically we're on a downturn. The entertainment industry is suffering. All revenues are down. What went wrong?
We lost our enthusiasm. The enthusiasm of being Americans was to create the future and provide huge frighteningly visionary opportunities for our children so they'd be propelled into the sciences. How have we failed in that goal? We have been dragged back by the nightmares of history such that some of our most important emotional elements in American politics are now fighting wars that are 150 years old or more. And they're fighting them over and over again, slamming their feet down, trying to drag us back.
They can't do that. On the other hand, the visionaries on all sides are kind of discouraged. The funding is dropping. VC is dropping. How are we going to start up new technologies, new revenues, where is the vision going to come from? We're kind of holding on. We're trying to maintain our stand. In some cases we've actually seen things happen. We've seen really major changes in the way books are being delivered. And now they're fighting it over. The giants are fighting it over. And I say that's great, that's the way business should be. They should be screaming at each other. They should figure it out. And I love my Kindle. And I would probably end up buying an iPad or a
Slate, whatever you want to call it. I think that's great too. I love all these things. They're all delivery systems for content.
But along the way we've seen some very strange phenomenon come out of the tech industry. We've seen the whole notion that content should be delivered for free because the Grateful Dead did it that way. You know the old metaphor. Why are you fighting people downloading all this music because what you can do is just put your band together and have live concerts. Yeah.

That's tough for a movie industry to do. It's tough for writers to do. Thomas -- Mark
Twain used to do that and go around lecturing around the country, and Ray Bradbury still does it to some extent but you can't make a living out of that anymore.
So what about this notion that information wants to be free. Where did this delusion come from? It is a delusion, because it's really not going anywhere. We're going back to the notion that, yes, information wants to be free. So do hamburgers.
But you can't download a hamburger. If we could, if we could go back to those 1960 science fiction models where the replicating machine makes everything for you, didn't we try to do that with nanotechnology? Didn't we say in 20 years nanotechnology will make everything cheap because you'll just put your home factory to work and it will make a
BMW for you. Just order it off screen. This was the vision we had.
How amazing was that? And when nanotechnology finally came to the fore what we ended up with was what we ended up looking for, when we went out looking for AI and looking for all these things, the great trends of the future.
We downgraded them. Artificial intelligence we said was just a search for expert systems. And not how. How, we said we may be there eventually but we can't get there for now, so we'll just redefine artificial intelligence.
Nanotechnology, machines that make smaller and smaller machines, and then, there we go, smaller and smaller machines. And it's just fantastic. And, of course, that was biology, really. But we were looking for silicon because we didn't want to corrupt. We didn't want to die and fade away, turn into slime and that sort of stuff. We wanted to be embedded in silicon, the visionaries of the mid-1990s said nanotechnology is going to be a giant star, computing things to the end of time.
Robert Bradbury said it. It's a brilliant vision. He's related to Ray Bradbury, apparently. I don't think Ray would have approved.
But where did that vision end up? All of nanotechnology is now confined to paint, cosmetics, golf clubs. And, of course, to writing very small things on silicon wafers.
Meanwhile, biology is coming along and quite literally eating nanotechnology's lunch.
Why? Because the original nanotechnology is the cell. It's a protein molecule with 60 domains of activity and 10,000 degrees of freedom. And it can move at 10,000 cycles per second. And what the heck does it do? You can't compute it. With that many

variables, you just can't do it on a computational system because the variables change as you compute them.
Now, that means that we're having a hard time understanding what life is all about. But how is that any different from what it was back when I was a kid? We have to reorient ourselves. We have to think about where we really want to be. We have to stop looking upon ourselves as not being connected to community, because most of us here have to work with other people to get things done.
We can't just lock ourselves away, rich billionaires with catalogs full of nanotechnological items and grudgingly move ourselves like snails back into a vision of the past that never really worked. Vision of the future that never really works.
So how are we going to do this? Where are we going to go from here? First of all, we have to get our economics straight. We have to get our priorities straight. We have to look upon ourselves as living in a world where there are a lot of bright people out there, but still, still, where what we have to offer is extraordinary. Our roots -- in a real way, the cultural roots of America come out of an England full of people who loved to argue with each other.
And they would pull in different cultural elements from the bible to the Greeks, to all of this stuff and they'd argue about them. And they'd go off into weird areas and have wars and set up empires. And I've got to say if you wanted to be occupied it was better to be occupied by the English than the Portuguese but not much.
We went through all of that and we separated off from that and we came over here and we continued to argue. Argument is terrific. Lying is not. If you are in a situation now where you lie to yourself about your goals, your standards, your connection to the country, you are not doing us any good. And right now in our media, we have alternate camps setting up lying factories. That isn't good.
We have the bloggers who have no fact filter whatsoever quite often. And what you have is 10,000 people lying to each other and out of it emerges this giant cumulative lie and it carries on an influence how our elections carried out. We always complained about people not being educated and voting, but people who are lied to and vote are really dangerous, too.
I think Robert Hineline actually found this out. One of the quintessential libertarian writers of the 1940s described a period of time he called The Crazy Years. We've been in the crazy years since 1970s. When are we going to come out of them? And in his

