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>> Kevin Schofield: Good afternoon. Welcome. I'm Kevin Schofield. I'm here to introduce and
welcome Greg Bear, a good friend of mine, and a good friend of Microsoft and Microsoft
Research, here to the Microsoft Research Visiting Speakers Series today.
Greg's here to discuss his latest novel, "Hull Zero Three." A starship hurdles through the
emptiness of space. Its destination unknown. Its purpose a mystery. One of its passengers
wakes up, finding himself naked, wet and freezing to death. The dark hulls of the ship are full of
monsters. And the man who has awoken has no memory of who he is, where the ship is going or
what happened. He will discover the answers if he can survive the ship.
Did I do that justice?
>> Greg Bear: Yeah.
>> Kevin Schofield: Okay.
>> Greg Bear: I'll let you know you can do the Brian ->> Kevin Schofield: How about if I sort of take this tone with the rest of the introduction. Greg
Bear is the author -- I feel like I'm doing William Shatner here.
>> Greg Bear: Do GI Joe.
>> Kevin Schofield: Greg Bear, author of more than 30 books of science fiction and fantasy
including "Blood Music," "The Forge of God" and "Quantico." Awarded two Hugos and five
Nebulas for his fiction. One of only two authors to win a Nebula in every category.
Greg's served on political and scientific action committees, has advised Microsoft, the U.S. Army,
CIA, Sandia National Laboratories Department of Homeland Security, and other agencies.
Please join me in welcoming Greg to Microsoft.
[applause]
>> Greg Bear: Appreciate it. Now you definitely have to use the GI Joe voice to read that.
This is kind of a banner month for me because we have "Hull Zero Three" out. And let me grab a
copy from back there, show that. For those who don't have your copies I might want to do a GI
Joe reading from it.
Now, they've done a nice job on this. This is getting very positive reviews. And a lot of people
are kind of reminding me that times have changed since I was a kid or even a young writer.
Nowadays, when you write a forward-looking science fiction book with lots of tech and scary stuff
in it and lots of speculation, it's retro. Only if you put zombies in it is it no longer retro, because
zombies are retro, too.
One of the reviewers came up and said this book is neo retro. I said, oh, because I'm writing like
Roger Zaladney [phonetic] and Philip K. Dick, doing a Robert Hinely and Arthur C. Clark book.
It's quite a mix-up here.
Of course with my background I go through all the stuff. This isn't the first giant starship book I've
done. There was a book 25 years ago called ""Eon"," heavily influenced by previous generation
starship novels. One way of thinking how you get out there, but a very expensive way to get out
there.
And certainly exciting when you spend 500 years, and the equivalent of Microsoft Research
"Aboard the Stone" and ""Eon"" creates an infinitely long corridor through space and time that
opens into all alternate universes. That's just what you would do if you have 500 years to putter
around, no doubt.
In this one we're dealing with a more, kind of down-to-earth economic picture. This is a starship
unlike any we've seen before. So that's part of the mystery as the character wakes up is, he's got
some memory of what this thing should be. But it's the memory he will have when he's arriving.
It's not the memory you have in the long periods when you're traveling between the stars,
because without too many spoilers here in that time period you are not alive. You're not even
frozen. Your memory says you're frozen. But in fact you're created out of seed stock, basically,
when you arrive to save all the energy required of this because nearly all of the energy of going to
the stars is going to be getting there.
And a long, long time ago, and this is where we'll start asking questions, stuff I should have put in
the book as diagrams and equations, a long time ago in 1969, I think it was, one of my astronomy
professors said we're never going to get to the stars because to go to any appreciable speed,
you're going to have to have a reaction mask compared to your delivery mask that will be
horrendous, like a trillion times more, just by the rocket equations.
Rocket equations are pretty solid stuff. And the whole Enterprise Starship thing, how much
antimatter would you need, well, you'd need billions of tons of it to get the Enterprise on impulse
drive up to near light speed. So it's always been we've always kind of finessed that. And in this
book I said let's not finesse this. Let's find a way to do it. So what we have is we went out to the
Orc cloud and strapped a budding moderately far future, two or 300 years down the road, building
engine, engineering engine on to this moonlit, send it off to the stars because the moonlit has all
the reaction mass necessary given the differential between the moonlit, say 150 kilometers
across of dirty water ice and ammonia and everything else, and the mass of the ship which is
sufficiently large to be impressive by itself.
So you have three hulls, each of them, about 10 kilometers to 12 kilometers long, all coming
together at the end to form a final spaceship at the end. Once it's been delivered, it drops its yolk
sac, fully primed, highly educated, highly motivated, totally gung ho version of Heinlein-type
starship troopers. But, of course, they don't realize that it's pretty much all made up. Why?
Because they need to be psychologically prepared.
I don't think we've ever considered the loneliness of being in a small tin can moving between the
planets or the stars for two years. That and your separation from the earth and your separation
from the ecosystem, it's just an extraordinary tough problem.
Of course not to mention the weightlessness which you could solve. We solved it, but NASA isn't
thinking of solving it the way the science fiction writers or Benford or myself have solved it over
the years. A lot of thinkers like Verner von Braun [phonetic].
