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>> Kevin Schofield: Good afternoon. I'm Kevin Schofield. It's my
pleasure to welcome you all and Greg Bear here for our afternoon talk.
Greg is joining us as part of the Microsoft Research Visiting Speakers
Series. He's here to discuss his new book, Halo: Primordium, the
Forerunner Saga.
Halo: Primordium continues the story of the ending back creators
builders of the Halo that began in Halo Cryptum. Greg Bear has won
both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for such critically celebrated
international best sellers as Eon and the Forge of God. He's
co-founder of [inaudible]. Bet you didn't know that, and has been
writing since he was nine years old. Bet you also didn't know that.
He's been published in Nature, New Day and other journals and
newspapers around the world, and is regularly asked to speak at
universities, conferences and on TV.
Please join me in giving him a warm welcome.
[applause]
Thanks.
>> Greg Bear: Just a few minutes ago I was getting ready to write
volume three. And now it's delayed. So I don't know. The game may
have to be put off, too. It's been great fun collaborating with 343
and the bungee folks and everybody on these things. It's quite a
privilege to be asked to set up the origin story for what amounts to
one of the most popular franchises around.
And I've actually been involved in a lot of these franchises over the
years. I think the only one I haven't done is Richie Rich. And that's
coming next.
But back when I was younger, in '83, I published a Star Trek novel
called Corona and then later, in 2002 or somewhere around then, I did a
Star Wars novel covering those territories. Just recently, my son and
I, my son doing most of the work, put together a Jurassic Park comic
series of five comics.
Since he was the world's biggest Jurassic Park fan, I just assigned
that to him. My son also helped me out on the Halo series. So he's my
resident expert on all the things that I'm a little bit too old to have
gotten immediately caught up on, watching him play the Halo game, I
figure, okay, this is classic ASF, this is the kind of stuff I was
raised on, Doc Smith and Azimov and Heinline all the way down to the
people Larry Nevine and so on, Arthur C. Clark, people who influenced
me also influenced Halo. So doing this series is really old home week.
But we are 100,000 years ago. And in that time period there are clues
set up in the various games, sometimes very compelling clues, there's
even testimonies and different things. But we don't really know -when I was given this assignment, we didn't really know what the
Forerunners looked like; we didn't know what their society was, we
don't know what their relationship was to the mysterious precursors who
came before, always precursors, never just an origin story, there's
always those who came before.
And all the setups were classic to me because seemed like we were
dealing not only with science fiction mythology but with greek
mythology, with origin stories for human beings and that sort of thing.
As we were about to take one of our earliest meetings, and this we can
tell you because the first two books are already out, my son who was
coming to breakfast with folks and me, the Halo boys, said to me, as we
were walking in, he says: You know I think your Forerunner needs a
human sidekick.
And I says: Yeah, you're right. So we posed it to Frank O'Connor and
Kevin Grace, and Frank was a little reluctant but within five minutes
he goes whoa, whoa, and we laid out much what occurs in book one and
part of what occurs in book two and it really ran with it. My son's
suggestion, very cooly, has really helped in shaping the new game
because it's a collaboration. They're doing the hard work.
Again, I'm just throwing ideas at them. And they're throwing ideas
back at me and putting down requirements and so on.
But it really is. It's what I've seen looks awesome. I don't think
you will have found a previous Halo game to be quite like this one.
It's as if all of the secrets are going to be slowly unveiled to you,
and if you're reading the books you'll be prepared for them.
Now, that said, there's often this dividing line between media
franchise fiction and the literary world. And I kind of go along with
that. Authors are supposed to be doing their own thing.
But in science fiction, there's often been this collaborative phase
where authors will take and jog ideas around with each other. They'll
throw this ball back, lob it back in this direction. Classically in my
lifetime I wrote a book called Eon, in which an astroid, giant astroid
comes veering into our solar system and it turns out it's a spaceship.
And I was reading, of course, Rendezvous with Rama
kid. So when Arthur C. Clark read this book I was
And he got back to my editor in England. He said:
the first 75 pages. I go, this is just Rendezvous
on page 76 my jaw hit the ground and it didn't get
the rest of the book.
back when I was a
a little nervous.
I read the book,
with Rama. He says
picked up through
That's the way we're supposed to do it. If you're going to be
borrowing an idea or a vision or whatever, you do it differently. You
try and take and run with it in a different direction. And when the
Halo people handed me this, that's what I thought we should do.
We should go back and explore the deep science fiction roots, but also
the mythological roots, the emotional roots, the family roots, because
anyone who has played enough Halo games really feels that they've been
walking around the living room with the Forerunners endlessly.
Now, what were these people like? You know, why did they do this
stuff? Why did they fire off those Halos, what was the flood? You
know what the flood is. It's attacking us now. But how did it come
about.
And along the way I've been allowed to actually dabble in the true
treasure chest of the whole series. Now, I don't know quite what the
bungee people think about all of this. I haven't spoken with them
directly except for one meeting we had when Halo Reach was released.
But I hope they're happy because it's sure been fun for me.