immittable way he started writing the headlines for the crazy years and these headlines can be found on the Internet right now every single day. Very similar headlines. How did we get there?
In some respects we didn't listen to our best people. In other respects we didn't listen to our inner heart. So as I work on books now, "Mariposa" is hopeful. "Mariposa" is about finally exorcizing the ghosts of the past, but it's also about facing up to the consequences of screwing things over. Quantico was about bad leadership leading to trauma for the people who put themselves in the front lines.
It wasn't about visionary thinking so much as it was about protecting ourselves. And when we put our protectors into tough and impossible situations, they get bent. They get broken. They get hurt. They die.
And so you need to be careful how you use them. In "Mariposa," it's when they come home, how do you fix them. PTSD. PTSD is going to be a huge problem coming out of all of these wars, because we have the children of baby boomers going off to wars as professional soldiers, and not being treated all that well medically, psychologically, within the corps even when they come home, within the military. We think if you're a soldier, suck it up, by golly, you're supposed to be brave and have courage, you're not supposed to come home and whine, are you? That's terrible, you're coming home and whining, how can you do that? George Patton all over them. And it doesn't help. 300,000 soldiers will probably have symptoms of PTSD. My best friend came home from Vietnam with PTSD which he still suffers from.
He was in a driving rainstorm in California a few days ago, a couple of weeks ago, and suddenly he visualized he was back in the monsoons in Vietnam. And he started having an anxiety attack.
That's 30 years. 35 years after he came home. What's going to happen to our soldiers?
In "Mariposa," the notion is that our troops, we have such a desperate need for PTSD that if a treatment comes forward that could in fact show real promise, what it does is it takes all of the stops and all of the checks and balances that you have been socialized with, sometimes that have been burned into your brain by experience and erases them.
Leaves you emotionally a tabular rasa from which you can regrow and reestablish the pathways in your life that you want to follow. Actually without the trauma, but it also, unfortunately, creates a set of individuals who are no longer socialized.
They have to make decisions about how to behave. All of their long-term educational training and cultural training has been erased. It's like Jekyll and Hyde all over again. So

you're liberated from PTSD. To some extent you don't feel that pain anymore. You're also liberated from the requirements of society.
But you're also liberated from the limitations of your intellectual training. The stuff that you were told that you sucked up to that you basically agreed to about your intellectual capacities, about your talents, your abilities, all of that is wiped out, too.
And suddenly we've got several hundred people, including the vice president of the
United States, who have undergone this training, this therapy, he underwent the training secretly. And who are they now?
They are the brave new world. One of them, my main character, decides that it's more interesting and more difficult to do good than to do evil. So he'll pursue that for a while.
But it's purely an intellectual exercise.
At what point can you find it more interesting to do the opposite? This is kind of a metaphor for America, isn't it? Liberated from Europe. Pulled out of Europe, given our freedom to think of who and what we are on our own terms, we quite often go backwards and forwards.
We have these things we need to be liberated from. The traumas of the past. The PTSD of history. But we have the incredible potential if we can figure out what we need to do.
That's why the end of "Mariposa" is so important to me.
Because my characters who have been through hell because of bad leadership, who have survived the philosophy of our country and realize that bad kings kill the land, they go off on their own now and they're liberated. What are they going to do and where are they going to go? They're like children again. They're like babies in the cradle except they're fully grown and well-trained and very smart and for them the world is very, very new.
I think this defines not only our problems but our potentials. What the heck are we going to do now? There was a postcard, and I'll end on this note and we'll take questions, sent out by a science fiction fan, which I think had a deep influence on Sir Arthur Clark back in his early writing days in World War II. The postcard went out, I forget who it was, Claude
Deggler or someone like that, old science fiction fan, Fanzine publisher, sent the postcard off to all of his friends and it says "I have a cosmic mind, what do I do next?"
And that's the end of 2001, isn't it? Well, we haven't acquired a cosmic mind yet. We don't know what that is. Is it liberation from self? Is it liberation from society? Is it