They come back, gel in my mind, how would you do this. And, of course, how do you tell a
nighmarishly good story using all the tropes we've picked up from all the classic science fiction
we've all read. That was my idea. So maybe it's neo retro. For me it's just, I think, a really fun
story in which we're trying to do both hard science fiction and hard economic fiction in both the
fuel delivery system, the starship design, the psychology of the culture and everything else. Also
remember these ships would be extraordinarily expensive to the culture of the solar system, the
economics of the solar system. How many of them will you be able to launch? It's all new. How
many will be testbeds? How many will succeed? They're like flinging out, of course, seeds out
into space. And that's very expensive for the plant that does it.
So they're going to want to be able to do things when you arrive that will meet with almost any
conceivable situation. And that's where the nightmares begin on this ship is biology, ecology, the
way nature works is the way this ship works. And we have many, many tools at our disposal
onboard this ship that don't quite mesh with the glowing bane book Heinlein vision of our noble
starship travelers arriving at a beautiful earth planet, which is what we begin with.
I think I'll read that to you. Then we'll dip off into where we are. I don't use the GI Joe voice for
this one.
"Cloud modest, the planet covers herself.
Our chosen is perfect–more than we could have hoped for. Rolling beneath, she slips aside her
creamy white veil to reveal the sensuous richness of blue water, brown and tan prairies, yellow
desert, a wrinkled youth of gray mountains hemmed by forest so green it is almost black–and the
brilliant emerald sward of spring pastures.
Impossibly rich.
My flesh is partner to the long journey. Like a hovering angel, I look down upon the dazzling
surface and yearn. All the springs of my youth flow toward this new Earth. A long limb of dawn in
the east–how lovely! Our world turns wisely widdershins–the best of luck. There are two moons,
one close in, the second much farther out and large enough for icy mountains under a thin
atmosphere. We will explore that other promise once we are established here.
We–dozens of us, so many gathering in the observation blister, finally bathing in real light! There
is sweet joy in voices from real lungs and tongues and lips–and such language! Ship language
and Dreamtime-speak all musically mixed. So many friends and more to come. Our laughter is
giddy.
We want to spread and lock limbs. We want to couple. We are eager to meet children as yet
unconceived–eager to hurry them along so they can share this beauty with proud parents.
We!
Kinetic, no longer pent up or potential… The long centuries over.
We!
We are here!
Planters and seedships have descended before we came awake. They have analyzed and
returned with the facts. Our chemistry now matches this world's.
Fons et origo.
Fountainhead.
I don't remember the name we've chosen, it's on the tip of my tongue–not that it matters. I'm sure
it is a beautiful name.
We form teams, holding hands in waving, weightless lines in the blister, calling to each other
using our Dreamtime names and smiling until our cheeks sting. We make awful, funny faces, like
clowns, to smooth and relax the muscles of our joy. Soon we will choose new names: Land
names, sea names, air names, poetically spun from the old.
My new name is on the tip of my tongue–
Hers is on the tip of my tongue. She is nearby, and I find myself strangely embarrassed to meet in
person for the first time, because I have known her for all the sleepy ages. We played and
learned together in the Dreamtime and resolved our earliest disputes. Making up, we realized we
were incapable of being angry with each other for long. She is a master of ship's biology–myself,
training and culture. Long, lazy times of instruction and play and exploration shot through with
intense training, keeping our muscles fit. There is no experience like it, except for coming awake
and meeting in the flesh.
The world, the flesh.
Our lines move toward the chrome-silver gate in the translucent white bulkhead. We are moving
into the staging area. Landers await us there, sleek shadows ghostly gray.
Our beautiful Ship is too large to land–twelve kilometers long, huge and lonely. Once she
embraced an irregular ball of rocky ice over a hundred kilometers in diameter–the shield and yolk
of our interstellar journey. She still clutches a wasted chunk of the Oort moonlet–just a few billion
tons. We decelerated with fuel to spare and now orbit the prime candidate.
How long?
The years are spread out cold and quiet behind us, the long tail of our journey. We do not
remember those years intimately, there were so many.
How many?
It doesn't matter. I will look at the log when there is time, after the teams are chosen to make our
first journey to the planet's surface.
Our new names are called and we arrange ourselves in the loading bay, ceremonial outfits like so
many brilliant daubs of paint, the better to see and be seen.
She is here! Comely in blue and beige and green, her look is bold, confident. Large, deep eyes
and wide cheeks, brownish hair cut short–her look my way is a loving, thrilling challenge. She sits
away from the others in the lander, by a spare seat–hoping that I will join her. She and I will be on
the first team!
We.
I recognize so many from the Dreamtime. Friendly, joyous–hugging, shaking hands,
congratulating. Words spill. Our tongues are still clumsy but our passions are ancient. We are
more than any family could be. We fought and argued and loved and learned through the long
cold voyage. We chose teams, disbanded, reformed, chose again, and now the fit is perfection
within diversity. Nothing can stand between us and the joy of planetfall.
A smooth jolt of perfectly designed machinery–
Severing connections with Ship. The lander is less than a hundred meters long, a tiny thing,
really, yet sleek and fresh.
Time is moving so fast.
I unhitch and push off my harness to be closer to her. She scolds but she wraps her arms around
me and the web accommodates, the net stretches. We laugh to see so many others have done
the same.
Viewing Ship from outside, along her great length, we marvel at her condition, weathered yet
intact. Noble, protecting–
Ship, combined from an early formation of three hulls, now resembles two ancient stupas joined
at their bases. Designed to protect against the hard wind between the stars, streamers of plasma
convection once flowed and glowed ahead of and around the hulls like foggy gold rivers, ferrying
interstellar dust–icy, glassy, metallic–aft, where it was processed into fuel or forged to replace
Ship's ablated outer layers.