And to go back again to all the people who inspired me and then to add
that modern touch, the sort of military SF adventure touch that we get
from people like Scott Card, Orson Scott Card and Robert Heinlein, and
later people like Joe Haldeman and SM Sterling and everything and a
little bit of my own stuff out of Eon, which I was remembering recently
as I watched aliens was published before aliens.
So the Marines In Space. I've got a marine drop sequence, but that
wasn't before Heinlein, and it wasn't before Joe Haldeman, so who did
all of this stuff first? I suspect it was probably Jack Williamson or
somebody we haven't read since the 1930s.
Science fiction has such deep roots. The ideas are really hard to pick
out. So if I -- I'm engaging as new stories come up, people will come
along and say, well, didn't you put that in your book? Didn't you have
the slate, not announced by Hewlett-Packard, by the way. Didn't you
have that in Eon?
And I say, well, yeah. But if you look at Forbidden Planet, there's
also this object they're looking at that they plug cards into and so
on.
And if you look at Dune, he's looking at an iPad on Duke running on his
Airokene [phonetic] iPad. All these things we really have a hard time
finding out who did it first.
The historical science fiction sequence was blamed on Robert Heinlein,
but it actually was a fellow who did it before him, whose name I'm
going to forget now, who actually did create the first history sequence
in a science fiction series back in the late 1930s.
Heinlein picked it up and -- John Dubler was a meddler. Editor of
Astounding Magazine. Astounding Magazine was this astonishing
influence on engineers and scientists and everybody all over the world.
So story number one, Heinlein goes to Azimov about his robot stories
and says, Isaac, do you realize that your robots follow ethical and
practical guidelines? So here I've laid them out for you, because I
found all of these things in your stories and here they are.
The three laws of robotics. And Isaac goes by George, you're right.
Puts them in the book. Isaac wrote it. John Campbell found it.
Distilled it and put it there. When Heinlein's sequence came along,
Campbell says: Bob -- and they didn't always get along, especially
later -- you know, you're having a kind of a historical sequence here.
What if we put a timeline together and published it of the way your
stories fit in.
And they didn't all quite fit in. So there's off the main sequence.
There's the main sequence stories. There's the timeline, which I
believe was published in Astounding, but was also published in book
form and the man who sold the moon or one of those books.
So there's Campbell doing that. Now, Campbell is not just affecting
science fiction at that point. We're going to veer off into another
territory here, away from Halo for a moment.
John Campbell is affecting policy, because he's looking at the
different things that are coming out of the scientific press. This is
1939. He's been editor for a couple of years. He's a young man.
But he's very ambitious. And he's very smart. And he realizes there
are engineers all over the world who read his books. And something's
happening. There's fission being discovered, being efficiently done in
Germany. Fission and Lena Whitemuller, anyway, have done this.
And so he's looking at that. And he's saying to himself: You know, I
wonder since there's a war coming very soon, what's going to happen
during that war.
And since I know that engineers all over the world are reading my
magazine, I'm going to do a kind of a test here. In November of 1939,
he publishes an editorial on the back of Astounding magazine, which is
a bed sheet size at that point saying: I wonder if we can get through
this coming war without building and using an atomic weapon.
And New York Times is publishing editorials about this possibility,
too, at that point. In the 1940s, I forget exactly when, '42 maybe, he
has a writer publish a story on fission, and that story it turns out
ends up in the Astounding library at Los Alamos where it's read by
people like Richard Feynman and everybody else and they sit around
start discussing this story about fission, a science fiction story and
you suddenly have the FBI agents in the back of the room going: What?
What? And taking notes.
And someone knocks on John W. Campbell's door a couple of weeks later
and Campbell knows. He's had his experiment confirmed.
Now, he never actually said this. But Gregory BenFord asks the
scientists in the room at Los Alamos and we've got our astounding
subscriptions and we discussed all the stories, and there was this
visit to Campbell's office by the FBI.
And suddenly Campbell knew that science fiction did get through and
that the people he wrote for, the editorials he prepared, the stories
he edited were going out to people who were doing something
interesting, enough to attract the attention of the FBI toward him.
Gotta explain, it's just science fiction, it's what we do. H.G. Wells
wrote about fission, are you going to go visit him in England.
Pushed him off. But the whole confirming cycle of the influence of
science fiction and everything is now coming back to us with astroid
mining.
How many people read about astroid mining when you were a kid? Along
with jet packs and everything else, right? Flying cars, jet packs, and
astroid mining. We have The Rolling Stones. Heinlein's story. We
have the tales of the flying mountains by Paul Anderson, my
father-in-law. We have Larry Nevine's stories of the astroid miners
and belt things and belt that, all that sort of stuff.
So common in science fiction. In the 1990s, just after we moved up to
Seattle, I was asking: So if we've got all these rather wealthy people
who don't seem terribly interested in space, not that they're talking
about, but you know, they were raised on Mr. Heinlein. And I know some
of these guys, and they liked the movies, at the liked the books.