ultimate truth? Is it being a star calculating mathematical things for the next ten million years? What are you going to solve mathematically, if the mathematics can't solve the problem? Where are we going to go next? Are we going to be in space? Are our bodies going to be in space? Will our minds be in space? Will we become star children? What we will be liberated from? Will we be criminals if we become like gods? What will we do? This is the problem that Americans face and science fiction has been wrestling with over 100 years now. H.G. Wells wrestled with it. We wrestle with it internally. L.K. Dick wrestled with it. Arthur C. Clark wrestle with it. You have a cosmic mind. What do you do next?
Any questions?
>>: You mentioned the Kindle. I'm curious about the author's perspective on central distribution do you need publishers or authors selling directly sell, publishing through digital media like Kindle and the iTablet.
>> Greg Bear: The old question used to be do you self-publish and the old answer used to be no. That's ridiculous, because you have editors that can help you and publishers know how to market your books and everything. That's less and less true. The publishers aren't buying authors, new authors in particular just aren't getting picked up, having to go to small press publishers. Eventually the small press publishers will emerge to become major players.
But meanwhile you've got this distribution channel. Now, the only problem is how do you reach 500,000 people to tell them your book is now available? Or a million or ten million or whatever.
YouTube doesn't quite cut it. The Kindle's really an interesting opportunity and it's being refined as we go along. It's purely a reading experience, which I find fascinating. I love my Kindle. Because it doesn't do anything but provide a page of basic text. Everything else it's kind of bad at.
And that's good, because I can read it for hours. It doesn't tire your eyes. No screen refresh rate. It's kind of wandering off into this slightly olive-colored universe of text.
So I'm very hopeful. On the other hand, it's going to take a while, and in that transition period we will have people pirating books because information wants to be free. And they could kill us quite literally. Yes, sir.

>>: You talk about corporations taking over a major part of the U.S. government. Can you comment on the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision that they can spend as much as they want before an election?
>> Greg Bear: Be careful what you wish for. I have a feeling there are some corporations in the northwest that were traumatized by the conservatives a few decades ago when one of them went to Washington, was told by a freshman House Republican:
Well, now you know who your friends are, don't you?
I have a feeling that there will be a kind of matching point for point of left and right. It's going to really screw things up. I think it's a bad decision.
But the war is far from over. I'm just wondering how much people are going to want to spend on which candidates.
We missed a bullet with John Edwards who had the Melon Foundation lady basically paying for his mistresses. That's very strange. How is that going to get perverted?
If you think artists are weird, look at politicians, politicians are entertainers without a screen to be limited to, you know?
It's got to be fascinating. We do this all the time. We screw things up so badly. And then we manage to work it out somehow. So good question. Yes, sir.
>>: What do you think about the Google word search program?
>> Greg Bear: It's pretty amazing. I think again there's some overreaching there. When
I gave a talk at Google up down in Santa Monica said guys you've got to share the wealth here. If you're having our page views support your advertising revenue, then you've got to give authors a cut just like libraries give authors a cut in Europe when their books are checked out.
You can't have the use of our copyrighted content earning you money without us getting something out of it. It doesn't have to be a lot. And I think they're working toward that model now. If you contribute, get a share. I also -- I think that's going to be true of almost all electronic distributions. We're not looking at models -- the one thing that books manage to do was they managed to stay terribly expensive throughout the last 30 years while DVDs were dropping down to ten cents each. It's not quite that bad, but five bucks each for a DVD when you go Best Buy. You're not going to find a book that costs that