Now, the last of the plasma feebly glows around the pinched middle, a vestigial beacon. The view
distracts us only for a moment. We are lost in simple wonder. One out of a hundred ships, we
were told, would survive. And yet we have made the longest journey in the history of humanity,
we are alive, and
WE ARE HERE.
A jerk and awful sound, like water rushing, or blood spurting. Everything's dark and muddled. A
little redness creeps into my vision. I'm surrounded by thick liquid. My legs and arms thrash out
against a smoothness.
Have we crashed? Did we break up in space before we landed? I'm already losing bits and
pieces of what all that means. My memory is becoming like a puzzle picked up and shaken apart.
Puzzle. Jigsaw puzzle.
All wrong!
My entire body hurts."
So we get a little bit of a jerk up there, as the propaganda passes away. So if you go down to
Fremont, see the Lenin statue, you'll know what we're talking about. The forward shaking
starship traveller. That's what you put into the minds of the children you send out there because
it's nice. They need that sort of strength but not when it goes wrong.
So that's "Hull Zero Three." Now I started writing science fiction when I was nine years old, and
reading science fiction shortly before that, and started off with reading Tom Swift books. And the
real first science fiction book was Robert Heinline book, "Red Planet" grew up reading the
"Juveniles," everything else I could get my hands on. By the time I was nine years old I was
reading everything from Leon Uris to "The Last Babylon," to whatever was available. Big, thick
paperbacks, really, approached my height of perfection. If it was that thick, I loved it. I just loved
it. And there were very few big, thick science fiction books like that, but there were lots of little,
skinny science fiction books, 60,000, 70,000 words, because that's what Doubleday would
publish. They didn't really want 120,000 words. That is until Tolkien came along. And they really
loved big, thick books. That's when the big thick fantasy started coming out, about 12 years later
was their heyday. So I really grew up reading those short books, books by my father-in-law, Paul
Anderson, like the "High Crusade" or "Tau Zero", all these wonderful science fiction books,
anywhere from 50 to 75,000 words. Many of which are now considered great classics today.
Phillip K. Dick tended to write at that length or short stories. Ray Bradbury, the same, the few
novels that he actually wrote tended to be shorter. So they were 60,000 words long, 75,000 tops.
So as the publishing world changes, I thought let's go back to that model. We actually have
electronic editions people want to b e able to read on an airplane ride. That's kind of the
equivalent of what paperback started out to be. So let's go back to that classic day. Science
fiction supposedly has worked best at the medium length or the novella length. And that's the
greatest challenge of all. Why not sit down and do it? Now I am. I am writing books mostly in
the 75 to 85,000 word range and having a ball doing it. It's not easy. They do take a little less
time to prepare but they're also incredibly hard to make work. Because the shorter the space, the
less you can sprawl, the more you have to condense.
And in a science fiction story, when you're creating a future world, you should be able to sprawl,
because you're creating the culture, and everything else. Now we have to do that in shorthand.
Fortunately, we have an audience that's fully prepared. They've got all of the means in their head
to understand science fiction because they were raised on it. 20-year-olds today know more
about science fiction than 50-year-olds did in 1968. Back in 1968 I could walk around my high
school, maybe one in 50 people would know what warp drive was or even care what a robot was.
They're not really on the edge of anticipating we're going to land on the moon. Well, I was totally
there. And along the way everything that I thought we needed eventually came along, and it
started to replace and challenge us. As writers, as science fiction writers, it's all out there.
Electronic publishing caught publishing totally unprepared. Well, I had been anticipating it at least
since the 1980s. I have a device called the slate in "Eon" which serves much of the function of a
cell phone and iPad and all that stuff we have today. I was looking forward to it, lo and behold
turns out there's a lot of problems associated with this that still continue to challenge us. So I'm
not able to retire early, I'm afraid to say. And along the way, because I was a southern California
boy, I really grew up in a media-rich world. I was a big fan of motion pictures of all different sorts.
There weren't that many science fiction motion pictures, certainly not that many science fiction TV
shows back in the '60s. I would read TV Guide magazine to find out what the new science fiction
show was. More typically it was something like "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea" or "Lost in
Space." Then along came Star Trek. And, bang, I was part of that generation that got all
starry-eyed because this was a starship hard to draw. On a tiny TV screen you try to figure out
what the damned Enterprise looks like, as the picture is fading in and I'm sketching it in my
15-year-old sketchbook and trying to figure out. And finally I manage to get it all after watching a
few shows. Then I realize the writing is also good. So some of this writing is pretty darned good.
I start memorizing names. Go to my first World Science Fiction Convention in 1968. There's
Dorothy Fontana and Gene Rodenbury and suddenly the whole science fiction world changes
because Spock has brought in all the women. Believe me, Big Bang Theory is absolutely correct.
Back in 1968 all the women wanted to help Spock with his problem. By the 1970s they were
writing romantic fiction involving their solution to that problem. That takes us off to a whole new
area of slash victim and all that stuff. What
I saw going on in the science fiction community is now basically what we see in the whole
Internet community. Fansenses used to have what we flame wars. People would get up totally
trash each other in the letter column. Three weeks later you'd get angry. If your copy of that
magazine arrived. And the whole thing was the Fansene flame wars could go for years and be
immensely entertaining to all the people on the sidelines and very aggravating as you waited with
gritted teeth for three weeks for the next issue to arrive. When the Internet arrived, that happens
now in microseconds. The whole thing is totally condensed and heated up and all the lubrication
is taken out of the gears and we get a really strange world, which Mr. Heinline would have
described as the crazy years, except he put them back in the 1970s and that's probably true, too.