And I wonder if they saw that scene in Destination Moon where this
mighty rocket engineer is laying out the plans for sending a nuclear
powered rocket to the moon. Great movie. 1950. George Powell, Robert
Heinlein script.
And he's invited all these wealthy entrepreneurs to come sit in the
room and he shows them this movie of what it's like to be in zero
gravity, basically get the ropes on propulsion and gravity and the moon
and all this stuff with Woody Wood Pecker doing the introduction.
And they all sit around and he says: Space is the high ground, which
is a phrase that I heard throughout the '80s and '90s, too, space is
the high ground.
As they say in Gettysburg, the high ground. If you don't have it,
you're going to lose, and the engineers look down at the entrepreneurs
and the entrepreneurs, mostly elderly, mostly looking like they're
between 70 and 90 or 100, they all go, okay, let's do it.
And they build a rocket and riots come because people don't want a
nuclear rocket to be launched and they launch it anyway and it goes to
the moon. And all that sort of -- what a wonderful vision. What a
wonderful movie because A it was politically astute. There were
protests over nuclear powered space probes and later, and Heinlein kind
of felt that coming.
But there's also this thing that very, very wealthy entrepreneurs are
going to be the ones who will ultimately haul us off into space. And
about the mid- '90s the rumors started to come down that there was
interest.
And by the mid-2000s it was obvious and suddenly everybody was lining
up, and there was Blue Origin, and then we had Elan Musk doing things
thing and very seriously doing his thing, launching satellites for the
Air Force. I saw one that didn't get launched at the Air Force Academy
recently.
They have their filing cabinet of prototype test model satellite. And
the engineering looks at me and says: That third one, you're not
supposed to see that again. It came crashing back down through the
roof of the launch center at [inaudible] apparently.
And so they get a free launch on Elan. In the 1980s, when I was
working with Jerry Parnell and Larry Nevine and a bunch of other folks,
I met a bunch of rocket scientists. One of them was Max Hunter, who
was one of the fathers of the Atlas missile program. He looked at
another rocket scientist, Gary Hudson who had just launched and lost a
rocket and he said, Gary, you can't be a rocket scientist until you've
launched and lost at least a dozen. That's still true today. The
maxim holds true.
Science fiction once again propels us as the submariners say I follow
in the watery footsteps of Jules Marin. As the scientists and
entrepreneurs look back and say, you know, I think we could do that.
And now there seems to be a bit of a gold rush. There's rumors that
venture capitalists are kind of pulling away from biotech where you can
spend billions and billions of dollars on a drug that doesn't earn that
much money, and moving over to the much safer area of astroid mining,
which I find utterly fabulous.
You know, we need to teach venture capitalists caution once again, but
I also like venturist capital. And this is a terribly interesting
area, and having -- in my own fortuitous way having dined or hung out
with nearly all the guys involved in this in the last couple of years,
I think it's doable. I think it's very doable.
And they all were inspired and read not just science fiction, but, of
course, textbooks. Everything else. Because reading science fiction,
at least for me, pulled me into that.
And we've been trying to find a way to get us back into that feeling of
the post-war period, the 1950s, when I was a kid, of the
1560s, '70s, '80s and suddenly in the '70s and '80s that impulse kind
of fell apart. We lost our confidence.
We got dragged into wars. The same thing is happening now. And so
governments sort of pulls away. The voters start to pull away. Now is
the time for the entrepreneurs to step forward. They're going to need
help. NASA still is utterly essential to this entire effort,
especially coordinating it.
In the late 1990s, 1998, I think, the director of NASA, Dan Golden,
requested a special meeting with the citizens advisory council in
Tarzana. It was our last meeting, I think, at Larry's house in
Tarzana. He's moved since.
And a bunch of us got together and we all sat around and Gary Hudson
said to Dan Golden: Look, I'll give you free payload on my rocket,
just clear away the regulations. And Golden says that's what we're
here for, to talk about this.
What do we need? How do we get FAA clearances for launches, how do we
experimental launches taken care of, how does all this pass through
security?
What are the ways we can greenlight these projects and encourage all of
this to go? And that's one of the things he thought was extremely
important to do.
Some of the issues, I think, began to be resolved before that or after
that. But that was an interesting meeting. And shortly thereafter, of
course, we had the beginning of serious adventure capital and space.
There had been a lot before that. A lot of different rocket
scientists. We were involved in things like DCX, really pretty rockets
that just didn't end up getting funding. X 34, all of these things.
Amazing technologies, just waiting for someone to push the button and
push us forward.
We keep saying in Halo or science fiction in general or in TV shows or
in movies: We're going to be in space. And we keep kind of wondering
why aren't we in space more. Why aren't we doing all these manned
launches? Why aren't we sending real human beings out there, heroes
and heroines to take over the spaceways and show us what's what, and
possibly die heroic deaths and crimp funding for the next 40 years we
have to make our minds up, of course.
And making our minds up is a process of talking to people who really,
really care enough to spend lots of money and people who really, really
want to go out there and people who really, really want those people to
go out there to survive.