much except in a book store. That doesn't earn us any royalties. Blue ray today you can get one for 10 bucks. Books are still expensive.
So that's why Amazon is trying to force it down to $10, and I think probably if the author is publishing a book, I don't see why it can't cost $5. I think that's a terrific possibility. And then suddenly you can have a library of 50,000 books and we'd all earn money. Plus there's all these free books out there, which is going to hurt the reprint industry. Dover books is probably sunk right now. Their books -- I love Dover books. I used to buy them all the time.
They're 30 bucks now for trade paperback. And the book is available on Google Books for free. So what's this going to do to reprints? The whole publishing industry has to rethink itself. On the other hand, there's been a lot of snobbery on the East Coast about the role of New York, Boston in American literature and American history.
The West Coast, far less snobbish. If things start moving over to the West Coast, that might be a good thing.
We've got a lot of possibilities here. I wanted to also say there's a couple of folks in the room who can't ask me questions because they've been giving me secret information that they're here to watch me carefully not divulge. My current project takes me away from
American politics, off into Arthur C. Clark and Larry Niven land with Halo, and I'll be writing the origin story. And I'm still trying to struggle around the first few chapters because when you write something about 100,000 years ago that determines the entire history of the human race and the universe, gotta get it carefully. But they've been helping me out here. What I also discovered when I came to Halo a few years ago, rather to XBox, was that this model that I had wanted to do back in the mid-1990s was pretty much what XBox became.
It was all the talent brought to the northwest and taking over the entertainment industry.
How cool is that?
So you're not quite there. I mean, you've still got movies like Avatar whisking out a swift one and a half billion dollars, while the competition really is pretty light compared to the entertainment industry's going over to video gaming.
The vision I had of video gaming back in those days was a little more abstruse. I wanted more women to play video games. I said we should create Prusland. Of course, this other thing, Sims picked up on that, and a lot of women play the Sims or Myst. I'm not sure what the breakdown is for a low or the first person shooter games or zombie games,

but it's actually getting more and more women are playing these games. That worries me to some extent.
I'm just wondering where they're going to get dates, the women, that is. But it's all cool stuff and the technology is utterly fascinating and I'm having to develop the fun skills to write these books.
Got time for a couple more questions are or we good? Questions about anything having to do -- here's my areas of expertise: When I was a kid, I loved Star Trek. I loved special effects and motion pictures. I loved comic books. I loved science fiction. I loved fancy, and I loved HP Low Craft and HORROR. I was the one in my class that loved that stuff and it now dominates the entire industry.
So I'm not sure that my positive influence helped things any. But it's been my pleasure over the years to be sort of a southern California boy getting insights into all of these areas by meeting the people. Everyone from Ray Harryhausen to Ray Bradbury and then coming up here and being asked to put together the science fiction museum, using all that expertise. Anything about science fiction or imaginative literature that you're curious about.
>>: I've been a sci fi fan for basically forever. It's interesting to me, the tenor of sci fi has shifted from really pie in the sky, extremely hopeful to space alpha to whatever, to then to
Star Trek, which was exploratory, and then Prophecy. Now the stuff we're starting to see come out now has a much darker realist tone, it seems. And I wonder what you see, is sci fi still an escapist hatch, or is it starting to tie into the fact we've got a complicated world that we're living?
>> Greg Bear: Brave New World 1928, 1929, pretty dark. H.G. Wells "Food of the Gods" pretty dark. "Island of Dr. Marrreau" very dark and bordering on sadomasochistic horror.
And even Arthur C. Clark, some of his visions turn out to be kind of strange like
"Childhood Zen" really a strange ending, are these humans anymore? Phillip K. Dick.
God, who am I? You know? And how am I like Frans Kalfka. I'm not because I'm an
American. But what's going on here? What is memory? What is self? All these questions came up in the 1950s through the 1940s, we had a positive take in Astounding
Magazine, but there were a lot of socially critical stories being published back then, too.
I remember in Analog, in 1963, a story called by Rick Rafael, I'm going to -- Code Three, which was about America. Apparently without a fuel problem, oil problem. With cars on the highways, these super highways, 100 lanes wide with cars that were 50 to 60 feet