We hit the crazy years every 20 years or so. Maybe every two years. I'm not sure which. We're
definitely in the crazy years now.
I think if we look back to the 1950s, Robert Heinlein, or the 1940s, Robert Heinlein, his view of
what's going on now would be it's just like California politics in the 1930s. Upton Sinclair the
leftists and rightists, anti-immigration fervor, the KKK. How do things change? They don't really.
The United States has moved forward, yet we're not in the future yet. We have not surpassed all
of those ignorances of the past. In fact, they keep creeping up and becoming entire news
channels.
So what Charles Coglin [phonetic] was doing to us by radio in the 1930s is spread out over at
least a daily audience of at least 1/50th of what the major news works used to get in the 1960s,
two or three million to five million people. Imagine the time when the 70th percentile was
achievable by ABC, CBS or NBC. You know what did that? A show about vampires. You
remember the Las Vegas vampire story? Richard Matheson's tale. What was the name of that?
>>: "Dark Shadows."
>> Greg Bear: "Dark Shadows" was the serial which did quite well. The one-time movie thing,
with Darin McGavin.
>>: "Nightstalker."
>> Greg Bear: "Nightstalker." That actually got a 60th percentile one night. Totally blowing away
the entire network. Wait a minute, this is a dumb show about vampires. 60 percentile, did well
for the future. If they had done zombies, it would have all been over by now.
We really are, in terms of science fiction, living in interesting times. Because in New York now,
you better be writing zombies or young adult, or vampire -- or young adult vampire zombies,
because the rest of it is very tough to sell. Whereas, on the West Coast science fiction is huge, if
you're trying to sell motion pictures. That brings me back to this next step here.
As a kid, I would drive up to Los Angeles, high school kid, late high school, college, and visit
Forrey Ackerman's [phonetic] house in Los Angeles and get to hang out with people like Ray
Harihouson [phonetic] and various other people who were similarly like-minded. A lot of Forrey's
visitors were people like Stephen Spielberg and George Lucas. I don't know if Lucas actually
went to Forrey's house. But he certainly read Spaceman magazine and Famous Monsters and
all that stuff. We all did. They were the source of material because you couldn't actually see
most of these movies on TV. There were no DVDs, no VHS tapes. It was an ignorant dark time.
We'd have to go up to Forrey's house to watch rare films. Or go watch King Kong because it was
cut on TV. We all hankered after, gosh, supposedly there's 20 minutes cut out of "Metropolis,"
his favorite movie. And 20 minutes gone since they distributed it in America. No one's ever
found it. Guess what? It just came out. The 20 minutes are back. Forrey is gone, too. What he
saw in the 1920s we can finally see today, perhaps not as clearly as he saw it when he was a kid.
So there's all this wonderful flux of material of text and cinema and media.
And then the gaming industry comes along. I remember back in 1993, I think it was. Nathan
Merevold sponsored a thing here at Microsoft, probably over that way, the old building, Building 9,
was it? And Nathan got a bunch of writers together and said: What's the future of fiction going to
be? And after we all fumfaued around, he picked out a couple more for further interviews trying
to pick our brains and after about 1994 suddenly I said I know what it is. It's going to be franchise
fiction. It's going to be established stories much like we see with Star Wars and Star Trek at this
point, and you'll be allowed to write in them as a fan and create a workaround with them and do
this and that. And it's going to be interactive to a great extent. Of course, the franchise owners
will keep control of things and judge, but you may actually get paid something if you create
something that's useful to the overall fan base and this extended universe.
Guess what? It's here. And it's not only at Varol's [phonetic]. It's at the Mongoliad [phonetic],
doing this sort of thing now on a regular basis. I don't know if you've seen the Mongoliad, that's
Neil Stephenson and me and a bunch of our friends getting together having a heck of a good time
writing a serialized historical novel set in the 13th century. And along the way we created this
new model, this newer model of publishing, where you subscribe, pay a $10 fee per year. You
get your material delivered to your iPad, your iPhone and soon-to-be Kindle or computer, read it
on a basis like Charles Dickens sent out little bits of stuff in magazines or science fiction novels,
serialized at one point on a regular basis. So all of that is coming, flowing in. I've never been
busier in my entire life, because, A, I love movies. I love television. I love books. I love the
gaming world. Bang, guess what I'm doing? I'm doing books, working on motion pictures. I'm
working on television shows. I'm working with gaming people to do things like this. This is the
first "Forerunner" book. Kevin just brought this by. And this is a copy I don't even have yet,
which shows you how special writers are. We're doing the history of the beginning of the Halo
Universe, the Forerunners, this is the first of the "Forerunner" trilogy. Actually writing a kind of
book that Arthur C. Clark would like to read, going back 100,000 years. Classic science fiction,
being allowed to play in the Halo universe. That will be out this January. January 4th. So there's
that. There's Mongoliad, which I'm working on. I just edit chapters every week. We put them up
there. It's like working on a television show because you've got a regular delivery system and six
writers and you've got to bring it up to speed and get the chapters out there looking and reading
kind of similar in style.
And Neil and I do that. And my son is working on that as a chapter writer. And we've got Mark
Chapel working on that also, and then I get to go over, both my son and I, but also to work with
the 343 people and work on Halo and kind of get involved in the deep, dark secrets that give you
a little book that's so individual that if you try and put it on eBay they hunt you down and shoot
you.