That's been my major concern about the whole operation, is we don't
know enough about space medicine even now, even after all these
decades, to guarantee that people on a two-year trip to, say, Mars
would come back healthy. Or if they could come back at all.
We have not really set up long-term -- other than space station and
bits of Mier and earlier with orbiting laboratories, we really haven't
done years in space under zero G. Months in pace under zero G and
people come back pretty weak. That's not a good thing.
How are we going to solve that? More research. More people willing to
go up there and test things out. But for the time being, for these
astroid miners, they don't really need human beings out there, although
Bruce Willis, I'm sure, would be happy to go. He loves big spiky
things flying around through the stars.
But a robot probably could. And that's what we're going to see. And
more work done by people like you guys and more work done by other
folks and it's all going to sort of come together in a vast
collaboration where our first children out in space are going to be
metal.
But we have an enormous amount of affection for some of these metal
children as Donna Shirley will point out. We really do. We like
watching them. They become the Wallies of our space program, and very
attached to them.
And we keep supporting them. So when we send our children out there,
metal or flesh or whatever, we are sending our hearts out there. And
it comes out of that emotion that we had when we were kids.
For me it starts reading comic books. Reading Heinlein. Sitting at
the black-and-white television with the flickering picture of John Glen
going up, for me it was 4:00 a.m. in the morning. I got up, I was
eight years old. Didn't think it was anything cooler on earth than
getting up at 4:00 in the morning watching a rocket ship take off. I
remember sitting in front of the television screen, which was color at
that point, but watching the black and white picture from the moon as
Neil Armstrong sets out.
Later on I met Buzz Aldrin. I never met Neil Armstrong. But I met a
lot of astronauts, a lot of people who had been up to the moon, gone up
to the moon on space shuttles, and they really were the right stuff.
They really were steely-eyed. Some are a little eccentric, but I would
be too if I had been subjected to the radiation of deep space for three
weeks or whatever.
It's just cool stuff to learn about being human and either doing these
things or being part of them or going out there and exploring.
The joy of working on a Halo novel is that it's got a lot of kids
really interested. What's it like to take off in a rocket? What's it
like to wear a space suit and fall from the sky as a plummeting meteor.
What's it like to do this? What's it like to go up against alien
beings and eventually learn what their religion is, what their culture
is, to do this, and eventually even to allie with those who are former
enemies.
What's it like to come out of a period of endless wars to rise up again
and find these magnificent things that point back to time when there
were wars even before you, before the human species.
What's the origin of the human race? And the Halo book, Halo
Primordium and Cryptum, I'm putting in recent archeological discovery,
because in Darwin's Children, I actually had an 18,000, 20,000-year-old
fossil related to homo erectus found in Oregon. That was pretty
radical. I had a lot of archeology folks looking at that.
That's pretty neat. But we don't think that's very likely. And then
in Indonesia, near Indonesia, homo floriescence [phonetic] is not only
possibly homo erectus and not only about 18,000 years old, maybe even
existed up into relatively modern times, they were this tall. They
were hobbits. I never would have said that. Nobody would have
believed me. Reality trumps even my weird speculation.
So I put them into Halo Cryptum and Halo Primordium. And they're among
the most famous, most popular characters for a lot of the readers
because these guys are feisty. Just because you have a small head
doesn't mean you think small thoughts.
And then we have the more recent, Dennis Sullivan's, more species
coming up, somewhat through genetic analysis, some just a molar here,
molar there, and by God what's a science fiction series without a giant
ape in it. They get giganto Patheecus [phonetic] in the story in Halo
Primordium.
Put it all in there, and it's going to lead a lot of readers go: Wait
a minute, is this stuff real? When they find out it is, our past
becomes just about as interesting as our future.
So tremendous fun doing all of this. Tremendous fun playing in the
gardens of other very creative people and tremendous fun watching them
put this game together. And going oh my God, that's awesome. I want
to play that game.
Especially seeing some of the things that I've helped create end up big
wide screen stuff being explored in three dimensions and so on. That's
very cool. So that's what I've been doing lately. And watching and
watching vicariously and participating in.
Any questions?
Yeah?
>>: How do you come upon the titles Darwin's Radio and Darwin's Truth.
>> Greg Bear: The whole metaphor of the virus being a carrier of genes
was what started the notion of Darwin's Radio, way back in the 1985 -earlier. I started asking about as I was finishing Blood Music in my
notebook, I said what do viruses do for us? Why do we allow them to
occupy us?
There are some organisms that have such effective immune systems that
they really -- they just don't have that much in the way of disease,
certainly viral diseases, like limulus or sharks and interesting enough
no confirmation here, they haven't evolved much.
But when you look at bacteria with their phages and you look at us with
as it turned out I discovered researching Darwin's Radio with human
endogenous retroviruses, we are constantly occupied by outside viruses,
and sometimes these viruses not only meddle with our genes and move
things around, but give us the capacity to meddle with our genes.
And that's what started this off is the notion, okay, if you have genes
being carried by viruses between individuals in the animal species,
which we haven't quite confirmed yet, but definitely a possibility,
that's a radio signal, Darwin's Radio. And it turns out that viruses
are FedEx for genes. That's what they do well.