long, could travel 60 to 300 miles an hour on these highways and the story is about the highway patrol that tries to keep you safe.
Now that's a cool idea. I'm still thinking of that. How is that not a Michael Mann movie or something like that?
But that's critical. So even astounding in Analog, frequently put out these ideas that are critical. We still do that to today. What we're noticing is a lot of this is dark fantasy with a lot of psychologically questionable elements to it such as, oh, serial killers are such romantic people.
Vampires, oh, they're so sweet really underneath and all they do is suck pigs dry. They have all these mollified pigs laying around. It's not a pretty sight when you're near a vampire village. What does it smell like? Baum Stoker knew what it smelled like. The only reason women would date Dracula is because he's very rich. How does he get rich.
He walks around finding fairy gold. And how is this not an investment banker. So investment bankers are vampires aren't they? It's very, very clear.
But we've always had back and forth on that. And if you want to read dark stuff, gotta go back to the 1970s. Some of the darkest science fiction ever written was written back in the 1960s and '70s by people like Michael Morecock. It's really dark stuff. And it was real science fiction. It wasn't just zombies and so on. Zombies. I don't know. Yes.
>>: You have any opinion on Space Elevators?
>> Greg Bear: Cool idea. It's a cool idea. Again, that's where nanotechnology really has to come along. We need that molecular monofilament structure. Nano tubes, carbon fibers, all this stuff are possibilities. But you need a sheer ratio to get into orbit across your molecular bonds. You also need -- Robert Forward had designs for survivable knitting strategies, core strategies, how you would knit your long tubes into things that would survive a nick. And I think some of that has been patented and there's progress there, and we've had competitions from various northwest geniuses where they've taken advantage of some of these space elevator competitions. So I like that. It's an interesting idea. It's a visionary idea that makes you think impossible thoughts and I like that.
>>: Any thoughts on some of the developments recently in brain imaging, the ability to have a lie detector that's effectively 100 percent accurate and brain reading, so forth?

>> Greg Bear: Homeland Security really wants this, along with facial identification software that can pick a face out in the crowd that has dire thoughts. And I understand that makes their job easier. But on the other hand you've got all these cameras and you don't have that many people. We're not China. China has 60,000 people just watching download porn, but we don't do that here we only have three or 400. So watch it.
But could you do it? We don't understand how the brain works. We do understand how certain individuals can function in certain ways. Brain imaging is really still more of an art form, just like lie detector tests are.
And you can pass by training your brain differently. So if we had brain imaging software that worked, and no doubt the terrorists would come along and say think kind thoughts about pussy cats think of wall cats as you're walking through the airport. And you have these happy brain images going through. That would worry Homeland Security. Wait a minute, they're all happy and thinking about wall cats.
Didn't we see it in Village of the Damned, where in the end he's surrounded by creepy blond children trying to read his thoughts. And all he comes up with is a brick wall. Think what he could have done if he could have wall cats instead of a brick wall. Great fun. I think again it's an interesting problem. But we are trying to find easy solutions to really complex social issues. And I think the money spent on this kind of research could perhaps equally be spent on trying to educate and uplift the societies that are causing us these problems. Basically they're poorly educated. Their opportunities are very, very poor. They're very patriarchal. And so someone like a Greg Mortonson really has a really good solution and finally the military is paying attention to it and they're co-venturing, which I think is fabulous which is to build schools and educate women.
When you do that, terrorism starts to go away. Maybe we can stop them before they get here. Yes, sir.
>>: So you talked a lot about the changes in society and these two books on Quantico.
A lot of your consulting work is well served, plays into this. The ongoing tug of war between security and privacy and the diametrically opposed opinions that continually surface. Do you touch on any of this? Or what are your thoughts around that?
>> Greg Bear: In the book, certainly. This notion of security and freedom. Not necessarily working together. That's why I think some of our best libertarian groups still have great functions to perform which is they're always screaming about lack of freedom.
And we need that. We need irrational concerns about freedom to keep us from going