And all this great stuff going on. As if that weren't enough, I'm trying to become a hot, young
screenwriter. Now, that scares my agent, who is also kind of my partner down in Los Angeles,
Vince Gerardo. He's actually managed to put together seven or eight television shows. I think he
recently sold "In Constant Moon" as a TV show. How many of you know that Larry Nevins story?
It's a classic story, because everyone's partying out in the backyard in California one night and
suddenly the equivalent of Larry looks up at the sky and, wait, the moon's getting very, very
bright. Whoa, it's almost blinding. Do you know what that means? It means the sun's gone
Nova. How many hours have we got to live? Now that's a cool idea for a story, but it's actually a
pretty intriguing idea for how many hours have we got to live until dawn? So I don't know how
they're going to do it, but I'm looking forward to George Martin's "King" series is coming out on
HBO. And that's produced by Vince.
So he and I are working on another pilot, which I'm calling -- we're calling "Opposites," kind of a
superhero show, with a very large twist to it. And so I actually decided since they couldn't get "A"
list screenwriters to write this damn thing. By God, I'll sit down and do it. I've written screenplays
before. I didn't realize it took me to the age of 59 to nail it. This is a really good screenplay. So
at 59 I'm suddenly a hot, young screenwriter.
I expect to change my attire. I'll get the gray jacket and the black turtleneck, and I'll go into
storied meetings and I love that down there, I love that whole thing.
"Forage of God," "Anvil of Stars" is going around yet again. The last seven years we've been
trying to get it going. We have a great screenplay from Ken Nolan, who is the author of
"Blackhawk Down," the screenplay version. Oscar nominee. Did a wonderful job. "Anvil of
Stars" is our focus now. We may have a director signed up for it. But we never know. You've
got to have incredible stamina. As you guys understand working a day job like here, sometimes
the dreamiest projects just come and go every day and you have to rock with that and move on
and come up with something else. That's what we're doing.
So as to which is going to occupy my time more in the next few years, the Mongoliad, book
writing, television shows, gaming, who knows. All I know is being busier than I've ever been
before, I'm actually having a heck of a lot of fun. And it's keeping many, many wrinkles on my
brain.
So here's the question I have of you: You have the rocket equations on your iPhones, right? I'm
sorry, your Windows phones. [laughter]
None of you here have iPhones, I'm willing to bet. Okay. You have your rocket equations there.
If you have a spaceship with a mass of, say, 35 aircraft carriers, which is, what, 125,000 tons
times 35, let's figure out that these ships altogether would equal that roughly.
How much reaction mass will you need to approach 20 percent of the speed of light in, say, 50
years? Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, and you cannot answer in the form of a question. Yes, sir.
>>: I have a question. What's the specific impulse that ->> Greg Bear: If you want to get up there, it's going to be near the speed of light. So you've got
a plasma drive or equivalent, high tech equivalent of. Near light speed for ejecta. And you're
probably sending out hydrogen nuclei, protons, neutrons, that sort of thing.
And maybe some electrons. Maybe some neutrinos. Although I doubt that gives you a big boost.
Unless we know more about neutrinos in the future, which is possible, because I call it a bozomic
drive. So let's assume neutrons and protons but near the speed of light. He's already working on
it, so...
Oh, man. I'm very disappointed. When I did this at Google asking them how many volumes
would it take to fill a universal library, they had it that fast.
[laughter].
It was a number that was longer than anyone could speak in an entire lifetime, but that's another
problem.
>>: They made it up.
>> Greg Bear: Yeah, of course they did. Then they looked at me hard and said: You know, we
deal with that every day. [laughter].
So how cool is this? We actually are living in the future. Now, all of you young people out there,
I'm sure you regard, oh, man, it's just a Measma of challenges. But looking back, I'm beginning
to realize how much America and the world repeats things over and over again, and how little
we've actually accomplished of the dreams of science fiction from the 1950s and '60s. Flying
cars -- well, everyone wanted those, but you know I've seen flying cars. I actually worked in a
museum that had them from the 1940s. You just strap wings on them.
And you could fly it around. And not quite like Back to the Future. So we've had flying cars. Jet
packs, they had them in 1963. What do you want? You know, everybody to have jet packs?
Well, okay. They're not cheap. And of course the fuel. So where are we, then? We're still
puttering along. We're still raising kids and teaching them to think large imaginative thoughts.
We're still self-critical.
We're still changing socially and, boy, sometimes that's really hard to change certain parts of our
American psyche. It always has been. All you have to do is watch John Adams to realize, oh, my
God, this is like Fox News was born in 1786. It was. It really was.
The whole controversy. So we've got to go with the flow. We've got to get done what we can get
done. And there's an awful lot of cool stuff that we've ignored. Like who pays any attention to the
space station? We've had a space station for years, and now -- and that's what Mr. Heinlein
would have said the public reaction was.
Don't know if you remember the opening of Destination Moon. 1950. George Powell production
based on a Heinlein script and short story. A bunch of engineers get together to persuade the
rich people of the planet that we need to control the high ground of space, otherwise the
Rooskies will be dropping rocks on our head. If we get out there first we've got to show them by
going to the moon in this atomic rocket. And the rich people say, oh, okay, now they're all 75 to
90 years old in the film, because that's -- to be a billionaire that's how old you have to get.