>>: Great to hear you're optimistic about the feasibility of the
astroid, how do you feel about the feasibility of the space elevator?
>> Greg Bear: Boy, there's some materials problems still to be solved
there. We've been looking at the mono molecular filament for decades
and we still need that.
But also people like Robert Forward and the gentle folks working up
here on this are still working on viable tethers that actually have a
[inaudible] that can survive micro meteor erosion. That's the major
thing. If you have the strength, the ductile strength, and if you have
the ability to resist micro meteor erosion or a rarer larger meteoroid
strike, if you have that kind of robustness, then I think these things
could be doable.
Certainly you can already do things like repowering satellites and so
on by dropping tethers down into a magnetic field and sucking up the
generator juice. That's been done.
That is possible. And that can refuel vehicles in orbit.
there's a magnetic field, you can do this sort of thing.
Wherever
So small steps, big steps, all someone has to do here at Microsoft
Research is find the mono molecular filament and maybe the general
products hull next. Are you aware of what that is? You have to read
Larry Nevine's books. If you're not doing research on the general
products hull, I gotta get Rick after you. It's a hull that basically
is totally inert to all activity.
It can even go into a neutron star and come out the other side. What's
inside will be crushed and mashed, but the hull itself will survive.
It's made by the puppeteers in the Ring World Series and so on.
busy.
Get
>>: Can you talk about your recent decision of your publisher to drop
DRM?
>> Greg Bear: I just heard about that yesterday. You know, JK Rowling
did it. I guess what's good for JK is good for the rest of the world,
I assume, but also we did it when we're working on Mongoliad, Neil
Stephenson, Mark Tepo, my son, a bunch of other good writers and
myself, and it was Neil's decision and Mark's decision that DRM just
wasn't helpful.
I don't agree with that in all circumstances. But I do notice that
there's a vast trend towards going after the pirates overseas, and
we're following in the wake of the Queen Elizabethan-ships of Hollywood
going out there. But Queen Elizabeth started up piracy, too. So I
don't know where we're going to end up on all of this.
DRM is irritating to a lot of people. I know it's irritating to me
when I want to reinstall windows on another hard drive. There's all
these versions of it. And yet the losses suffered under these -vigorously philosophical pirate programs.
You've heard of the religion, Copesme. Copesmeism, it's my right to
copy because God wants it to be so. That's like the Republican right
to be fabulously wealthy and Christian because Jesus wants you to be
wealthy and keep it all. Perfectly obvious to me.
But it's all going to work itself out one way or the other. What I
love about what's come up recently is Microsoft's investment in Nook
and everything is really putting the screws to the whole environment.
I love it.
Competition in which writers are suddenly the main focus is great. And
as these platforms become more and more versatile, more and more open,
more and more available, more and more writers are going to be free to
get really unhappy when New York Publishing rejects them and says you
won't sell anything: Oh, yeah? And go out and do it yourself.
And that's happening.
I was talking to a good writer who published a book, Steven Monis, on
the Pacific Northwest Ballet recently. Beautiful, big book,
self-published because I don't think there's a publisher who can sell
five times more copies than I can but they'll get all the royalties
otherwise so I'm going to do it myself.
Seattle times wouldn't review his book. Why? Because it's a
self-published book; we don't review self-published books. So the
attitude from the '40s and '50s where Vantage Press was the only thing,
if you self-publish today, where self-publish would be the rule, I
wonder if they'll award a Nobel or Pulitzer-Prize to a self-published
book, I don't know, things gotta catch up. Question over here.
>>: Another subject, is there any sort of push to -- I'll just say it
like this. I would really like to be able to purchase like the e-book
and a hard copy together and not pay double the price. And they
already do that kind of thing with a lot of Blu-rays and stuff you can
get.
>> Greg Bear:
Absolutely, 14 different disks in one for 4.98.
>>: A lot of them today come with a digital copy code where you buy the
Blu-ray ->> Greg Bear: Jim Ray used to package CDs of all the previous books in
a series for free if you buy the hard copy. That was fairly smart.
Most publishers aren't caught up to that. But definitely what you need
is some way to redeem or buy either hard cover or whatever, and I think
that's going to be happening, package it up.
We were trying to consider that, how would you do that. And there are
some problems. So if you can figure out a way to get retailers to deal
with that at the same time that you deal with returns, which still the
major problem for hard cover books, you could buy a book; you could
take the digital copy code. You could get your digital copy. Turn the
book back.
How would you know?
Yes, sir?
Solve that for us, we'll have that problem solved.
>>: Earlier in your talk you had examples of how scifi started getting
into policy, and that reminded me an article that I read about six
months ago about the DARPA, 100-year starship program. Just curious
what your thoughts on that are.