over to the dark side of, oh, I'm safe and I'm surrounded by a bunker; I can't move. But their bunker has cameras. So it's still a fight we have to fight.
In terms of protecting us, seeing a Homeland security from the inside, I have to disagree with a lot of people who say they're all incompetents and they all want to take over and they all want to destroy our freedoms, that's not true at all. These guys are really hardworking. They make mistakes they have to because their job is impossible. And
TSA, cops on the highway, patrol cars, all this stuff, I never give them guff. Why? Their life is hard enough. Even if they're a little overbearing, put up with it. When did you last scream outloud in frustration in private?
They don't have much privacy when they're working. So a lot of these issues are about how we train, how we coordinate and not about technology. The technology may be useful at some point. Certainly the cameras are useful. I've got to say I don't have feel having CTV systems reduces my personal freedom. I'm not sure why. I don't feel the
Google Street View causes me great concern, but I could be wrong about that. There could be a point in which -- in "Queen of Angels" I have all of these cameras are available and all of the information is available and it's recorded but you have to have a court order if you're law enforcement to get access to it because it's a public enterprise. It's not a federally funded thing.
It's a public enterprise, and the court order allows you access to all this information. I think that's an interesting model. It's there. But you have to have a really good reason to narrow down. Of course our cameras now are in houses, in "Quantico" and "Mariposa," my law enforcement people have 6K cameras in their eyeglasses, your whole life is recorded. I've got to say having scanned all the photos I took with film cameras back through the 1980s and '90s, a lot of that stuff isn't really that interesting. So what are you going to watch?
>>: So on that topic, have you read David Friedman's "Transparency Society"?
Opposite of what you say, everybody needs a quarter of everything.
>> Greg Bear: I think his point of view is actually good. I agree with David. Anonymity is the problem. This notion I want to say whatever I want and still no one will know I said it.
It's nasty, really nasty. Twitter, all this stuff, if it's anonymous, I don't care to listen to it.
So society is basically, I think the society should say if your name isn't attached to it, no one reads it.
>>: You mentioned court orders. The man in charge of micro health products says in his life he's given off 15,000 health records under subpoena.

>> Greg Bear: Yeah. But, of course, that's under FISA and all this other stuff which has gotten dicy in the last 10 years. These things need to be refined, they need to be inspected by a nonconservative dominated court. We need to have public discourse about this that isn't traumatized by this historical being persuaded that we need to work against our own best interests to support some goal or another.
We have to go back to being true Americans, which is skeptical, searching for the truth, finding the truth, learning how to recognize the truth, not lying to each other, and working for common goals for the common good so that our kids can grow up with a visionary world to live in.
Yes, sir.
>>: If you were Steve Balmer, where would you have Microsoft focus its efforts in terms of the future?
>> Greg Bear: It will cost you. [laughter] over the years I've actually been kind of in and out of talking to all these people. Not Mr. Balmer, but I had dinner with Bill Gates and
Steven Hawking. That was really interesting. Nathan sent that up. We hang out occasionally with Rick Rashet and Terry Rashet and talk about all sorts of cool stuff.
Rick doesn't give me any secrets. But we talk theoretically about things.
And over the years I've realized that in the northwest our billionaires are among some of the best billionaires ever. I mean, they still can cause problems. But, nevertheless, I like them. They're nearly all science fiction fans. And that gives me hope. Now, I don't know about Mr. Balmer. I don't know whether he reads science fiction, but I know Paul does and Bill used to and Jeff certainly still does. Jeff started off like me being a treky. And so all this stuff I have hope because they read science fiction. I hope they're not reading zombie books now. But to Mr. Balmer, I would say, yeah, this corporation still is capable of changing the world.
But it can't do it safely. It can't do it on a two-year agenda. It has to think 10, 15, 20 years down the road some respects it is. This department is one of the most interesting parts of Microsoft. Microsoft Research, Rick actually bragged to me saying we're researching every single technology that was in Star Trek, he says. I'm wondering where you've got the matter transporter right now.
Where is your fly strip filter system there? But, yeah, there's a lot of cool stuff being done here. I would say look to Microsoft Research and to this international cooperation thing

where you're around the world providing very intelligent people access to funding, to encouragement and to working with Americans. By God, we need that. We need to get rid of this notion that immigration and crossing borders is a nastiness that's going to bring us down. Outsourcing jobs, yes, it can be a real problem. But on the other hand, you know, it's one world. In the science fiction community, it's always been one world. And as I look at India now, I'm getting messages from fans in India, science fiction fans, that remind me of the 1950s. They're trying to put together community and visionary things.
They come over here and stay what was science fiction like in the 1950s, because we're there. What do we do? Our spiritual influence is tremendous if we're not mired in the past. If we don't go back to all of our old hatreds and the philosophies of slaver culture and all that stuff that say suspicion, hatred, fear, that's how we get our political agenda going.
If we can avoid all that we can once again be a beacon light in the world, and I think the opportunity lies slumbering here at Microsoft and sometimes it breaks out into flame.
Any other questions? Well, thank you very much for listening. I appreciate it.
[applause]