And I was waiting throughout the 1990s for all of our rich people to start building spaceships. And
it finally happened. You know, they read "Red Planet" and "Rocket Ship Galileo," too. So we got
Space Ship 1. We've got Elan Musk and Space Sex and rocket scientists all over. So that dream
is starting to come true.
The other one, of course, was the atomic spaceship which probably won't happen for a while.
Turned out that back in 1950, they showed that there would be a huge protest about having a
nuclear pyar flying over your head. So all the crowds go to the fence and shout at the fence but
they have to launch anyway. The private enterprise people defying the Vocks populi, which of
course is ignorant of science. Radiation is good for you, we all know.
I just love all of these visions and all the alterations of them, and so on. So nuclear power, space,
we've got that. We actually do have nuclear drives out there. What also are we looking at? Time
travel. Teleportation. Rick assures me he's working on it. I think you guys probably have things
you can't tell me.
I remember going to UW in the 1990s and with Gregory Benford, we went to a physics lab there
and looked way down into this penning trap, way down at the bottom of an infinitely deep well,
there was a blue dot, almost infinitesimally small, sitting there fluctuating a little bit. They said
that is a single barium atom. Whoa. How many human beings have ever seen a single atom?
You know, there's got to be a top percentile. If I can't be the smartest person in the world, I can
be one of the people who saw a single atom. There's all this awe, wonder going around us.
Biology grabbed me and still does. I think biology is one of the most amazing areas. When I
wrote Darwin's Radio and Darwin's Children I was messing with the biological themes and having
great fun with those, and guess what, Darwin's Radio is still as far as the deep science goes,
99 percent accurate.
We're still following up on the theories that I was reading in science papers that everyone else
was ignoring back then. It wasn't necessarily that I invented all this stuff, I just put two and two
together based on what the scientists had already found. And that's kind of how science fiction
has always worked. My goal was, very envious as I was of Heinlein and Clark and Bradbury and
all the people who inspired the space race, I wanted to inspire the biologists, almost got there. I
think it's sort of an underground now. Certainly a microbiology and virology that group is there.
The evolutionary theory will never change, except it has.
Nowadays we call all of the things I was talking about, punctuated equilibrium, the whole notion of
that idea, has now become temporary change. I forget what the exact term for it is. The species
actually do have a toolbox that they can access to make temporary changes.
Oh, that wasn't allowed back in the 20th century. So we're making progress. So that's everything
that's going on, past, present and future. Any questions? [laughter].
>>: I have a question.
>> Greg Bear: Sure.
>>: I saw [inaudible] and they got pretty amazing ideas like I came to know that [inaudible] some
of the ideas that actually have been taken by NASA and they implemented, they succeeded in
that.
>> Greg Bear: Sure.
>>: Is that something actually true, actually how -- the ideas that are actually getting you through
the [inaudible] implementation [inaudible].
>> Greg Bear: It's hard to know. When you talk to people in the Homeland security, they don't
tell you whether they'll listen to you or not. That's true of the U.S. Army and everything else, and
true of Microsoft, too, for that matter.
>>: We couldn't hear it back here.
>> Greg Bear: Oh, repeat the question. Watching Star Trek TV show, you see a lot of things that
end up being utilized by NASA and seem to be part of our modern culture today. The common
one, of course, would be the communicator, which is like a flip phone today.
Yeah, I think you do see that. Science fiction actually isn't in the area of making inventions or of
prophesying things. It's in the area of social criticism that we're most efficient. We take possible
social trends and then we show the social reaction or the individual reaction to them. And people
as supposedly low tech as Phillip K. Dick and Ray Bradbury were masters of this. Bradbury
comes along and shows you virtual reality in the belt. And kids in a big four-walled 3-D
environment that smells like an African velt with lions that get alarmingly real. Emphasize the
psychology of the children. That and Arthur C. Clark and City and the Stars, the first chapter
begins in a video game. This is a billion years in the future. Yes, we do have video games now.
Took a little sooner than maybe Arthur was hoping. But there's this whole video game structure,
computer game structure, three dimensional. Total immersion type stuff. We haven't got that far.
Maybe we will before a billion years gets closer. Did Arthur invent the video game, in passing, as
well as various aspects of space travel? I think so. I don't think there's much more before that.
We get to virtual reality in the '70s, people like John Varlay moving on to what becomes famous
when William Gibson gives it a name, that sort of stuff.
So we have done that or inventing cell phones or pads or whatever. All of these things. We can
take some credit for. Water bed. Heinlein did actually invent the waterbed, I think, and of course
Arthur Clark did the communications satellite. They didn't patent either of them.
So, yeah, sometimes, but mostly we're here not to predict, because we're terrible at that, you take
a look at our track record for every single hit there's a million things that we didn't get.
Personal computers is one of the most famous ones. We didn't actually pin that down. Of
course, unless if you consider the portable pad that I had in the early 1970s, being carried 100
years from now.
Yeah. And other questions?
>>: You started writing when you were nine, I imagine, using pen and paper.
>> Greg Bear: Typewriter, actually.
>>: Or typewriter. Do you think there is new technology that's going to help nine-year-old authors
to get started on that path of being serious writers, or do you see it more hurting their ability of
becoming authors?
I think if you want to become an author, the Web is an amazing resource. Dictionaries and
Encyclopedias are basically passe now. The kind of research I do by going to a library I can now
do on a search engine, any search engine, they're all marvelous, and can find books that have
been out of print at Harvard. Do you have to go to Harvard? No, just pluck it down as a PDF and
read it.