>> Greg Bear: I thought that was fabulous. Just before
written Hull 03 which was kind of the solution of what I
to do to solve starship difficulties, traveling at very,
speeds between the stars rather than just crawling along
speeds would require huge amounts of reaction mass.
that I had
thought we had
very rapid
at rocket
So I had to strap my starship, a very large starship, to an org cloud
moonlet about 100 kilometers across, which made the relationship
between mass and delivery and payload more believable.
That, I think, is of interest to the 100-year starship thing, but we do
need to figure out the technologies and the biologies, and we've got
all of these mythic things from the past like generation starship and
so on, which Hull 03 is one of those. But Hull 03 goes into a lot of
the politics, a lot of the economics of this. These things are
enormously expensive to build.
We're probably looking at the gross national product of the entire
planet for ten years to build one of these things. Why? Why would you
do it? Why would you launch it off there in copies, one or two copies
or three copies, and not know what's going to happen to it?
So in Hull 03 there's a lot of really nasty safety mechanisms on board
the ship. What if you find life on the planet that you're heading
towards? Get rid of it. It's too expensive not to.
That sort of thing. And
the Forage of God, which
the galaxy? If so we've
it's not just economic.
there.
it echoes back into what I'm talking about in
is is this an ecological competition across
got to get smarter and we've got to figure out
There's billions and billions of worlds out
It looks pretty good that there's probably tens to hundreds of millions
of earth-like planets in the Goldielock zone and somebody wants their
porridge. Did I just make that up? I'm sure it's been used before.
Yes, sir.
>>: Just a question about continuity in and around the two Halo novels.
So much people movement are reading diverged series -- is there an
average about technical inconsistencies, but I think probably science
fiction readers maybe are more concerned [inaudible].
>> Greg Bear:
Say it out loud, we're nerds and we're proud of it.
>>: I'm wondering how much effort did you have to put into the research
or the games, the existing novels to try and do that, and also kind of
a follow-on question is whether when you were writing these two books,
did it feel more like an archeological kind of thing that you that you
were essentially pulling the clues from all of the other places and
stitching them together or was it more like you were writing an
independent story that you just have to make consistent?
>> Greg Bear: Well, Halo fans are very interested in the details, and
they believe in the canon and they really want you to get it right and
not get it wrong, contradict yourself. A lot of Star Trek, Star Wars
fans, fans really into it, are very much the same way. But with the
Halo people, they really have an entire division and operation set up
to make sure that the fans are not unhappy.
And they did take a risk by letting me do so much original new material
fitting it in between what little we knew about the Forerunners.
So we touched those points, and I created points and then got back to
them and they said: Oh, well, we can do that with this. And I say:
Cool, because that means I can do that with this.
And then we can run with that and we can make this character that
character. We can identify and what we're doing is we're taking like
the secret history of Halo, all the stuff that you know, it's so well
structured, just as an original story, even as thin as it might have
been in terms of the origin, that we can now fit in all the rest of
this stuff.
And then take it off and expand it into this huge game.
So while we're doing that, though, and they're doing their creativity,
I really have to be flexible enough and write well enough and have
meetings often enough and they have to coordinate with people in the
office that we do keep all of this straight.
It's been very helpful, because these are really bright people.
they're really helpful to me and they're very sweet.
And
And I think I haven't made them angry once. So I hope not, too. But
we're not putting Richie Rich into this series. That was my prime
objective and they wouldn't let me do it.
The star wars novels, the one thing they wouldn't let me do on my star
wars novel although they gave me a chance to write about Darth Vader as
a teenager, they wouldn't let me have Darth Vader come back through the
force and influence Anakin Skywalker and teach him the ways of the dark
side.
They wouldn't let me do that. Lucas says: No, no, none of that.
also wouldn't let me have Anakin be shriven after his first
assassination. No, that's a religious word. You can't do that.
They
A few things we have to follow through on here. I was trained well in
things to understand that when you're writing in someone's favorite
series, you don't mess with the tropes too much.
But when you're allowed to fill them in, that's great fun.
question? Yes, sir?
One more
>>: You were talking about things that were dreamed up decades ago that
have since become a reality. Is there anything in particular that you
see dreamed up recently in recent science fiction that you think will
be promising in the future?
>> Greg Bear: Probably. We're not yet in that age, the new age of
pioneering everything all over again. So a lot of the stuff that was
easy to think about and easy to imagine doing was written about in the
20s and 30s, television, that sort of thing. Computers, we imagined
it, we just didn't get it quite right.
Some people came along and made computers available on everybody's
desktop. And while I was writing about that in the '70s to some
extent. And while Isaac Azimov was one of the few science fiction
writers who said that, even up through the '70s people said it was
going to be central computing systems and tyranny forever and ever.
Not quite.
So technology makes us reverse course and reestimate. And that's great
fun. As for what's coming up now, anybody have anything you've read
recently that you think would ->>: This is Halo, the modern era of Halo they have AIs they're not just
human, they have capabilities like far beyond humans.
>> Greg Bear:
Right.
>>: Like it's not possible for them to even run their ships and the
operations without them.
>> Greg Bear:
Turns out the Forerunners were the same way.
>>: Will it eventually turn out to be the case?