As far as research goes, it's all changed. Really it's changed. The mapping systems you can get
on computers today let me go all over the world to find out what a city looks like today when I
want to know what it looked like in the 13th century, or Kiev. We're doing Kiev now. There's
Kiev, Dnieper River, same flow, pretty much unchanged.
And then I want to fiend out what was the weather like in 1241. Well, oak ring structures indicate
it was a very wet year. This I find in a Polish scientific paper that just pops up.
So we've got lots of floods in 1241. How could I do that in a library? Even with expert librarian
help, we don't have the random element of stuff popping up that you didn't expect.
Infinite numbers of things, if you just go down in 10 minutes through all the thousands of pages,
suddenly you've got, wait a minute, but you need the instinct to do that.
Now, that's the thing that we need to teach. We actually need to teach children how to use these
resources, how to filter them, how to figure out when someone's trying to sell you a line, and
whether or not you should pay any attention to that line, because sometimes the websites that
are selling you a line also have valuable information.
Big challenge. Yeah.
>>: How long does it take when you're writing, takes a fair bit of focus, do you think the downside
to access to all this information, is that how -- I would think a younger writer today would have a
harder time getting to the point where they know enough to then get sort of focused and actually
do the work, the distraction.
>> Greg Bear: The older you get, you have a severe advantage. Although I've seen younger
writers doing really good work.
So I was a member of the television generation. So I could always sneak off and watch Saturday
morning cartoons instead of writing. But somehow I did it anyway. If you're obsessive, you're
going to do it. My daughter right now, at age 20, 21, is writing her second novel. Thousand
words a day. Every day, unless, you know, there's a distraction going on, which is rare. She
gets -- so by the end of the year she's going to have a 360,000-word novel. She doesn't think so.
But I've never known women writers who could write short reliably. So how is that for sexism?
Yeah, it is always -- and the problem of getting into writing, how many of you write on your own
out there? All different sorts of stuff, besides code, which is plot beyond compare. I mean,
you've got to make this plot work.
You can have no Lukuni, you can have no locked room mysteries going on here. What's a locked
room mystery called when you're doing code? I don't know. But I don't want to encounter one in
my program.
So focusing on that is really interesting, especially if you're working a full-time job which most
people are nowadays, most writers are. For the last 35 years I've been unemployed, which has
been a real benefit to me. Actually, it's almost 40 years now. I haven't had a job, a steady job in
35, 40 years. Oh well.
>>: You think you might revisit the previous universes you created.
>> Greg Bear: Probably very likely.
>>: [inaudible].
>> Greg Bear: The question was very likely. Am I ever going to go back and revisit any of my
older universes, "Queen of Angels", "Slant," I actually did that with "Quantico" and "Mariposa," by
going back to the prehistory of "Queen of Angels", when I realized that the politics I'd set up in
"Queen of Angels" and "Slant" was pretty much the politics we were heading into now.
So I wrote these near present-day thrillers, and suddenly started putting in thinkers and artificial
intelligences, which will lead up to what's going on in "Queen of Angels". And a little bit of
nanotechnology, too. So the early versions of this, and yet in my experience, modern day
science fiction is actually -- instead of being all inclusive has broken down into sections and
people say, oh, that's not science fiction, that's a techno thriller.
When I was a kid in analog, they published techno thrillers. You know? They had the high speed
jets breaking down over the North Pole and having to be rescued. No, that's a Tom Clancy novel.
So I think I'm just old school science fiction, which means I do all of this stuff and have fun doing
it. And sometimes I manage to play tricks on people. And when they say this isn't science fiction
I say, ah, take a look at this, where are we heading here? They said I don't care. No vampires,
no zombies, back to square one.
>>: What do you think happened? As far as I can tell, in the '90s there was a lot of, and early
2000s, a lot of directors styled nano stories now there's very little nano of that style going on.
There's still -- did the biology kind of subsume that?
>> Greg Bear: That's what I figured would happen. I knew Eric Drexler back when he was
working on this stuff. And thought it was visionary and wonderful. I said biology is going to beat it
up. It's already there. Protein molecules already in nano machines. What they wanted was
something you couldn't decay, something where you could live forever. Basically up load to a
giant crystalline star and be there solving astronomical problems I suppose for the rest of time, or
living in virtual worlds where sex is easy which for a nerd is really important.
I love big bang theory for that reason. It's 110 percent true. And they've left a few characters out
who are a little too unpleasant to deal with, though.
So the whole point of nanotechnology is now in biology. We're doing things with biology, you
know, like making babies. That's a self-replicating nano machine. So the obvious, of course -whether we go back to that or not, I think nanotechnology has been subsumed by industry. It is
now micro particles and cosmetics and golf club shafts.
Okay. I've complained about that. But they don't listen because they're making money. And
nano cosmetics is a big area. Why? Because we grind our flour exceedingly fine. So we've got
to build that back up again. The original vision Fineman had we haven't achieved yet, of course
in biology.
>>: Room at the bottom.
>> Greg Bear: There's always room at the bottom but that requires, I think -- I don't think we're in
the most in some respects the most inventive period in our history. In my lifetime, that was
probably the most -- the most inventive and fermentative time in history was between 1945 and
1970, I think. Maybe we'll go to 1980.
And in that time period you had all of this stuff going on, but at the same time America was pulling
back and the rest of the world was moving forward. So now we see situations in India and China
which remind me of the United States in the 1950s, the whole psychology of it. It's just amazing
to me to watch it. It's wonderful. It's fresh. It's vital. It's naive. It's like a bunch of science fiction
fans getting together in the 1950s. And that means we're in big trouble unless we find our
youthful mojo again, and that means maybe a little less time spent watching zombies.
But who knows. I cannot be critical of imaginative science fiction because all my high school
teachers were, too. They're all dead now, I think. How is that for change? One more question
and then we'll -- yeah, back here.
>>: Would you please walk us through the collaborative process of the Mongoliad. Like are you
guys taking turns as you write things, or are you doing things to keep each other on the same
page as you write?
>> Greg Bear: We've gone through every variation. Neil and I collaborate on chapters. And he
would write a section, and then I would continue it. And then we would both go over and glaze
each others prose and revise it. And revising rough draft Neil Stephenson is wonderful. I mean,
that's a privilege. And then he revises me, and then we go and find the younger writers and we
revise them until they scream, but they don't scream, actually.
Because it's all turning out to be pretty good. And along the way we get together, what we do on
Sundays is we get together for sword practice. Neil has started us off, first of all, with the
Gentleman's Cane Club, which is Bartizu, the art of whacking people over the head with bowler
hats who have bowler hats with a cane. That was too dangerous, so we moved to long swords.
Long swords are cool. I own two, one saber and one long sword, and then we practice with
blunts and we spar with plastic swords. Blunts are what we call I-beams which are steel swords
and I actually have a sword cut on my knuckle which is so tough. That and bare knuckle boxing,
a lot of Philippines martial arts which attracted a few of us. So last Sunday. By 11:00 when we're
all worn out we go bring a bunch of donuts from Acrena, pastries from Acrena, in Georgetown, go
back to our site, make coffee, sit around and Mark Teppel runs us through the problems of the
week.
We've got this historical thing we need to solve. Kiev was deserted over 200 years after the
Mongols raped it over. I go back say, no, no, that may not be the case. We argue that back and
forth and we settle on, okay, it looks really bad. It's not a happy place.
Or shield maidens. We've got the shield maidens coming up, they're Russian maidens, and I
contribute the fact, you know, I've seen October. And the female guard that guarded the Royals
and the czars they were really interesting, really tough-looking women. So let's have the shield
maidens kind of take some of those hypermasculine aspects. Some of them aren't. But a lot of
them are really hefty and really kind of narrowly females. That would be great fun. So we take
and borrow stuff from history. We try and keep it as close as possible. Then we have to make
stuff up. So along the way we have two characters who are of different language groups. They
don't know how to communicate with each other.
Latin is not common to one of our characters. So how are they going to communicate? They
can't. For a while they fumfau around, they're two young people. Then suddenly our male
character notices that the female has her hair in a braid. And he looks at the knots in the braid
and he goes: Oh my gosh that's Winco's Colbra, Roncalbra. That's Lithuanian, by the way, and
it's a knot language, which you can also do as a sign language called arm talk. You can go like
this secretly to each other and you're doing OM or the equivalent of notched writing or knot
writing. So you just go like that and it's sign language.
What you can do even in the dark. If you know how to count fingers on your arm which is
perhaps a talent we don't normally have. Totally invented. And really cool. You know? So is
that feasible? It's based on historical precedent. And we don't know much about that time
period. There's a lot of stuff we can fill in. So that's kind of what we do. It's really God fun. And
the amazing thing about it even though we have tizzies now and then, I'm known for tizzies in this
group, we're remarkably low on ego, because our overall company is called Pulp.
That's our ambition. Get out whopping good stories that you just can't put down fast. And get -and of course fast -- this thing apparently is going to be about 500,000 words by next summer.
So really interesting process. Dip in. The site is great. We do not have the Windows phone
application yet. We're working madly on it. I believe the Android application is coming up. We've
got the Kindle coming shortly, being helped by these groups. We've got some investors moving
in and taking an interest in all of this, and we're working toward developing a game, and so it's a
start-up company. And I've never done that before. I tried to get -- horn in on Microsoft back in
the '90s, but it wasn't really a start-up company then. They didn't listen to my vision of franchise
future fiction. The whole thing with Nathan never quite worked out. I think Bill scotched it. One
more question.
>>: The [indiscerinble], is it going to be a reality? What do you think about of time span?
>> Greg Bear: I really don't know. I suspect aspects cover it that are insuperable to our
technologies today, our understanding, philosophical understanding. I strongly suspect that our
point view of how time moves, how we move through time, is wrong. I expect each of us in a real
physical sense operate in a smear of time. We catch up with each other like particles
communicating with each other. The quantum effects, who knows, there was recently an article
on optimization of quantum effects in chlorophyll in plants. And when I heard that, the evolution
was actually evolved to take advantage of quantum effects, including multiple worlds, in plants,
knocked my socks off because if it's going on in plants, it's probably going on up here, too, which
means that things like ESP, precog, all that sort of stuff, to a point, that you might be able to see
at times down timelines or your brain is thinking them through just like a science fiction writer, or
it's a combination of the two. That gets really strange. Are you time traveling? Do you change
the present? The future? Think all the way we ask questions is wrong. At that point it becomes
very mythic and at that point I say we start looking toward what the people were saying in the
Vedas because they knew as much as we do. Let's go back 6,000 years now and figure it out.
So thank you very much for coming. Let's sign some books.
[applause]