>> Greg Bear: I think that's true, in that case you've got the AIs
being collaborative, not to mention charming half naked and blue or
entirely naked and you just don't care.
I think that all of that is part of the romance of the future, is this
what we're going to be seeing in 500 years? Is Hal going to be
Harriet? Or we just don't know. There was Hal. And Hal is kind of an
ansula [phonetic] or a helper to run the ship and things go wrong.
So I think that's kind of some of the origins here. But Hal is by far
not the first. We have to go back to the Gollum and find out about the
artificial being that was created through magic and alchemy and
religious incantations and suddenly rises up to defend the ghetto and
turns bad, which becomes Frankenstein, which becomes Hal, which becomes
things in Halo. We've got these visions back and forth. Is there
anything that you think you've read about that is completely doable
today?
>>: You mentioned planetary mining, Planetary Resources Corporation,
Bellevue of all places. It looks like it's coming to fruition.
>> Greg Bear: Good people. Good people. Little things. How about
products that you guys -- Google just came out with something that I
wrote about about eight years ago. Specs. You wear them. They
project, give you terminator vision. Some have red lines about
people's clothing sizes running across your face. If somebody breathes
smoke, it says carcinogen. Tells you important stuff.
Now they're doing that. In my novel, Quantico, the FBI agents are
wearing these things and they are connected to RFIDs which are on their
bodies and allow them to touch their guns and use them and no one else
can use those guns.
And the RFIDs are implanted in Mariposa in a rather more tyrannical
compound in Texas but it turns out that they are subjected to EMP and
so if you put off a non-EMP burst, which is totally doable guys, work
on it. Bang, suddenly everybody's RFID chip burns their flesh and
wants to pop out.
So there's all this back and forth in technology. The glasses are
definitely doable. The RFID chips implanted, just because you want to
unlock your house and your car just by walking near them you can do
that with your key fob now.
But how do you work around that? How do you make the individual the
sole perpetrator and purveyor of the individual's identity? In other
words, thumbprints, eyeballs, all that stuff can be duplicated. We saw
that in Minority Report, just carry a friend's eyeballs around and you
can go anywhere you want. I remember when the thumb prints were coming
up and they said well a dead person cannot be used to open up this
laptop with thumbprint identification. Oh, yeah? Sure.
Your capacitance analysis center will process, yeah, sure. You can
probably use a rubber pad with grease on it and get the same result.
So I don't know.
>>: Actually, they check online military grade ones they check your
blood flow.
>> Greg Bear:
To see if there's blood flow behind it.
>>: And the irises have to move, varying the amount of light.
>> Greg Bear: There you go. I like that. That's getting better. I
want to see some special effects artists work on this now. You know,
Stan Winston, bless him, he's not with us any more but he probably
could have created a blood flow thumb -- if he can do a full sized T
Rex he can do the blood flow. Yes, sir.
>>: You mentioned the Mongoliad, can you talk about what your
experience was like in that process and what your vision is for those
cross-platform, cross-media creations in the future.
>> Greg Bear: I think that the whole experiment was quite marvelous.
There was a lot of talent involved in putting it together. Neil had
this vision of introducing a large audience, larger audience to western
martial arts and to sword fight and what it was really like.
His goal now is to create a game based on this in which you will
basically be feeling the effect of carrying a broad sword around you
and using it and you'll have to learn how to use it to play the game
well.
That game is called Gallo Glass. And it's going to be up on
Kickstarter pretty soon. In terms of Mongoliad, we have a number of
people in the room and turns out enough of them were writers or wanted
to be writers, we started kicking story ideas around. We would get
together in the morning, would hit each other with broad swords, not
sharp ones, mostly, and learn how that felt and carry these things
around and practice Fiori [phonetic] and all the different versions of
training, the German, Italian training, and then find out, of course,
if you have a pike staph, forget swords. If you have a [inaudible]
forget swords, you're a dead man if you're a knight. We found all that
stuff, and we would get together in the afternoon and plot this giant
historical epic based on the untold history of Europe and Asia and the
interrelations there.
And it just kind of grew and grew. And finally at one point Mark
Temple looks at us and said you realize we have half a million words
here. We put it out first over the website for the Mongoliad which
became an iPad app. There was problems with that because of the delay,
because of iPad Apple's licensing requirements and so on. Took us a
couple of months. But we got a fair number of subscribers, eventually
took it around New York, and New York was a little conservative. They
didn't want to have it available for subscription and being sold as a
book. They say, oh, we can't do that.
So eventually Amazon picked us up and we're being published by 47 North
and they're quite happy with it.
We're way up there in sales on Kindle and as a book, and the more the
merrier. There's seven authors on this book. That by itself would
have killed it in New York, I think, without some huge names,
basically, trundling it along.
So it's been an interesting experiment. And now the book is out,
volume one is out. And some bookstores are refusing to carry it. It's
range wars out there. We're going to have to figure out how to make
barbed wire to keep these people separate, because they're right now
they're shooting daggers at each other.
>>: Probably [inaudible] ecosystem where you get the main authors and
all the people writing variations on that, which are just kind of
ignored, even when they infringe copyright, and some of those become
popular and those writers go...
>> Greg Bear: That was our thought. I wrote about this a long time
ago, back in the 1980s, that franchise fiction would be kind of due to
invite fans in to write fiction judge it and give them royalties if it
worked.
And that was one of our models which didn't quite work out. We have a
number of people following our fiction and even writing fiction in it,
but never got to the stage of where we could pay them.
I think a more stable platform and more outreach and so on in a
different product would be quite possible. But I know JK Rowling
doesn't want to do this. And a lot of the writers we met have seen
their slash fiction based on their characters and they just don't want
to deal with it.
>>: You've got a lot of that environment as well.
the office are repeaters.
But the junk is --
>> Greg Bear: Pure democracy. That would appeal to Jeff Bezos, maybe
not to those who have already written their universes and don't want
people tromping around in them.
There was many, many piracy debates when we went after some of the
books that were being put up on Gutenberg, Paul Andersons, that were
not in fact public domain. They insisted they were.
They kept juggling theories as to why they were in public domain. We
finally shot them down. But along the way we had people writing to say
I want it all to be public domain. I want to write my own alien book.
I think the aliens need -- and Halo books. I'd like to write those.
No, guys. Go out there and do your own original stuff, please. I am
not happy to have you out there tromping around in stuff -- that's
easy. I do it. It's not easy, but you know what I mean. It's easier
than creating your own universe and fighting that fight. And that's
the advice we have to pass out to a lot of these people. Stop writing
slash. Get out there and do your own stuff.
Now I wrote Edgar Rice Burroughs fan fiction and Thomas Whitt fan
fiction when I was a teenager, so I've been there.
>>: The things that we've seen that we think would be a new
revolutionary technology. Let me turn that around. What do you think
we are working on, or what could we be working on right now that could
realize some of the aspirations you have for better technology or
revolutionary technology?
>> Greg Bear: Well, at the Air Force Academy recently I got a brief
summary of what's going on in quantum computing. And I'm still a
little confused.
So you gotta break it all down into a Hamiltonian. Which Hamiltonian,
the one that describes the total energy of the system? I can't even
find it on Wolf From Alpha [phonetic]. And then you're going to be
doing four A analysis to solve your problems. Sounds like many, many
ways of saying it's a very focused thing that we don't quite know how
to use it yet even if we do have it.
So what are you looking at? Are you looking at a way of using a
computer that spreads across all known universes and those you don't
know? Is that what you're really saying?
Are you saying that you're solving problems here using all possible
solutions? Are you doing some over histories kind of approach? I just
don't know. I'm not smart enough to make sense of it. Help me make
sense of it.
And then help me use it. I want a chip that does that. But if we're
going to have to do room temperature super conductors brainstorm 1983
or whenever it was, or anything else, there's just a lot of stuff that
needs to be done there.
And I'm sure you're working on a lot of these areas, and some of you
will tell me -- some Rick will tell me about and some of it he won't.
Biology, my area of feeling now is that you've really gotta start
cutting away the dross in biological theory. There's still so much
confusion in the mainstream science magazines, even when they have
great results, they just don't interpret it well. They have to satisfy
the old guard that's standing over them with their funding and their
academic judgments and everything.
So I'm trying to think what I read recently that just didn't make any
sense. Looking for statistical -- in autism, we went looking to see if
there was this effect and we didn't find it. So there are reasons why
we didn't find it.
No, you didn't find it because your theory was wrong. Get it together.
Stop looking for random variations. We're looking for an effect that
might be an epi genetic effect and you're trying to find it in the
sequences. Why are you doing that? If it's epi genetic you're not
going to find it by sequencing the genes.
And so take a look at it epi genetically. But the thinking isn't there
yet. We need better theory in the most important aspect of the
sciences today.
We are still hung over by the [inaudible] randomness of the 1920s.
Steam engine mechanics still dominates by a logical theory and it's
caused so much harm in terms of one of my great moments in personal
history was to be at a side shoot of a DARPA conference. 8:30 in the
morning I'm standing up and saying we need to stop using randomness as
an excuse and start looking at the personality of the things. We need
to use our novelist brain to figure out who these are when they're at
home and what they want to do. Instead of sitting there saying
mathematical analysis will reveal it to us. So hand was raised up in
one corner and I said, yes, sir, and I think you're giving randomness
far too little credit. Had about ten seconds to discuss this with the
individual and it turned out he was a Nobel Prize winner who had found
the sequences of ribonucleic acids. Great, here I'm a English major
arguing with a Nobel Prize winner, but I was right, and we need to get
that stuff down. There's a lot of work being done in corporations and
elsewhere that basically ignores the biological theory of the 30s, 40s,
50s, 60s, 70s and 80s, we need to find out what works and what doesn't.
That's my last screed on that.
I think we need to sign some books and thank you very much for
tolerating my lateness, and the impromptu nature. As you can see I
prepare all my speeches in advance. [laughter].
Thank you very much.
[applause]